Despite the perpetual success of “Hamilton,” a name you will hear a lot when the Tony Awards are doled out on June 12, there will still be more than enough suspense in the tightly competitive acting categories. It’s here where you’ll find the most acclaimed performances of the season: some from veteran actors being acknowledged by the Tony nominating committee for the first time (Jessica Lange in “Long Day’s Journey into Night”) while others represent a welcome introduction to Broadway (Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o in “Eclipsed”). The sheer excellence will make marking the ballot difficult for the 800-plus Tony voters, who are drawn from the ranks of theater professionals, critics, producers, and actors. Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play Jessica Lange, a two-time Oscar winner for “Tootsie” and “Blue Sky,” was snubbed by the nominating committee for her previous outings on Broadway: her 1992 debut as Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and as Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie” in 2005. She returns to Broadway in a role she played to award-winning acclaim in London sixteen years ago: Mary Tyrone, the morphine-addicted mother in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night.” At the beginning of the epic, which is nearly four hours, Mary has just returned from treatment for her addiction and the engendered hope among her family slowly dissipates into despair.Lange’s luminous performance, which toggles between her terrible loneliness and desperate love for her family, concludes with an hallucinogenic reverie that is heartbreaking.Laurie Metcalf, who recently played Mary Tyrone in a London production of “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” is nominated this year for a role far from the fog-bound Tyrone household. The snowy climes of Colorado are the setting for the stage adaptation of Stephen King’s “Misery,” in which Metcalf plays Annie Wilkes, the “number one fan” of novelist Paul Sheldon. Despite the marquee name of Bruce Willis as Paul, the Broadway version of the best seller was not a hit. But Metcalf walked away with the reviews for her performance as the nurse with a sinister bedside manner to the injured novelist. This is the third Tony nomination for Metcalf (“The Other Place”, “November”), who was one of the founders of Chicago’s prestigious Steppenwolf Theatre and is best known for her television work in “Roseanne,” “Desperate Housewives,” and “The Big Bang Theory.” Metcalf, perhaps more than any other actor of her generation, can summon up the thin line between madness and sanity and the muscle in both states.In 2009, long before her Oscar-winning success in the film “12 Years a Slave,” Lupita Nyong’o was cast as an understudy in a production of Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed” at Yale Rep. She never got to go on in the play about women caught up in the brutal violence of the Second Liberian Civil War. But after following up her Oscar win in “12 Years” with a role in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the 33-year-old actress, who was born in Mexico of Kenyan parents, wanted to come back to her first love. When Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, gave her a choice of plays, there was only one role she wanted to tackle: the young girl in “Eclipsed,” whose arrival into the camp of a warlord upsets the balance of power among the captive women. Charles Isherwood, in the New York Times, called her “one of the most radiant young actors to be seen on Broadway in recent seasons. [She] shines with a compassion that makes us see beyond the suffering to the indomitable humanity of its characters.”Born in London to a Nigerian father and Jewish mother, Sophie Okonedo won a Tony Award for her performance in the 2014 revival of “A Raisin in the Sun” as Ruth, the harried wife of Denzel Washington’s ambitious Walter Lee Younger. She carries a heavier burden on her stooped shoulders in the Ivo Van Hove revival of “Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible,’” in which she plays the much-abused wife of the farmer John Proctor (Ben Whishaw). In this allegory of the Salem Witch Trials, Okonedo is a steely presence in the face of terrible injustice, a technique she learned as a student at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Van Hove’s production is a radical re-imagining and to pull it off takes a daring ensemble, including Whishaw, Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan (“Brooklyn”), and Okonedo, herself a one-time Oscar nominee as the brutalized wife in “Hotel Rwanda.”In her Broadway debut as Sally Bowles in the 2014 revival of “Cabaret,” Michelle Williams not only received mixed notices but was also overlooked for a Tony nomination. The snub was not repeated for her waif-like Una, the young woman who tracks down the man who sexually abused her fifteen years earlier, in “Blackbird.” David Harrower’s play, directed by Joe Mantello, taunts the audience as much as Una torments Ray, played by Jeff Bridges. What does she want? Revenge? To resume the affair? To get closure? All of these contradictory emotions play over Williams’s face in a performance that is anything but safe. The actress’s extraordinary range is unsurprising given her eclectic career, which began when she was 14 in the 1994 feature film “Lassie.” What followed were the TV series “Dawson’s Creek,” and three Oscar nominations — “Brokeback Mountain,” Blue Valentine,” and “My Week with Marilyn.” Film success notwithstanding, Williams says of Broadway, “I want to be here and I want to work hard to deserve a place here.”According to the ten theater experts at Goldderby.com, the race so far appears to be between Jessica Lange and Lupita Wyong’o, with Michelle Williams as the dark horse.
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