Yesterday I posted my predictions for the winners on Sunday’s 66^th Annual Tony Awards telecast. Below, my feelings about who will and who should go home with the gold in the musical categories:

Best Musical: Nominees include the already-shuttered Leap of Faith, Newsies, Nice Work If You Can Get It, and Once. This is a rather humdrum list. Once is truly a play with music, as End of the Rainbow and Peter and the Starcatcher both identified themselves this season, but it opted to classify itself as a musical, so I’ll play it as it lays. And it lies at the head of the pack here, challenged only by the crowd-pleasing Newsies. Who would have thought that Newsies, based on a bomb Disney movie musical from twenty years ago, would be the Goliath in this race? I still find it a middling musical, and as the more commercial one, would benefit less from a Tony win than Once, which could use the push. I, perhaps foolishly, grant the win to Once, which succeeds better on its own (slightly problematic) terms than the other nominees.

Will win: Once

Should win: Once

Should have been nominated: absolutely nothing else this season

Best Direction of a Musical: Nominees include Jeff Calhoun (Newsies), Kathleen Marshall (Nice Work If You Can Get It), Diane Paulus (The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess), and John Tiffany (Once). Tiffany will likely prevail here, and should: he managed to fuse a lot of unorthodox moving parts to turn Once into The Little Show That Could. Personally, I’d vote for Follies’ Eric Schaeffer over this quartet, but he didn’t make the cut.

Will win: Tiffany

Should win: Tiffany

Should have been nominated: Eric Schaeffer, Follies

Best Leading Actor in a Musical: Nominees include Danny Burstein (Follies), Jeremy Jordan (Newsies), Steve Kazee (Once), Norm Lewis (Porgy), and Ron Raines (Follies). Sometimes I play this game, where I put my money on the actor I want to win less, as karmic insurance that the one I want to win more will prevail. So even though the general consensus has it that long overdue veteran Burstein will win for his definitive portrayal of Buddy, I’ll stick the much-hyped Jordan instead. All the while, I feel that a solid Lewis and especially Kazee are being overlooked in the mix, particularly the latter nominee, whose delicate work headlining this year’s sleeper hit absolutely deserves recognition.

Will win: Jordan

Should win: Burstein or Kazee

Should have been nominated: no one

Best Leading Actress in a Play: Nominees include Jan Maxwell (Follies), Audra McDonald (Porgy), Cristin Milioti (Once), Kelli O’Hara (Nice Work), and Laura Osnes (Bonnie and Clyde). I’m a huge proponent of Maxwell’s work this year; her rendition of “Story of Jessie and Lucy” slew me, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it all year. Also, Milioti’s idiosyncratic blend of tenderness and pluck was a big driving force behind Once’s success – her “The Hill” has also haunted me all season. But this one looks like McDonald’s race to lose, and that rankles me. Though it’s her first award as a leading performer, McDonald will set a record with five acting wins – tying Julie Harris and Angela Lansbury – and I just don’t think her Bess is harrowing or transcendent enough to earn that career milestone (one that took Lansbury an additional four decades to hit, at that). Still she’s a beloved member of the community, and a win seems all but assured.

Will win: McDonald

Should win: Maxwell

Should have been nominated: Bernadette Peters, Follies

Best Featured Actor in a Play: Nominees include Philip Boykin (Porgy), Michael Cerveris (Evita), David Alan Grier (Porgy), Michael McGrath (Nice Work), and Josh Young (Jesus Christ Superstar). Except for McGrath, all of the nominees here are nominated for revivals, and even Nice Work dusts off a bunch of Gershwin standards. I give McGrath the edge over Cerveris, but for me, Boykin stands out the most. His Crown was riveting, memorable and incredibly well-sung. He buoyed Porgy to places it didn’t go when he wasn’t onstage.

Will win: McGrath

Should win: Boykin

Should have been nominated: Patrick Page, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (yes, really)

Best Featured Actress in a Musical: Nominees include Elizabeth A. Davis (Once), Jayne Houdyshell (Follies), Judy Kaye (Nice Work), Jessie Mueller (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (Ghost the Musical). Mueller was the bright light in an otherwise execrable misfire, and Houdyshell brought humor and subtlety to a small but memorable part. Still, I said it in my review http://nypress.com/hard-work/, this is Kaye’s to win. Note to those who want a Tony: put a chandelier in your show, too.

