Some praise is due to the 850-plus Tony voters, a group more maligned than any industry group outside of the Golden Globes. They violate Tony rules by voting in categories in which they haven’t seen all the nominees, goes one frequent complaint. They vote for their friends, goes another. They vote in blocs, the largest of which is out-of-town producers who have a stake in a show’s commercial potential on the road. They’re unsophisticated and always go for lowest-common-denominator fare.
They take major guff, and I, having been a grumpy gadfly guff-giver across the decades, should know. In truth, all of the above have been borne out in surveys of voters I’ve conducted over the years, despite efforts to fix the problems.
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