Behind the scenes and beyond the speeches at the Tonys

NEW YORK — When playwright Tracy Letts thanked his backers for producing a new American play and casting it with "theater actors" he hit on one of the more intriguing aspects of Sunday night's Tony Awards. For the first time in many years there was a preponderance of true stage actors, rather than moonlighting movie actors. And you could sense the difference as soon as they came to the stage to make their acceptance speeches — speeches that reflected their love of language and a more high-minded overall literateness.

Of course, Steppenwolf actress Rondi Reed is a renowned "talker" who can make a recitation of telephone book listings seem to flow, but her words came easily: “Oh my God!” a resplendent Reed exclaimed as she accepted her award for best featured actress in a play for her work in "August: Osage County." “It’s all about families for us … the Steppenwolf family, my onstage family [in “August”], my ‘Wicked’ family [she will be returning to the Chicago production soon]. And 80 percent of this award is for my costar, Francis Guinan, [who played her husband].”

Reed also bid a “happy Father’s Day” to Dennis Letts, who was part of the original cast (and the playwright’s dad). The actor made his Broadway debut with the show but died of cancer in February.

“We had a phase early on at Steppenwolf where we said, ‘We don’t need New York,' " Reed confessed. "But we quickly came to the realization that there is larger pond. New York held no allure, but it also held all the allure. We had passionate arguments about this, and then we ended up sending ‘True West,’ to New York in the 1980s, and it was the single event in our history that put us on the map. It changed all of our lives. New York became dear in our hearts because of that.”

"Tracy wrote this play with the actors of Steppenwolf in mind," said Reed. It was like Chekhov and his company [the Moscow Art Theatre]."

Letts himself, who frequently works as an actor, quipped that “writing is better than acting, and it beats the hell out of auditioning for ‘Jag.’ ” He went on to thank “the Chicago theater community; they are the ones who made this possible.”

Later, facing a bank of reporters glued to their laptops, Letts said he felt like he was in an OTB parlor and described the past year as “surreal, wild, bizarre, upsetting, exhausting. The audience response to my play was, from the start, so enthusiastic. It just felt like we hit on something. Frankly, I think I’m a little in shock. And I think I got a little mad up there on stage [while accepting the Tony]; it’s something I need to look at in myself.”

“It's a bittersweet night,” admitted Letts. “It made all our perspectives change when my dad died in February. So we just think of the awards as fun.”

Letts noted that he never went to college, although both his parents were university professors in Oklahoma. "I don't know why," he said. "I was 18 and crazy."

"August's" Tony-winning director Anna Shapiro thanked her parents, wishing “her father were still here to share the moment with her mother,” and said they never made her think her choice of a profession was trivial. She also thanked her companion, actor Ian Barford, who was part of the "August" cast and who "keeps the best spot in the world clear for me — the one right next to him." As for keeping her grounded, she paid tribute to her nieces and nephews who "are not interested in any of this, but only wanted tickets to 'The Little Mermaid'." (“I got them,” she quipped.) Shapiro is a lucky woman on many counts. She received her Tony from actor Gabriel Byrne.

Deanna Dunagan, "the auxiliary member of Steppenwolf" who is not a formal part of the company but has worked in many shows at the theater over the years, made an emotional tribute to her fellow nominee, Amy Morton, who played her daughter on stage and who was her direct competition in the leading actress category. “Amy should at least be standing up here beside me,” she said. “She can do things on stage that I cannot do.”

Shapiro went on to describe Morton, who will be staying with the Broadway production throughout the summer, as "a powerful machine. She would only miss a show if someone had amputated her leg."

And this is not the last dance for the original cast, even though Dunagan, Reed, Barford and Guinan have all left the show for now. Theyvery likely will be reunited next season for the London production of "August: Osage County" that is to be produced at London's Royal National Theatre.

In a most apt alignment of the stars, the award for best Regional Theater that was given to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater (a notable champion of Stephen Sondheim musicals for many years), came in the same year that Sondheim himself was given a special Lifetime Achievement award.

"He's a shy man," said Mandy Patinkin on his way into Radio City Music Hall, as he explained why he had been sent as the 78-year-old Sondheim's surrogate.

Sondheim's elegant letter of thanks praised the long list of writers he has collaborated with over the years — “the men who gave me the characters who would sing my songs.”

One of the most charming little homages to Sondheim came in the form of the impassioned rap-style acceptance speech made by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the young (27) and exceptionally talented fellow behind the top Tony-winning musical "Into the Heights" — a show that garnered a total of four awards, including one for best original score. (The show carries the distinction of being the first "Latino show written by a Latino.")

"Mr. Sondheim, look! I made a hat," he intoned, recalling the song sung by the artist in Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George." Miranda later admitted that he had come to the ceremony with "a few couplets in his head" but that he went blank halfway through, and was grateful to have strong improvisational skills honed by being part of a rap group for four years.

