The Ceremony
The opening was a song-and-dance medley performed by Gwen Verdon, Paula Kelly, Helen Gallagher and Donna McKechnie.
The theme was the global reach of Broadway. The "Wide World of Broadway" featured narrations by Rex Harrison, Walter Slezak, Rossano Brazzi, Yul Brynner and Peter Ustinov, who brought the viewers to: Vienna: West Side Story; Tokyo: The King and I; Milan: Ciao, Rudy; Paris: Hello, Dolly!; London: Show Boat; Zagreb, Yugoslavia: Man of La Mancha; and Wichita Falls, Texas: My Fair Lady.
Musicals represented:
- Pippin ("Magic To Do"- Ben Vereen and Company)
A new series of awards was started this year, termed "Theater Awards '73", renewable annually. (New York Times, McCandlish Phillips, p. 52, 3/26/73)
This was the fourth time that Julie Harris won a Tony Award (and her sixth nomination); she won a total of five with a sixth for Lifetime Achievement.
Read more about this topic: 27th Tony Awards
Famous quotes containing the word ceremony:
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)