THE BROADWAY musical Once, a stage adaption of the Irish love story film of the same name, yesterday received 11 Tony Award nominations, the highest for the current season.
Like the film, the musical tells the love story between an Irish busker and a Czech immigrant who share a passion for music and an impossible attraction to each other.
The film catapulted Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová’s songs to international fame. One of their songs for the film, Falling Slowly, earned them an Oscar in February 2008.
Playwright Enda Walsh adapted their story for the stage and it opened last month. Writing in this paper, critic Fintan O’Toole praised Walsh’s script for its “dry, ironic sense of humour”, and called the production “miraculous”.
He wrote: “John Tiffany’s production . . . navigates the rough passage from screen to stage with remarkable fluency. What emerges is not a mere adaptation of the movie. It is a supple translation of one form into another: Once has been stripped down, taken apart and rebuilt in a completely different mode. But the charm and delicacy of the original survive intact.”
The Tony nominations, which are given for excellence in live theatre on Broadway, include two for Once’s main stars, Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti.
Once was followed closely by musicals The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess and Nice Work If You Can Get It, both with 10 nominations, and Peter and the Starcatcher, with nine nominations. Actress Kristin Chenoweth and actor Jim Parsons announced the nominations in New York.
The awards, which honour Broadway’s best musicals and plays, will be broadcast live from New York’s Beacon Theatre on June 10th. Among big name nominations in the leading actor in a play category, Philip Seymour Hoffman was nominated for Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, James Earl Jones for The Best Man, Frank Langella for Man and Boy, John Lithgow for The Columnist and James Corden for One Man, Two Guvnors.
The nods for leading actresses in a play went to Nina Arianda for Venus in Fur, Stockard Channing for Other Desert Cities, Tracie Bennett for End of the Rainbow, Linda Lavin for The Lyons and Cynthia Nixon for Wit.
– (Agencies)