Expect to hear a number of British accents when the winners of the Tony Awards are announced on Sunday, June 7, at Radio City Music Hall, a complement to the brogue you’ll hear at he very beginning, since Alan Cumming, the Scottish-born entertainer, will be co-hosting the ceremony with Kristin Chenoweth.While Americans will dominate the musical categories, the Brits will take the lion’s share in the dramatic competition. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Mark Haddon’s bestseller about a young man on the autistic spectrum, stands to have a very good night, including wins for Best Play, Best Direction (Marianne Elliott), Best Actor (Alex Sharp), as well as a fistful of design awards. The 26-year-old Sharp was freshly out of Juilliard when he was tapped to take on the arduous role of 15-year-old Christopher, who uses his highly honed mathematical genius to solve the killing of a neighbor’s dog. London-born, Sharp had an itinerant youth with parents who had a serious case of wanderlust. He was homeschooled until he landed in the U.S. and began to earn a living renovating properties. When he got the role in “Curious Incident,” he was both elated and apprehensive. After all he was stepping into a part created in London by Luke Treadaway, who’d won the prestigious Olivier Award, just one of the seven given to the drama. Chances are that “Curious Incident” will walk away with wins in five of its six nominations at the Tony Awards.A competitor with the best chance of pulling off an upset is another British import, “Wolf Hall Parts One & Two,” the epic drama of Thomas Cromwell as consigliore to Henry VIII, which has been nominated for eight Tonys, including Best Play, Best Direction, and three acting nods: Ben Miles, as Cromwell; Nathaniel Parker, as Henry VIII; and Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn. Parker has the best chance of winning in a featured acting category that includes his countryman Richard McCabe, nominated for his performance as Prime Minister Harold Wilson in “The Audience.”The Labour Party politician is clearly designated as Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite prime minister in Peter Morgan’s historical drama, in which Helen Mirren time-travels through six decades as the long-reigning monarch. Mirren has a near-lock on the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play. The cavils that she is merely repeating the role that won her an Oscar in the movie “The Queen,” also written by Morgan, are misplaced, if not erroneous. In that film, she played Elizabeth at the time of Princess Diana’s death. In the play, she morphs through various stages of her life as she takes weekly meetings with her respective prime ministers from Winston Churchill through David Cameron. It’s a tour-de-force with lightning shifts of personality as age and worries press down her crowned head.Nominated for three Tonys, “The Audience” is likely to pick up at least two, one for Mirren, and the other for Bob Crowley’s exceptional costume designs, which expertly mirror the succeeding decades from the 1950s to the 2010s. As a sidebar, the Irish-born Crowley is also nominated for an additional three Tonys for his set design of “Skylight” and for his sets and costumes for “An American in Paris.” Expect him to go home with two wins, one for “The Audience” and another for his brilliant sets for “Paris.” Broadway has long been known as a bastion of Anglophilia. It’s nothing new that 10 of the 20 nominations in the acting categories are going to Brits. In addition to the aforementioned, there are the nods for Bill Nighey, Carey Mulligan, and Matthew Beard in the revival of David Hare’s “Skylight,” as well as Ruth Wilson’s nomination for “Constellations.” Charles McNulty, writing in the Los Angeles Times, put it best as to the reason why the Union Jack has been raised once again at the Tonys: “With its august tradition of theatrical excellence, Britain has long been exporting its top-tier thespians to our shores, and this talent has cultivated a taste for language tautly delivered and wit served extra dry.” This season has been no exception.
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