Arts

‘Mean Girls’ and ‘SpongeBob Squarepants’ lead the 2018 Tony nominations, with ‘Angels in America,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ Denzel Washington and Tina Fey also in the mix.

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The Tony Awards, celebrating the best of Broadway, can bring together curious bedfellows, and so it is that competing for Best Actress in a Play this year will be the famously lewd Amy Schumer and the coolly majestic Glenda Jackson.

Two musicals lead the Tony Award nominations, announced Tuesday morning: Mean Girls and SpongeBob Squarepants: The Musical, both with 12 nominations. Tina Fey scored her first Tony nomination for writing the book of Mean Girls.

Of the plays in contention, Marianne Elliott’s brilliant revival of Angels in America scored 11 nominations, and John Tiffany’s stunning and moving Harry Potter and The Cursed Child, Parts One and Two, 10. (The full list of nominations is below.)

Jackson, Tony-nominated for a fifth time for her performance in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, is a favorite to win that category.

Speaking exclusively to The Daily Beast on Tuesday morning, the famously straight-shooting, twice Oscar-winning Jackson expressed surprise, and first asked a reporter which category she had been nominated in.

“Oh well, there you go,” she said in a fairly disinterested tone when told it was a Best Actress Tony. “I knew what the categories were. I wasn’t aware what the definitions.”

Of Schumer, Jackson said, “I’ve seen her on the telly. She’s very funny.”

Told it was her fifth Tony nomination, Jackson said, “Is it really? My God. I didn’t know that. I always jib at the idea of winning. It sounds as if we overtly compete in some way. We don’t, so the winners are those who vote for those who win the award in the end.”

When asked if she was going to celebrate, Jackson said brusquely: “I beg your pardon. I’ve got a performance tonight.”

She said she would attend the Tonys. “I think you’re expected to. As I’ve had occasion to say before, I’m a pretty anti-sociable Socialist.”

Also scoring highly at this morning’s Tony nominations was a mixture of popular and critically hailed musicals and plays: The Band’s Visit (11), Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (11), My Fair Lady (10), Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (8), Once On This Island (8), and Three Tall Women (6).

As well as Jackson, other stars nominated include Denzel Washington (The Iceman Cometh), Lauren Ambrose (My Fair Lady), Nathan Lane (Angels in America), Diana Rigg (My Fair Lady), Renée Fleming (Carousel), Jessie Mueller (Carousel), Andrew Garfield (Angels in America), Tom Hollander (Travesties), Michael Cera (Lobby Hero), Mark Rylance (Farinelli and The King).

The best musical category pits strong and known entertainment brands like the so-so, and occasionally sparkling Mean Girls and (the far superior, rollicking) SpongeBob against The Band’s Visit, a charming and beautiful original musical starring nominees Katrina Lenk and Tony Shalhoub about an Egyptian band ending up by mistake in a desolate Israeli town.

David Yazbek’s musical should be in strong contention for every acting and production category it is nominated in.

Bruce Springsteen will collect a special Tony award for his phenomenally successful residency on Broadway; so will John Leguizamo, most recently seen in his one-man show Latin History For Morons, for his body of work more generally.

Completely missing out on nominations: the flaccid Jimmy Buffett musical Escape To Margaritaville, which the critics mostly loathed. Rocktopia also scored no nominations. Hollywood star Chris Evans missed out on a lead actor nod for his role in Lobby Hero, while his co-stars Cera and Bryan Tyree Henry both scored featured actor nominations.

Joshua Jackson also went un-nominated for his performance in Children of a Lesser God (while co-star Lauren Ridloff won a Best Actress, Play, nod), and the excellent James McArdle and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett also were un-nominated for Angels in America. Alison Pill was also shut out, while her co-stars Jackson and Laurie Metcalf were nominated for Three Tall Women.

The much-hyped, but not much critically-loved, Disney musical Frozen, missed out on acting nods for its two leading ladies Caissie Levy and Patti Murin, though it did score three significant nominations: Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical (Jennifer Lee) and Best Original Score (Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez).

Despite the drubbing it received from reviewers, Donna Summer: The Musical scored well-deserved nods for its performers LaChanze and Ariana DeBose.

There were no nominations for Uma Thurman or the play she led, The Parisian Woman, and Michael Moore’s rousing call-to-activism The Terms of My Surrender. Prince of Broadway, a lackluster celebration of the career of Harold Prince, scored no nominations. John Lithgow received no nominations for his mellow autobiographical show, Stories By Heart. The revival of M. Butterfly scored zero nominations.

In some creative categories, certain nominees scored twice, like Christopher Gattelli (for choreography in My Fair Lady and SpongeBob Squarepants), Ann Roth (costume design in a play for Three Tall Women and The Iceman Cometh; she’s also nominated for costume design, musical, for Carousel), and Scott Pask (for scenic design in a musical in The Band’s Visit and Mean Girls, with Finn Ross & Adam Young).