Big Shows and Tonys Are Talking Happy Talk
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Broadway might have been in the haze of a post-Tony hangover Monday morning, but the math was as clear as a bell: Lincoln Center Theater won big. Again.

The revival of “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific” won seven Tonys, the most of any show and, according to the American Theater Wing, a producer of the Tonys, the most ever for a musical revival (thanks in part to the growing number of design categories). While there are still those who say nonprofit theaters have no business putting on big shows that compete with commercial productions for the Tonys, that clearly didn’t bother the voters, who showered the production with silver medallions — four for design, one for direction, one for lead actor and the big one.

Lincoln Center has not been shy about putting on big shows on the thrust stage of the Vivian Beaumont theater — “Carousel,” “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” and “Henry IV,” to name a few — but the back-to-back success of “South Pacific” and last year’s “Coast of Utopia,” which itself set a record for the most Tonys won by a straight play, is remarkable.

“I think it’s very important for nonprofit theater companies to have a certain niche of their own, something that they uniquely do,” said André Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. “And certainly the Beaumont, being one of our theaters, is suited to this kind of play or musical.”

“South Pacific” has been good to Lincoln Center’s coffers: the show, which cost around $5 million to mount (but which is rather expensive to run, with a 40-person cast), has an advance above $16 million, which will be growing after Sunday night’s awards ceremonies.

The other big winner of the night was “August: Osage County,” Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which took home five Tonys. While the producers are starting a road tour and are in discussions about a production at the National Theater in London, five members of the 13-person Broadway cast will be new at the first post-Tony performance on Tuesday night. Sunday — the day of the awards — was the last day of in the original-cast members’ contracts, an extension made several months ago to keep everybody on board through the Tonys.

Among those who have left the production are the two actresses, Rondi Reed and Deanna Dunagan, who won Tony Awards.

“They began asking us several months ago if we would stay,” Ms. Dunagan, who spends most of the three-hour play screaming at everybody, said in the pressroom after the Tony broadcast. “I said I would stay if I could do no two-show days, and they couldn’t live with that. I really can’t, for right now, I can’t do eight a week. I’m just, I’m, my voice and my stamina are just kind of shot.”

Do not despair, though. “Most of us,” Ms. Dunagan said, “will come back to go to London in November, I think.”

The best-musical win — one of four — for “In the Heights” may justify the widely second-guessed decision on the part of the show’s producers to move it to Broadway from the Off Broadway 37 Arts Theater, where it received warm if not ecstatic reviews. But while its Tony success will no doubt boost the fortunes of “Heights,” it was already in better financial shape than any of the other nominees in the category.

“Xanadu” has been hovering around the $200,000-a-week mark for months, though producers have no immediate plans of closing.

“Cry-Baby,” which came away with no awards, has not broken $350,000 in weekly grosses in its three-month existence. And “Passing Strange,” which probably had the best shot against “In the Heights,” hasn’t broken $300,000 since March.

On Monday, the producers of those two shows were taking a wait-and-see attitude.

The Tony ceremony’s ratings were just as good as last year’s, but last year’s were the lowest in Tony broadcast history. According to preliminary Nielsen ratings, the ceremony drew around 6.2 million viewers, leaving CBS in third place among the networks for the night. While the record set last year was the result in part of the broadcast’s unusually stiff competition — the last episode of “The Sopranos” on HBO — stuff seems to always happen on Tony night. This time the ceremony was competing in its first hour with one of the more exciting United States Open golf tournaments in recent years, and in its second and third hours with a Lakers-Celtics slugfest in the N.B.A. finals.

Finally we come to the strange case of Mark Rylance, who won the Tony for best actor in a play for his performance in “Boeing-Boeing.” Mr. Rylance’s acceptance speech began thus: “When you are in town, wearing some kind of uniform is helpful, policeman, priest, etc. Driving a tank is very impressive, or a car with official lettering on the side.”

The whole speech was like that, eliciting some rather entertaining reaction shots. As it turns out, the speech was a prose poem by a Minnesota writer named Lewis Jenkins. Mr. Rylance also quoted Mr. Jenkins at the Drama Desk Awards last month. Mr. Rylance told the show’s press agent that he was not going to be answering the telephone on Monday.