Best Recreation of a Role Tony Award Is Officially Eliminated

The Tony Awards administration committee has officially eliminated the award for Best Performance by an Actor/Actress Recreating a Role, which was supposed to go into effect last season. According to a statement from Tony Award Productions: “This [decision] was in response to a range of practical considerations that arose during the first year in which those rules [for this award] were in place, which revealed difficulties in properly and fairly adjudicating such an award.”

Jonathan Pryce, who stepped into the role of Lawrence Jameson in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels in January, was expected to win the award for the 2005-2006 season, and a brouhaha erupted when it was announced that the award would not to be given at all. Harvey Fierstein was the only other eligible performer, for his work as Tevye in the revival of Fiddler on the Roof.

Under the rules, which were announced last fall, producers could submit the names of replacement performers who had a six-month commitment to the show, with the caveat they could not submit more than two performers per show. The decision of who would win the Tony was then left up to the administration committee. According to a report in The New York Post, only 16 of the committee’s 24 members even saw Pryce’s performance.