“Mazel tov.” You could hear Ben Platt in the Sofitel Hotel corridor congratulate Jessica Hecht, both nominated for Tony Awards. She was leaving the press room at the annual “Meet the Nominees” event, and he was entering. Starring in one of the two most Jewish plays on Broadway—Platt plays Leo Frank in the stunning revival of “Parade”—he spoke about how important this musical was to him, having grown up actively Jewish, and especially now as antisemitism in America is not simply a thing of 1913.

The other most Jewish play is “Leopoldstadt,”, a brilliant work by Tom Stoppard, examining an unexplored piece of the playwright’s history in Nazi-occupied Europe. Both plays received multiple much-deserved nominations. No one from “Leopoldstadt” stopped to say hello, but that’s the way with the “Meet the Nominees” day, you never know who will come by. Best to take frequent bathroom breaks. The corridor may be where you will see Sean Hayes as he’s led off to be photographed. Or glimpse Jessica Chastain.

Or you may be lucky to get J. Harrison Ghee in blouse and midi skirt, with rhinestone-trimmed velvet slippers, looking divine as you would expect from the actor playing Daphne in “Some Like It Hot.” Dressed for the occasion, Ghee spoke of the joy of having the mother of a trans kid thank him for the representation. Or Beowulf Boritt, nominated for Best Scenic Design of a Musical, go into detail about how they spared no expense in the look of New York, New York: using the techniques of old school Broadway, they got a Ukrainian painter who had relocated to Amsterdam to hand paint 12 backdrops. Video would have been so much cheaper but the actors would not have looked as good. In my favorite scene, construction workers tap dance on a steel beam high above the street; the beam, he said, actually had a steel surface, so heavy it was a nightmare to get it on and off stage.

Of the African-American cast “Death of a Salesman,” Wendell Pierce gamely spoke about how Sharon D. Clarke’s Linda Loman could not be seen as a doormat or how, because of our ignorance about who can play this family, Ossie Davis or James Earl Jones or Harry Belafonte never got to play Willy Loman. Blacks see the micro and macro aggressions in this American dream cum nightmare with a twist, without changing a single word of Arthur Miller’s text, cringing, for example, when Willy has to pick up a paper off the floor in his much younger white boss’ office. “’Nooooo,’ screamed a woman in the balcony at one performance,” he recounted.

Clarke should have been nominated. Danielle Brooks should have been nominated for her role in “The Piano Lesson.” And Laura Linney should have been nominated alongside Jessica Hecht, who said that compared to Linney’s refined approach to acting in their two-hander, “Summer, 1976,” she felt like a caveman. But no one asked about the injustice of the awards. Instead, when asked, where was she when she heard about her Tony nomination, she replied, trying to meditate, she was under an LED light. The phone ringing off the hook was “ruining my anti-aging headspace.”

The Tony Awards air June 11 on CBS and Pluto TVm hosted– maybe — by Ariana DeBose.

We first learned that former Broadway star Laura Osnes was putting her career in jeopardy in the summer of 2021. She refused to be vaccinated for a Hamptons production. She was fired, the NY Post reported, and subsequently lost a couple of other jobs.

Osnes was immediately ostracized from the Broadway community. She had had two Tony nominations on six Broadway productions. But she was outspoken and it all came out.

Now Osnes says in an interview, picked up Chris Peterson’s OnStage blog, that she knows her time on Broadway is over. She compares herself to Jesus Christ. She says she and the Post recently settled the defamation lawsuit, but the stigma against her lives on.

In case you had “Laura Osnes compares herself to Jesus Christ” on your bingo card today… pic.twitter.com/4ajSR4nLWM

— Chris Peterson – OnStage Blog 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 (@OnstageBlog) May 5, 2023

During the winter, a revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “other play,” called “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” came to BAM. I didn’t see it there, but it was a hit largely because of two superstars in the main roles: Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan.

