by John McWhorter

Returning to the U.S. after a week in Italy, I found myself disappointed by two Tonys. I must admit that I found the ending of "The Sopranos" less bracing than Richard Stern. Ambiguity is nice and literary and all, but for the action to simply black out at an arbitrary point--leaving me wondering, like apparently many across the nation did, if something had gone wrong with my Tivo--left me feeling as if David Chase simply neglected to give the majestic saga an ending. I wanted one. So often "The Sopranos" has been compared to opera, and in this one, the fat lady didn't sing, or perhaps, the fat man didn't die, or escape doing so. Flying home this Monday, my wife and I actually told the passengers around us on our plane reading USA Today to kindly not tell us how "The Sopranos" ended--instantly echoed by several other American passengers on tenterhooks waiting to get a gander when they got home at what had happened the night before. After 86 achingly marvelous installments of one of the best television shows ever, we are left with Meadow rushing in after having trouble parking and Tony just looking up and then, poof, the credits. Not an ending worthy, to me, of the five years I have spent obsessed with this show, turned on to it, as it happens, by TNR's own Leon Wieseltier in 2002. And then, the Tony Awards--my God. Okay, I see why Spring Awakening got Best Musical--it's clearly the freshest, slickest musical on Broadway at present, and is on its way to countless college, regional, and foreign productions for the next few decades (it will be interesting to see how the title line to the song "Totally fucked" will be rendered in German, Hungarian, Korean, and so on). Its audiences are significantly less gray-headed than usual, and like Rent, Spring Awakening is to be commended for bringing young people weaned on contemporary rock and pop to the theatre. It will rake in bucks, and there is a place for acknowledging this in Tony awards, as there has always been (The Music Man beating out West Side Story in 1958 was a similar case). And Spring Awakening is indeed special in ways: It looks great, it dances great. But Best Score??? Please. Hands down, the best score this year by any serious standard has been Grey Gardens. Scott Frankel and Michael Korie are clearly steeped in Sondheim, but translate it into a sound of their own, and it is a rich, lovely, quirky, bracing language indeed. The cast album is of a sort that merits endless relistenings, as you can't take its fullness in on a single listening or even two or three. Actually, there are two cast albums already, as the score was seen as worthy enough that while it was already recorded in its initial off-Broadway version, a second Broadway recording was also done. The orchestrations alone are caviar, with the winds burbling along in almost excessively elaborate filigrees. Listen to Big Edie deluded that "Jerry Likes My Corn," with the lush, intricate, dreamy arrangement revealing that she is living in a web of self-medication, the melody stressing the subdominant, which connotes warmth, and thus here, interiority, a resistance to the cold reality of the outside. Bravo, orchestrator Bruce Coughlin, for one of the loveliest CD cuts ever recorded--this kind of thing takes work. My wife and I listened to the Grey Gardens album in the car on the way home from the airport, and I insisted on listening to "Jerry Likes My Corn" twice. Or Little Edie's "The Revolutionary Costume for Today," a weird, catchy, unpredictable anthem that sums up this woman's magnificent, politicized weirdness in four minutes. This one is hands down the best show tune of the year: I have twice watched it bring the house down mid-show. Significantly, it does so with its lyrical deftness alone. The equivalent audience-baiting moment over at Spring Awakening is when the word "fucked" is sung--but that's an easy score. The greater human achievement is when you get that kind of response from an audience without resorting to profanity or brand names. Duncan Sheik's work in Spring Awakening is nice enough. But it's rock. What appeals is the visceral charm of rhythm and volume, along with some decent structural turns here and there. But Grey Gardens' songs are more complex--few of them could be picked up on first hearing by any but a few uniquely gifted ears. They're intricate, crafted, challenging--and yet charming enough that, unlike most of Sondheim's shows, Grey Gardens is running fine and a tour is already cast (I have been told by a little bird that "Designing Women"'s Dixie Carter and Jean Smart will be doing it along with Hal Holbrook--perfect!!). Awarding the music of Spring Awakening as Best Score over Grey Gardens is like treating Nirvana's Nevermind as a more awesome human achievement than Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Consul, or Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, or Duke Ellington's Far East Suite. I am disappointed. Spring Awakening even won for orchestrations! Did the committee even know what orchestrations are? Okay, the Kurt Weill musical bio LoveMusik is a bit of a plop in itself--but Jonathan Tunick's orchestrations for it are sheer heaven. Tunick is the dean of living Broadway orchestrators. He's a genius. The Tonys folk seem to think that the best orchestrations are the loudest ones, or the ones that sound most like the pop they, as boomers, grew up listening to. Ugh.