Of course, when producer-director Dori Berinstein documented an entire Broadway season, she had no idea that what she was filming would be such a dramatic, surprising and exciting year as 2003-2004 was. That was the season that:



Rosie O’Donnell decided to become a Broadway producer and dragged across the Atlantic a modest little musical that had caught her fancy in London. By and about Boy George, it was plainly marked “Taboo,” but she did it anyway, believing that, given her wealth and high public profile, she could will the show into place.  Unfortunately, she had not figured on friction among the show’s creators that tied her hands and doomed the project. Nor were matters helped by a hostile press, which reported (sometimes gleefully) every backstage body-blow. (One montage in the film flips through a blitzkrieg of bitchy headlines, to the tune of Boy George’s plaintive lament, “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?”) Through it all, O’Donnell high-roaded it, even after this ambitious caprice had devoured her whole $10 million investment.
 



A pleasant, if decidedly bizarre, little enterprise about puppets that fornicate and have sexual-identity issues--“Avenue Q”--surfaced Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theater and, buoyed by a better-than-average reviews, bolted for Broadway to try and make a go of it there. As composer Robert Lopez notes in the film, “It started out as a joke, sort of--puppets singing funny songs--and it turned into something that actually has a heart.”  An impish ad campaign kept the show afloat until Tony time when it went into election-year overdrive, urging voters in big red, white and blue lettering to “vote with your heart.” Nobody thought it would work (and, in a sense, it didn’t because Tony voters are not so simply swayed), but it turned out to be--in one of the most startling Tony upsets ever--the little “Q” that could. As producer Robyn Goodman so eloquently put it when she picked up the prize for Best Musical: “It certainly doesn’t suck to be us tonight.”


 

A veritable armada of deep-pocketed producers rallied behind the commercial lost-cause called “Caroline, or Change” and brought it up from The Public Theater downtown to Broadway, no doubt with dreams of a Pulitzer dancing in their heads. Tony Kushner, its author, had, after all, brought most of them the Pulitzer with his “Angels in America,” so they were right to hope that lightning would strike twice. It didn’t and closed at a loss after five struggling months, only to reopen again in Los Angeles to rave reviews. It’s the show in which Tonya Pinkins went Public again, resurfacing in the star spot after a bitter divorce and child-custody battle sent her scurrying out of the limelight. An act of personal courage, her performance of a black maid in backwoods Louisiana of 1963 was bravura work and widely regarded as a shoo-in for a Best Actress Tony. Again, it didn’t happen.
 




At a whopping $14 million (that looked it!), “Wicked” was the year’s most expensive and anticipated musical event--so its stumble with reviewers when it left the starting gate was doubly conspicuous, but the paying customers quickly countered those critical yawns, and the show has been raking in a million or more every week since opening. The secret of its success? That it purports to be the backstory of The Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz,” and audiences are drawn like magnets to that beloved source by L. Frank Baum. Sympathetically reinvented, that witch is named Elphaba after the author’s initials and played lime-green by Idina Menzel, whose first spray-painting (a ritual she endured for more than two years) is caught here by the cameras. It was a bitter pill for “Wicked” to lose to “Avenue Q,” which was capitalized at a quarter of the cost.

 


The making, unmaking, remaking and survival of these four musicals are explored with remarkable candor in "ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway," a feature-length documentary which, because of the unprecedented cooperation its creators received from the theater community, looms like the ultimate in inside-Broadway movies. But this quartet hardly constitutes the whole picture of the season. Punctuating the narratives of these shows, pitched in like confetti, are other openings, other shows. The 2003-2004 stage season was also a time when:

 



Hugh Jackman took Broadway by storm, playing a fellow Aussie (the late Peter Allen) in “The Boy From Oz” and doing it with such spectacular panache and showmanship that he put the kibosh on the critical carping about the musical’s bio-book. He never missed a performance and sold out constantly. A Tony was the least the community could do.
 





In contrast, Donna Murphy set some kind of dubious record for poor attendance because she was ailing during the re-run of “Wonderful Town.” Eventually, the producers brought in as replacement Brooke Shields, who--surprise, surprise--charmed the pants off critics.
 





Actresses of color completely dominated the Tony Awards--three blacks and a green. Phylicia Rashad became the first African American to win the Tony for Best Actress in a Play, and Audra McDonald became the first to win four Tonys (a distinction she shares with Angela Lansbury and Gwen Verdon). Both were cited for the Sean Combs-driven revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” A sleeper contender for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, Anika Noni Rose, emerged victorious, but Tonya Pinkins who played her mother didn’t come through as predicted, losing to that lady in green, Idina Menzel.
 



In non-musical matters--and there were nonmusicals on Broadway (not many and not nearly enough, but some)--it was the first time that two Pulitzer Prize winners came up for the Best Play Tony in the same year: Nilo Cruz’s “Anna in the Tropics” and Doug Wright’s “I Am My Own Wife.” The winner was the latter, a one-man, multi charactered, fact-based saga about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (born Lothar Berfelde), a gentle but resilient German transvestite who survived both Nazi and Communist regimes. It was the first time a solo work received the Tony for Best Play. Jefferson Mays, who executed all of the roles, won the Best Actor prize. It was reported that when his name came out of the envelope, Christopher Plummer (nominated for his “King Lear”) exited in a huffy hurry.


 

                            -- Harry Haun