Hansberry was a superstar thanks to “A Raisin in the Sun.” Yet no one I know has ever seen “Sidney Brustein.” staged anywhere. It debuted on Broadway in 1964 and played a short, sad 101 performances. The anticipation was high because of “Raisin,” but it closed in 1965 right after Hansberry died from pancreatic cancer at the tragic age of 34. “Raisin” is her towering legacy. “Sidney” is her mistake. If she’d lived on, Hansberry would have known that and written several more plays that made more sense.

Now Isaac, Brosnahan, and newly minted Tony nominee Miriam Silverman have moved from BAM to the James Earl Jones Theater (formerly The Cort), where the novelty is gone and the problems with “Sidney” are evident. It’s a play without focus that feels like it was suggested by Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park.” That’s all fine but Act 2 reveals the playwright had no idea of how to bring together those aspects with references to homosexuality, prostitution, communism, anti-semitism, and of course racism. It’s all too much.

All of the actors deserved a better play than this one. Anne Kauffman directs aimlessly, not even trying to make sense of the unwieldy. The actors enter and are charming. Oscar Isaac is powerful and fully present. He throws himself into Sidney’s misplaced idealism, Rachel Brosnahan is making her first move away from “Mrs. Maisel,” and she’s a star. Silverman, in her second ever Broadway production, is the find of the season. There’s even good news about Julian De Niro, son of Robert, who also makes his debut.

The show was panned in 1964, and looking back at the reviews, you can see why it was then and now. Isaac’s Sidney is a dreamer layabout much like the character the actor played in “Inside Llewyn Davis.” Sidney has a failure to launch, and he’s a little too old already. Brosnahan’s Iris, his wife, is younger, more realistic, madly in love with the idea of Sidney but wise to his failings. Silverman is Iris’s fake patrician sister, Mavis, who’s married unhappily to a rich guy and is condescending to this couple even though she has problems of her own.

Back in 1964, the New York Times dismissed the whole enterprise except for one scene with a secondary character, Alton Scales, the couple’s young Black friend, who tells a story about his father being condescended to by well meaning whites. Even now that scene resonates, and you think that Hansberry, if she could, would have rewritten the play to explore Alton’s world. It’s a shame she didn’t because in act 2 she runs out of material for Iris. This isn’t good news because when Brosnahan is off stage for quite a while, you can feel the air blowing through the James Earl Jones.

The two main actors have big careers, and you know we’ll see them on Broadway again. It’s worth seeing them, and Silverman, now, however just because of their commitment to the project. Their enthusiasm is contagious even when the play is letting them down. But listen, The sign in Sidney’s window should read “to let” after this. There are far better plays for these actors to do including “Barefoot in the Park.”

Drew Barrymore is out as host of the MTV Movie and TV Awards this weekend.

The reason? She’s in sympathy with the Writers Guild strike.

Thus begins the real affects of the strike. If it continues into June, the next problem could be the Tony Awards. Will Ariana DeBose stay as host? Will presenters and performers balk at being on the show? And who will write it? Dave Boone, who’s written the Tonys for several years, is a member of the WGA.

So the MTV Awards will go without a host. I feel for the producers. That show is like herding cats to begin with. But the strike must be respected.

Barrymore said in a statement:
“I have listened to the writers, and in order to truly respect them, I will pivot from hosting the MTV Movie & TV Awards live in solidarity with the strike. Everything we celebrate and honor about movies and television is born out of their creation. And until a solution is reached, I am choosing to wait but I’ll be watching from home and hope you will join me. I thank MTV, who has truly been some of the best partners I have ever worked with. And I can’t wait to be a part of this next year, when I can truly celebrate everything that MTV has created, which is a show that allows fans to choose who the awards go to and is truly inclusive.​”

The executive producer of the MTV show, Bruce Gillmer, told Variety the show will go on nonetheless.

“But we have a plan, since the award show is fan-voted, we want to honor the fans’ participation and also honor the talent that earn these awards. So we’ll be giving the awards away. We’re working on a plan on how to do that without the traditional presentation involved, should the talent or some of the talent not show. We’ve got backups to our backups. And we’re planning on keeping as many of the signature elements of the show intact. We will have a live audience and it will still be a live event. Different, with more pre-taped packages and so forth, which are scalable, but it’ll still have that live event feel.”