In regards to your second point, the people complaining the most strongly were
theatre people, who (as far as I know) were connected and aware. They just
"didn't know where to find it," despite the news about the online broadcast
being plastered all over every major theatre site. The Tonycast is (rightly*)
low-rated every year, but was considered enough of a prestige show to air, even
if it is not much more than an infomercial for New York tourism.
As for the WTFness of the broadcast, television directors still, after more
than fifty years, still haven't figured out that the directors and
choreographers who work on Broadway are generally very good at what they do,
and have staged their plays to look good from the front. They don't need the
"help" of swooping cameras, dramatic angles, or (worst of all) reaction shots
of the crowd to make them dynamic. I'm not saying "plop a camera eighth row
center and lock it down," but I am saying that the hard work has been done for
them and they don't have to reinvent the wheel.
(*Again, it's awarding a very small number of people who work in a very small
part of one island on the east coast. I read someone in the industry describe
it as "bodega owners giving awards to each other." As a reflection of what's
actually happening in the American theatre -- or even in the rest of NYC --
it's pretty useless. Case in point: "The Inheritance," which won Best Play.
It's an American story by an American writer, but no one in New York cared
about it until it was done in London. The same play with its original cast and
staging would have been of no interest to a commercial producer, because it
didn't have Brits doing crappy "American" accents.)
--Dave Sikula
On Tuesday, September 28, 2021, 10:05:05 AM PDT, M-D November
<[email protected]> wrote:
So there are a couple of things getting lost in the narrative of "the ratings
are way down":
- The Tonys are usually in JUNE, not September, so they're not normally
competing with Sunday Night Football
- This Tonycast was not well promoted; *I* knew about it because I follow
certain theater-related sites/personalities online, but the average person
might not have realized they were on this past weekend (esp. since CBS just
aired the Emmys the week prior)
- What promotion existed didn't exactly make it clear what was happening on
which part of the broadcast, whether the P+ portion would include performances,
etc.
- The ceremony itself was honoring a Broadway season that ended in April
2020, and honestly it was a chore to even remember what was eligible to be
nominated (which...not a lot, because COVID shut down a whole bunch of
productions before they played their first performance)
I'm not saying the ratings would have been DRAMATICALLY better had the awards
run in June 2020, but an oddball Sunday in September certainly didn't help.
All told, I actually thought the show was pretty good, apart from some TV
direction miscues (what was with the camerawork during the In Memoriam
segment?).
On Monday, September 27, 2021 at 4:59:07 PM UTC-4 Dave Sikula wrote:
According to Playbill, ratings were down significantly.
While I thought it was a fabulous show -- and it usually is the best of this
ilk -- in checking my social media Sunday night and Monday morning, there was a
combination of frustration and downright anger about the streaming half of the
show, that boiled down to two camps: "Why can't I see this on my teevee?" and
"I don't want to subscribe to Paramount Plus!"
I thought about explaining the whole "get a free subscription and cancel it
right afterward" concept, but most of the posts I saw seemed to come from
people for whom that idea was the equivalent of understanding particle physics.
There was also a healthy chunk of folks who didn't even know where and when it
was on.
Left mostly unsaid was Paramount/Viacom's questionable decision to air the
first two hours (where all but three of the awards were given) live online, but
leave the second half broadcast-only for most of the country, so that anyone
not in the eastern time zone had to wait as long as three hours to continue the
show.
My takeaway was that Paramount alienated far more people than they attracted.
--Dave Sikula
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