Yesterday in the 2012 Tony Awards Clip Countdown - a look at the finest moments in theatre history as shown on the Tony Awards telecasts over the last sixty years - we focused on the 1982 Best Musical winner, NINE. While Tommy Tune's Fellini-inspired fever dream won the big prize, Michael Bennett's innovative and visionary R&B pop opera DREAMGIRLS won many of the night's most significant awards and has certainly firmly established itself as a firmament of the history of the modern musical in the intervening years. Among the prizes won by the DREAMGIRLS cast and creative team: Best Actress In A Musical for Jennifer Holliday, Best Actor In A Musical for Ben Harney, as well as wins in the Featured Actor In A Musical category for Cleavant Derricks, Best Book for Tom Eyen and Best Chroeography for Bennett and Michael Peters.
In a Tony Awards moment only a master showman like Michael Bennett could pull off - let alone allow it to pack this kind of plosive punch - see one of the best and brightest Tony Awards clips of all-time: Jennifer Holliday's titanic and incomparable "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going". An instant classic of a musical theatre anthem which was actually written in under an hour, inconceivably, as composer Henry Krieger recently told me in our InDepth InterView (available here), this is one of the most riveting musical theatre numbers ever - and it comes through loud and clear, even on the small screen (as opposed to the vast stage of the Imperial Theatre, where the show originally premiered; as Tony Randall relates in the intro for the clip). Precluded by Sheryl Lee Ralph, LorEtta Devine, Ben Harney, Obba Babatunde and members of the rest of the original cast of DREAMGIRLS enacting the operatic and high-emotion "It's All Over", Holliday is simply a force of nature in her big ballad. Specifically staged and directed for this television broadcast by Bennett himself (as he had done for A CHORUS LINE nearly ten years prior on a previous Tony telecast), this as about as good as Tony Awards moments get; and technically precise, in addition.
So, now, experience DREAMGIRLS again and relive the magic - or, sample it for the very first time - below.Now, after you have caught your breath, see Jennifer Holliday perform the song nearly twenty years later - and significantly more svelte and a bit less manic and mannered while doing so - at Carnegie Hall, as a part of the MY FAVORITE BROADWAY: THE LEADING LADIES concert.As a special bonus, see this once-in-a-lifetime duet between Tony-winning original Effie White, Jennifer Holliday, alongside Oscar-winning movie Effie, Jennifer Hudson, in this audience capture clip from a spectacular concert presentation in 2008. So, what is the greatest staging coup de theatre in Michael Bennett's dazzling and remarkable original staging of DREAMGIRLS - was it the cinematic wipe from Effie to the Dreams at the final moment of Act One? "Steppin' To The Bad Side"? "Fake Your Way To The Top"? "One Night Only"? Furthermore, what performance by the tremendously talented original cast stays with you the most - is it impossible to compare anyone to a singularly unique and powerful performer like Jennifer Holliday? Perhaps the true star of DREAMGIRLS was not the lady with the big song or the razzle dazzle featured roles or even the hi-tech design, but the staging and direction of the show itself - never before had a musical danced quite like this; and dance it indeed did do, just as master director Michael Bennett always had intended for his masterpiece to do.
