Tony telecast: a lot … and then a lot more

Who would imagine a night when Megan Thee Staillion was only approximately the 43rd most flashy person?
That was Sunday’s Tony Awards, in which the three goals seemed to be: 1) More; 2) Even more; and 3) A whole lot more.
Certainly, I was delighted with the result: “Schmigadoon” (shown here) won for best musical; that may nudge people to see the original version, a gem that’s streaming on Apple.
And Cinco Paul was showered in honors — even if he was sort of invisible.
Paul won one Tony for his brilliant “Schmigadoon” songs and another for the “book” — the witty dialog that went with them.
Alas, the first two awards were handed out before the CBS telecast began. Unlike previous years, there was no mention of them during the show. Also, Paul was somewhere in that mega-crowd accepting the best-musical award, but it was tough to tell where.
But mostly, this was a night of unfettered spectacle — so much so that until late in the night, my favorite number was the “in memoriam” song.
Broadway shows are structured carefully. The big, brash numbers are the ones the audience savors, but they can’t be back-to-back or they won’t seem that big. You need peaks and valleys, quieter songs of emotion or wit, between all the thundershocks.
At the Tonys, however, each show wants to present its biggest number. So it went, number after number — vampires soaring, cats dancing, Titanic passengers partying, townsfolk with a sort of schmiga-hoedown. Remember when we thought “The Rocky Horror Show” was outrageous? This time, it was just one of the crowd.
That’s why I appreciated two solo pieces, beautifully done — Leslie Odom Jr. doing the memoriam piece and Rachel Zegler singing Marvin Hamlisch’s “What I Did for Love,” in a one-song tribute to “A Chorus Line.” Zegler flashed the immense talent she showed in Steven Spielberg’s great “West Side Story” movie … and that she never had a chance to show in the botched “Snow White” remake.
And what about Pink? She seemed appropriately humbled by the fact that, as she put it: “I’m the host, somehow.”
In a theater filled with gifted pros, she was the one who’s never been on Broadway. But she sang well (although she never had a number of her own) and gamely went along with the comedy bits, most of which were so-so.
(That’s probably why shows work better when a comedy person hosts. A comedian might have spotted trouble with the bits and made them work.)
At times, the comedy was almost adequate. It filled some small spaces until it was time for the next (mostly repetitive) acceptance speech and the next spectacular, high-octane, over-the-top, way-big song and dance number.