By Simi Horwitz, Backstage.com

Thu Jun 12, 2008

Moving from Broadway to Hollywood comes naturally for theatre artists with Tony Awards gracing their shelves. Kristin Chenoweth, Sara Ramirez, Nathan Lane, and Sam Mendes are just a few who did it — and choreographer-director Rob Marshall, a six-time nominee, even morphed into an Oscar-nominated film director.

This year's list of Tony nominees is awash in future talent that should be on Hollywood's radar, including the single-named Stew and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who have both received multiple nominations as actors, writers, and composers in Passing Strange and In the Heights, respectively. Heights, which received 13 Tony nominations, is a series of interrelated stories set in New York's Washington Heights barrio that combine rap with salsa and Latin pop; Passing, which received seven Tony nominations, is an autobiographical journey that is at once rock concert and performance art.

Here's a talent shortlist they should take note of:

Deanna Dunagan
August: Osage County
Nomination: Best performance by a leading actress in a play

Why her? As monster mom from hell Violet Weston, Dunagan manages to be hilariously funny despite her extreme stridency and abusiveness.

Up next: Osage County led to two film auditions, she says. "When this is over, I expect to go home and resume my life in Chicago the way it was before I left."

Adam Epstein
Cry-Baby
Nomination: Best musical

Why him? Producer Epstein creates crowd-pleasers, first with his Tony Award-winning Hairspray and now Cry-Baby. A broad musical pastiche with wonderfully tacky songs, it's the old chestnut about an upper-crust good girl who falls for the sensitive bad boy, straddling the line between homage and send-up.

Up next: A revival of Godspell and a musical adaptation of Ever After for Broadway. He says, "My intention is also to produce movies — both musicals and otherwise."

Raúl Esparza
The Homecoming
Nomination: Best performance by a featured actor in a play

Why him? Esparza's Lenny is an uneducated, lower-class Brit pimp who's at once sinister and infantile. His chest puffed up and leading from his crotch, his walk was wonderfully vulgar, yet he was totally understandable.

Up next: Esparza is currently playing a killer in Wes Craven's latest for Rogue Pictures, 25/8, and has a recurring role on ABC's Pushing Daisies. "I enjoy doing films, but they're not my first love," he says.

Tracy Letts
August: Osage County
Nomination: Best play

Why him? Not unlike Quentin Tarantino, playwright Letts has an uncanny ability to merge the horrific with over-the-top comedy. Like a white-trash Long Day's Journey Into Night, Osage County presents a family suffering from emotional paralysis.

Up next: Letts, also an actor, says there have been no movie offers, "but I don't pursue them. I'm cynical about that end of the business."

Lin-Manuel Miranda
In the Heights
Nomination: Best performance by a leading actor in a play; best original score written for the theatre

Why him? Refreshingly devoid of elbow-nudging irony even in the corniest moments, Miranda's ability to convey enthusiasm and faith in the future makes his performance so endearing.

Up next: Miranda has written two songs for Stephen Schwartz's Working, playing in Sarasota, Fla. "Since the Tony nominations, it has been an amazing whirlwind," he says. "I'm still trying to soak everything in!"

Kelli O'Hara
South Pacific
Nomination: Best performance by a leading actress in a musical

Why her? In addition to her exquisite soprano, O'Hara gives a multilayered performance that merges innocence with a darker soul.

Up next: "Over the last few years, my Tony nominations (The Light in the Piazza and Pajama Game) have definitely helped move me into TV and film in small ways," she says. "So here I'll stay, hoping to get lucky, not relying on Tony nominations but knowing they can't possibly hurt."

Bartlett Sher
South Pacific
Nomination: Best director of a musical

Why him? While clearly a period piece, Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific is rousing and its views on racial relations still have disturbing resonance. The staging is exceptional. This is theatre at its most engrossing, thanks in large part to Sher.

Up next: Directing Namaste Man at Seattle's Intiman Theatre, where he serves as artistic director. Later this summer he will helm Charles Gounod's opera Roméo et Juliette at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. "I'm now getting some interest from Hollywood," he says. "I will be looking into it."

Stew
Passing Strange&apos
Nomination: Best performance by a leading actor in a musical; best book of a musical; best original score written for the theatre.

Why him? Passing Strange and its creator-star are wholly original, with Stew as the most unlikely and endearing of Broadway stars. So, too, is Passing, a rite-of-passage story that recounts Stew's hilarious journey through Europe's downtown scenes.

Up next: Recording an album of three new songs, directing a screenplay, and "developing another music-theatre piece, which would explore and create connections between rock concert and theatre at an even deeper level than Passing Strange does," he says. "It'll be something a little less narrative-driven and more of a happening."

Matthew Warchus
Boeing-Boeing
Nomination: Best direction of a play

Why him? With its classic physical comedy and wonderfully dated views on gender relations, this door-swinging mid-60s farce about an American businessman juggling his three mistresses is just plain fun. Madcap comedy is not simple, and it's to Warchus; credit that Boeing-Boeing takes off.

Up next: He'll direct the first revival of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests in October at London's Old Vic, and he says he'll either be involved in a film project or an international production of the stage production of Lord of the Rings by the end of 2008.

Tony Trivia
Compiled by David Sheward
Director-producer Harold Prince has won the most Tonys, with 21.

The musical with the most Tonys: The Producers (2001), with 12

The play with the most Tonys: The Coast of Utopia (2007), with seven.

The only mother-and-daughter set to be nominated for Tonys in the same year and category are Rosemary Harris for Waiting in the Wings and Jennifer Ehle (who won for best actress in a play) for The Real Thing in 2000.



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