Best Musical: Tony vs Grammy - Part 1

Now that the 50th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony is history, and before the Tony Awards season sneaks up on us, it might be a good time to do a little investigating into the relationship between the category that both award shows recognize-Best Musical, of course. Impressively, this category has existed continuously at the Grammys since the very first year, 1958, and readers of this article no doubt hope that it continues to do so. The Tonys are a decade or so older, and have also always given out a prize for the year's top tuner. These two categories have existed pretty much side by side for long enough now that some parallels, similarities and differences can and should be brought to light.

Compare and Contrast

But first, let's set the scene. The Grammy Awards (www.grammy.com) are awarded by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, or NARAS (full disclosure: I am a NARAS member and Grammy voter) and recently have been given out every year in February, with their award year named after the previous calendar year. The award in question has gone by several slightly different names in the course of Grammy history, but is now called "Best Musical Show Album." The Tony Awards ceremony (www.tonyawards.com), sponsored by the American Theatre Wing and the League of American Theatres and Producers, takes place in early June and calls its award "Best Musical." The date of the award is the year in which it is given out.

Obviously, the Grammy is given to a recording and its "creators" (the rules are complicated-trust me on this one) and the Tony is presently given to a production and its "producers" (less complicated). And there are far more Grammy voters than Tony Voters, though NARAS members cannot vote in all musicAl Fields (pop, country, classical, jazz, etc.), engendering some sort of specialization, one would hope.

A key point to understand is the timing of eligibility for the awards. Varying somewhat in the early days of both awards, for some time now Grammy eligibility has been roughly October 1 - September 30. Tony eligibility is roughly early May to early May. Though this sounds like the time periods are nearly six months apart, in the Broadway musical theater world shows are almost always Tony-eligible first, and Grammy-eligible later. Not only is it conventional wisdom that the best shows open on Broadway in the spring, at the end of the season, but nearly all cast recordings are issued a month or two after the show has opened (with a wide range on this, as readers are probably aware).

So the fact remains that most Broadway musicals qualify for a Tony first, and for a Grammy afterwards, coming in just under the wire for eligibility for both, and ending up in award years which are the same. And every single Tony-winning Best Musical has had a Grammy-nominated recording (somebody tell me if I am wrong!). Twenty-four shows (nearly half of those possible) have ultimately won both awards, and it seems that all but three of them (How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, Company and Hairspray) have won their Tony Award first.

Double Winners

So, it seems that the best way to predict each year's Grammy-winning Best Musical recording is simply to assume that it will be the same show that wins the current year's Best Musical Tony-it has happened roughly half the time. And what shows are these? They are for the most part the shows you would expect-well-known names, if not giants of the field, all but a handful of them as popular now as they were when they were new, and giving Little Room for one to argue their worth as recipients of both of these awards.

The first four years of the Grammys saw the award in this category go to Tony-winning Best Musicals:  The Music Man (a great standard setter), Redhead (a now-forgotten musical comedy, but starring Gwen Verdon at the height of her powers and directed by her husband, Bob Fosse), The Sound Of Music (no slouch there) and the aforementioned (and a Pulitzer Prize winner) How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. Within a few years the Hal Prince-directed Cabaret (by Kander and Ebb) and Company (Stephen Sondheim) would join the list, both remarkably innovative and tuneful. In the mid-1970s A Little Night Music (Prince/Sondheim again), Raisin (somewhat forgotten today, but based on A Raisin In the Sun) and The Wiz ("Ease On Down the Road") would win both awards three years running, and later in that decade Annie, Ain't Misbehavin', Sweeney Todd and Evita would do so four years in a row (the longest such string so far).

Evita's dual win in 1980 was matched for composer Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1983 with Cats, his last Best Musical Grammy win to date (hint to his Lordship: no London cast album has ever won in this category). The third British musical of that era to win both awards was the Schonberg-Boublil blockbuster Les Miserables (original Broadway cast recording, thank you), which defeated the London cast album of The Phantom Of the Opera for its 1987 win.

In the late '80s and early '90s, three shows were double winners which could be considered "State of the art" for the key creative artists involved:  Jerome Robbins' Broadway (unrevivable, it seems, but marvelous to see and hear), The Will Rogers Follies and Passion. A decade later, film adaptations which have dominated the Broadway box office of recent times, The Lion King, The Producers and Hairspray, made both sets of voters happy. And of course, the last three years in a row have produced shows that won both awards, Spamalot, Jersey Boys and the current bi-title holder, Spring Awakening. Quibbles aside, this list of shows and recordings truly represents the best of Broadway musical stages and their nearby recording studios-a cavalcade of excellence for different eras, recognized by professionals of two somewhat different industries. 

The Actress Connection

But what has happened at Grammy time if a Best Musical Tony winner has failed to win the recording award? Is there any other Tony category that correlates to these Grammy champions? Actually, the Tony category that seems to be the next best predictor of Grammy success is…Best Actress (or Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical-call it what you will). There may be and probably are other contributing factors to the award-winning success of these recordings, but the fact is that in the 26 years when the Grammy winner for Best Musical Show Album was not also a Tony winner for Best Musical, its leading lady won a Tony for herself nine times (roughly a third of the time).

These shows include No Strings (Diahann Carroll was the woman in question), Mame (Angela Lansbury), Dreamgirls (Jennifer Holliday), Into the Woods (Joanna Gleason), Guys and Dolls (the revival starring Faith Prince), Chicago (the current revival originally starring Bebe Neuwirth), Annie Get Your Gun (the Bernadette Peters revival), Aida (Heather Headley) and Wicked (Idina Menzel).

These are wonderful recordings of great shows-but there is no clear reason why Grammy voters would sometimes turn to cast albums containing award-winning leading lady performances. The noticeable correlation is there, but perhaps the factors that led Grammy voters in other types of circumstances were also at work here. Indeed, they may have been at work as well in the twenty-four shows that won both Best Musical awards. What are those other factors?  We'll discuss them next, in the upcoming Part Two.

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