On Friday evening, the NY Drama Critics’ Circle met to vote on its annual awards and special citations. Since the voting process is made public on the Circle’s site, it’s no mystery that the shows I was rooting for got shafted. It took me all weekend to recover.
As you can see on the third ballot, the eventual winner for Best Play, Horton Foote’s Orphans’ Home Cycle, wasn’t even in my top three. My No. 3 pick, “Enron,” may not have been all that perfect on paper, but I chose to endorse the production as a whole. (The Foote cycle made it to my ballot once we narrowed down the options, but I placed it last.)
When we discussed Foreign Plays, I once again looked at entire productions rather than how the plays read on paper. In each case, the show I picked was more than the sum of its parts.
But what nearly did me in was the outcome of the Best Musical vote. As in: There wasn’t a winner. Some message-board commentators have declared this evidence we had a bad season for musicals. I feel the exact opposite: It was a good year — so good that there were several viable contenders and no single show managed a consensus. I voted for Kander & Ebb’s “The Scottsboro Boys,” which was, in Susan Stroman’s production, extraordinary. If I remember correctly, it was just one point behind “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” — which I enjoyed very much, but it’s a trifle compared to “Scottsboro.”