Tony Awards Live 2

First Anti-Bush joke of the evening. Actually, it's probably going to be the only one. Something about a Republican puppet. And when you've seen it (earlier on, they let me into rehearsals by mistake) being practiced over and over until it's done right, it sort of loses its magic. But still. Loud applause, etc.

Christian Hoff won best Featured Actor in a Musical and cried, and thanked the Lord, and talked to the unborn baby in his wife's womb. God. Somebody else make a puppet joke and get that man off the stage.

Oooh! Julia Roberts is announcing the Best Actor award next. G'wan David Wilmot!!!!

Update: Wilmot would have gotten the award for incredulity-at-being-here if there was one (his expression when the camera closed in on him was priceless), but Richard Griffiths won (so there, Ralph Fiennes). He gave such a long speech that they did the play-the-music-so-he'll-leave thing eventually; relished his 6000-strong audience and quoted the Walt Whitman line from the play, and I think he even sort of shrugged off the bony usher woman who seemed to be trying to steer him away from the podium. Good man! Cynthia Nixon, on the other hand, who won Best Actress, was BORING...and, as the guy from the San Fran Lesbian Gay Times beside me at the red carpet said when he saw her, where the hell was her girlfriend? And why no mention or thank you? Come to think of it, for a theatre awards ceremony, there was a depressing dearth of gay couples out there tonight. So everyone in NY theatre is straight and married? Yeah, right.

Fair play to Julia Roberts for prefacing her scripted introduction to the Best Actor award by saying to the actors in the audience "you people are insanely talented" in a very pointed fashion. A reference, I would think, to her discovery that being on stage is damn, damn hard, and not at all like film work.

What's left of the Irish hopes now? Best Play and Best Lighting Design, I think. So that's that...

Wait! Bob Crowley just won for Scenic Design - not for Tarzan, but for The History Boys. He's Irish....and begrudging with it: "Thanks very much. But between me and you, I should have won for the other one," he said.