Will win: Kaye

Should win: Houdyshell or Mueller

Should have been nominated: Melissa van der Schyff, Bonnie or Bryona Marie Parham or NaTasha Yvette Williams, Porgy

Let’s see how my predictions go!

Photo by Joan Marcus

Doug Strassler on Matthew Broderick’s new Broadway offering Nice Work If You Can Get It

Remember a few months ago that Honda commercial featuring Matthew Broderick retracing his steps as the iconic high school skipper Ferris Bueller? It’s not every day a fifty-year-old gets to play a young whippersnapper, especially in show biz. Kathleen Marshall’s new Broadway musical, Nice Work If You Can Get It, employs Broderick to enact a similar ploy as a dashing playboy. It’s nice work for any actor to get – but Broderick doesn’t quite get it, if you get what I mean. Get it?

Work may technically be a new musical, but it’s old or old-fashioned in just about every conceivable way. Memphis writer Joe DiPietro lifts the book from Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse’s 1926 vehicle Oh, Kay! to create a new outlet for such classic Gershwin gems as “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” “’S Wonderful”, “They All Laughed,” and the title tune. So we get the cutesy 1920s Jazz Age scenario of tuff-tawkin’cross-dressing bootlegger Billie Bendix (Kelli O’Hara) and her cohort, smuggler Cookie McGee (Michael McGrath). Billie meets a drunk Jimmy Walker (Broderick) on the eve of his fourth marriage, when he admits that his Long Island mansion is sitting unattended. The plucky Billie decides to co-opt his enormous pad for her own hooch storage.

But wait, there’s more! Jimmy and new wife Eileen Evergreen (Jennifer Laura Thompson) actually end up heading back to his home for their honeymoon, forcing Billie and Cookie to pose as household help and spinning out into a series of misunderstandings and giving way to a handful of new couples. What follows is cute but dated, and despite a few highlights (and Bill Elliott’s lush orchestrations), an overlong Work feels like, well, work, for almost everybody onboard, starting with Broderick. The performer knows how to amble through Jimmy’s spoken scenes, but you need a trained singer and dancer to sell Gershwin’s music and Marshall’s choreography. He always looks unnatural and as though he’s struggling to keep up with his co-stars. The show also pushes O’Hara into new physical comedy territory, most of which she can handle but not without a slight hint of tentativeness. Marshall’s Billie attempts to show what Sutton Foster’s Reno Sweeney did last year in her Anything Goes revival: that these are broads who secretly want to be dames. But the chemistry between the two leads isn’t there, and Billie’s eventual transformation feels inorganic. (And here’s a memo to O’Hara’s handlers: she’s an A-list talent but she keeps taking roles in revivals and old-feeling new shows. It’s time for her to originate a new role to fully make her mark on the scene.)

Several supporting players do show how this kind of work should be done: Thompson dazzles in a first act showstopper “Delishious,” taking place in and then out of a tub, and the grumbling McGrath steals scenes with more aplomb than his tough Cookie can move moonshine around. And as a crusading prohibitionist, the wonderful Judy Kaye does for Work exactly what Carolee Carmello did in The Addams Family: proves that characters whose drinks are spiked will always get the best scenes. Kaye’s comes in “Looking For a Boy,” which sends her swinging from a chandelier. The last time Kaye starred in a big Broadway show featuring a chandelier, she landed a Tony for The Phantom of the Opera. I’m predicting that could bode very well for her this year as well.

Other design elements add to the joyful feel of the show, including Derek McLane’s colorful set design, Peter Kaczorowski’s lighting and Martin Pakledinaz’s costumes. Yet every time it comes back to its central screwball couple, the perspiration begins to show, and Broderick keeps weighing down a show that should dance on air. Someone alert Ed Rooney – Ferris deserves a detention.

Nice Work If You Can Get It 

Imperial Theatre, 249 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. http://niceworkonbroadway.com/ $46.50 – $146.50