Tony Awards 2013: Why Matilda may not win a Tony

Here’s the peculiar thing about this year’s To

ny Awards. An industry in perpetual thrall to the English may be singing a distinctly American tune this year, notwithstanding the fact that the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Matilda is in the running for 12 awards, including Best Musical. Normally, any Broadway show with so weighty a presence cleans up on the night. The Producers got 15 nominations in 2001 and went on to win 12 awards, while Britain’s own Billy Elliot the Musical eight years later walked away with 10 prizes out of 15 nods. This awards season, which reaches its climax on Sunday, proposes a different story amid a three-way race that pits Roald Dahl’s pint-size heroine against two home-grown Broadway musical entries, albeit one adapted from a 2005 English film. Kinky Boots – up for 13 awards, the most of any show this year – may be set in and around Northampton and boast the appropriate accents (up to a point), but it marches to a decidedly American beat. That’s as one might expect from a show whose book writer and composer are New York natives Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper respectively. The Grammy-winning Lauper marks her debut as a musical theatre composer-lyricist with a score that is unlikely to cause Stephen Sondheim to lose any sleep. (Sample lyric: “Everybody say yeah/ Yeah yeah yeah”.) Matilda tunesmith Tim Minchin, conversely, could be forgiven a few restless New York nights. While Minchin’s own Broadway debut is considerably more sophisticated, the Australian comedian’s linguistic intricacies may not count for much against the hip-swivelling parable of empowerment that Kinky Boots offers an enthralled audience, alongside liberal dollops of camp and kitsch and aptly startling footwear. The show’s big number is called, perhaps inevitably
 News source: www.telegraph.co.uk

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