Tom Stoppard could make Tony history with ‘Leopoldstadt’
Tom Stoppard and the late Terrence McNally have won the most Tonys for a playwright taking home four each. The 85-year-old Stoppard is a strong contender to pick up his fifth Tony for his latest (and perhaps final) play “Leopoldstadt.” The acclaimed drama revolves around a wealthy Jewish family who had fled the programs in Eastern Europe and settled in Vienna. In an interview, Stoppard noted that the play “took a year to write but the gestation was much longer. Quite a lot of it is personal to me but I made it a Viennese family so that it wouldn’t seem to be about me. “ Stoppard, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, lost all four of his grandparents in the Holocaust.
“Leopoldstadt” earned six nominations on May 2 including Best Play and best director for Patrick Marber. It will be vying for the top prize against Jordon E. Cooper’s “Ain’t No More”; Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “Between Riverside and Crazy”; Martyna Majok’s “Cost of Living”; and James Ijames’ “Fat Ham.”
The play premiered in London in January 2020 to strong reviews. The Spectator wrote: “History will record ‘Leopoldstadt’ as Tom Stoppard’s ‘Schindler’s List.’” The play received Olivier Awards for best knew play and actor in a supporting role for Adrian Scarborough. The play arrived on Broadway last October-it has set closing date this July-and was generally embraced by critics with Deadline describing it as a “late career masterpiece” adding that “any summary of scenes and timelines descriptions of ‘Leopoldstadt’ can’t begin to convey the richness of Stoppard’s work.”
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Besides the six Tony nominations, “Leopoldstadt” has earned six Outer Critics Circle Award nominations, two bids for the Drama Desk Award and two more for the Drama League Awards.
Stoppard may be the elder statesman among playwrights, but he began his career as the hip young Turk in the 1960s. He was an overnight and singular sensation at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 with his play “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.” An absurdist comedy, “R&G” revolves around two minor characters from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” who briefly interact with the tragedy’s main characters including the Melancholy Dane, Ophelia, the Player and Polonius. It opened in London in 1967 and then arrived on Broadway in October that year with John Wood and Brian Murray as the ill-fated duo.
“R&G” won four Tonys including Best play and ran 420 performances. Stoppard told me in a 2016 L.A. Times interview that Hollywood soon came knocking. “I think there was some interest…from MGM,” he noted adding that John Boorman was initially attached to the project as the director. “I remember then…writing a script for John and now realize looking back, I had no idea what a screenplay was.”
He soon learned. Stoppard has written several screenplays winning the Oscar with Marc Norman for 1998’s “Shakespeare in Love.” He also directed one movie: the 1991 film version of “R & G.”
Stoppard earned his second Tony in 1976 for “Travesties,” in which an elderly man reminisces about being in Zurich in 1917 where he interacted with the likes of James Joyce and Lenin who were living there at the time.
“The Real Thing,” starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, won five Tonys in 1984 including play, director for Mike Nichols and for lead actor and actress and featured actress for Christine Baranski. The New York Times’ hard-to-please critic Frank Rich was enthusiastic describing it as Stoppard’s “most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage and marriage in years”
His fourth Best Play win in 2007 was for “The Coast of Utopia,” a trilogy about a group of Russian friends including author Ivan Turgenev who came of age during the autocracy of Nicholas I. The play was nominated for 10 Tonys and won seven.
Though he initially stated “Leopoldstadt” would be his last play, he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in 2021 he wasn’t sure. “At the moment, I’m sitting here with nothing to write, and I’m thinking I really ought to try to write something else. Theater is a storytelling art form. I don’t think of myself as a polemical writer so I’m not, as it were, hauling my play forward thinking about what it must speak to the people. All I’m doing is, in my mind, telling a story, creating a story, trying to make a story, keep moving, try to make it human.”
The 76th annual Tony Awards takes place June 11 from the United Palace in New York City with Ariana DeBose returning as host. The ceremony will air on CBS and stream on Paramount +.
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