To be sure, Miranda is a talent to be reckoned with. A charismatic performer, who spent eight years (from the time he was a student at Wesleyan) working on "Into the Heights," he admitted he would have been scared to embark on such a project had he known how long it could take to realize. The show is an inspired hybrid — a classic, old-fashioned street scene sort of story about several generations of Latino immigrants that is blended with a salsa-meets-hip-hop score. Tony- winning choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler (now at work on the Broadway-bound "Nine to Five"), created the show's ingeniously integrated mix of salsa, hip hop and modern dance, and the orchestrations (by Tony-winning Alex Lacamoire and Bill Sherman), mixes those same sounds with equal skill.

Miranda already has a deal with Dreamworks to score an animated film, and added, "I have several other musicals in my head," but he is waiting to get the rights to the material he wants to adapt before elaborating on those projects.

The award for best original book for a musical went to Stew, the Los Angeles-born ”bourgeois black” who tells a quasi-autobiographical “coming of age tale” in his musical “Passing Strange” — a mix of hard rock, poetry and inventive stagecraft that moves from black gospel sounds, to Euro-chic, to a regained sense of home.

So why did he don a mask when his name was read out before the winner was announced? Well, the musical is about finding an identity and playing roles related to race, status, artistic bent and all the rest. Stew, with his trademark red shirts, is quite the character.

Notably, both of these ingenious new musicals "In the Heights" and "Passing Strange" initially were developed and showcased extensively in the regional theater network.

The Lincoln Center production of “South Pacific” (amazingly the first Broadway remount of the Rodgers and Hammerstein masterpiece since its debut in 1949) was named best revival of a musical, as expected.

Bartlett Sher, who was named best director for his seamless work on the show, thanked its original creators who, he said, “Taught me that I am not just an artist but a citizen, and told us that our country was a great place, could be a little bit better and perhaps we could change.”

Later, he admitted he felt enormous panic at taking on the project, in large part because so many people had such indelible memories of the musical.

"It was like doing Aeschylus," he said. "This musical is like having a national myth acted out.”

Brazilian opera singer Paulo Szot, who was named best leading actor in a musical for his Broadway debut as Emile deBecque in “South Pacific," also had fears, but of a different kind.

"I wasn't sure I could do eight performances a week," he confessed. "As an opera singer, you do three. Previews were hard, but gradually it has become easier. The wonderful thing about performing at the Lincoln Center Theater is that there is no orchestra pit separating you from the audience. I often can hear the audience humming along as I sing.”

No endurance worries trouble Patti LuPone, who got a standing ovation for her performance as the relentless Mama Rose in "Gypsy" on Sunday night, and who went on to win the award for best leading actress in a musical. She joked about recycling several thank-you speeches that had never gotten out of her purse during the past 28 years or so since she won her first Tony for "Evita."

"I'm built for the theater," she said. "There is something to be said about honoring a contract and not missing a performance. Doing eight shows a week requires a certain muscle. I have it, and I'm proud of it."

Laura Benanti, who plays LuPone's daughter in "Gypsy," won her first Tony for featured actress, becoming the first actress to win the award for playing the girl who morphs into stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. (Usually only Mama wins.) The exquisitely pretty and charming actress thanked her real mother for being “the anti-Mama Rose,” that stage mother from hell. Veteran Broadway actor Boyd Gaines won for best supporting actor in “Gypsy” (his fourth award) for playing Mr. Goldstone, the man Mama never quite marries. He knocked out a number of hugely talented younger actors in the category, including Daniel Breaker, who plays Stew's guileless alter ego in "Passing Strange"; Danny Burstein, the wonderfully zany Seabee, Luther Billis, in "South Pacific," and Christopher Fitzgerald, the irresistible sidekick of the bodega owner in "In the Heights."

In the category of best revival of a play, the winner was “Boeing, Boeing,” a 1960s sex farce whose producers noted their next project on Broadway would be “The Seagull” starring Kristen Scott-Thomas. Mark Rylance, the Milwaukee-bred actor who ran London’s Globe Theatre for many years, won as best leading actor for his role as a sex-crazed Midwesterner in “Boeing Boeing” and gave one of the most hilarious and absurd acceptance speeches in the history of the Tonys. Turned out it was a poem by Louis Jenkins, a Minnesota-based poem.

As for the Tony show itself, with Whoopi Goldberg serving as the ever-morphing host (variously trying her hand as Mary Poppins and Christine from “Phantom of the Opera” and an all-black “Chorus Line”), it was more energetic than usual. Goldberg was particularly good in describing each of the four contenders for best play, which, in addition to “August,” included Stoppard’s “Rock ’n’ Roll” (to be seen at the Goodman Theatre next season), Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer” and Patrick Barlow's “The 39 Steps,” a four-actor reinvention of the Alfred Hitchcock film.