Britannia rules: Tom Stoppard collects one of The Coast of Utopia's seven awards. Photograph: Jason Szenes/EPA
OK, so Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia won more Tony Awards - seven - than any other non-musical in the history of Broadway's biggest prize. But it's still difficult not to interpret the ceremony, which finished several hours ago, as anything other than the American theatre patting itself on the back for being so, well, American. As Broadway veteran Jack O'Brien said when he picked up his directing trophy for Coast: "Now let's hear no more nonsense about the state of the American theatre." His reference was to the ability of a huge, mostly American creative team to mount so successfully a daunting nine-hour British play.
O'Brien's comment exists in stark contrast to the tenor of the same event in 2006, when Alan Bennett's The History Boys took six prizes - one fewer than Coast, but with an important difference. Whereas Coast was recast for Broadway with New York-based performers including Billy Crudup and the Anglo-American Jennifer Ehle (both of whom won their own Tonys last night), The History Boys brought to New York director Nicholas Hytner's entire original London cast. The aim, presumably, was to help prevent the premature demise of Coram Boy, a National Theatre entry wholly recast for New York that bit the dust a few weeks ago. At the 2006 Tony show, it seemed that one could hardly move for British recipients - Hytner among them, as was Ian McDiarmid for his performance in a well-regarded Broadway revival of Brian Friel's Faith Healer, starring Ralph Fiennes.
Not so last night in an evening dominated, as predicted, by Spring Awakening, which won eight prizes in all, including best musical, pretty much shutting out the competition; London's Mary Poppins snared a single award for Bob Crowley's sets. Grey Gardens won three prizes, including trophies for its distaff double act of Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson as the Bouvier Beales, mother and daughter living in profligate squalor in a decaying Easthampton mansion. And it was characteristic of the night's overall tone that the lone American presence in Englishman Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon - Frank Langella, whose best actor prize for playing Nixon marks his third Tony - was also that play's sole Tony success. Not only was co-star Michael Sheen not nominated, but also his half of the play's title was disparaged in no less high-profile pages than the New York Times, which wondered in print a few Sundays ago whether anyone (in America, presumably) even cares about David Frost. The best actress in a play award went not to Eve Best or Vanessa Redgrave, but to Texas-born firebrand Julie White, for The Little Dog Laughed, who is about as defiantly American a performer as one's ever likely to see.
That seems to encapsulate Broadway's current relationship with the British, whom the Great White Way apparently regards at present as a kind of unfortunate necessity distracting the American theatre from getting on with the oh-so-crucial task of being American. What does all this portend for the next wave of British shows to cross the Atlantic, from Rock 'n' Roll to The 39 Steps and, in autumn 2008, Billy Elliot? Hard to say, though it may not be too early to start thinking about relocating the Elton John/Lee Hall hit musical to, hmmm ... shall we go for Brooklyn?
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