Why will more people watch The Sopranos? Because nobody but New York tourists has seen any of the plays up for the Tonys, so no one cares.

You are of course free to sneer about your soap opera about fat middle aged men who like to kill people.

This article doesn't so much "look back" on the year, and certainly doesn't "anticipate" the Tonys, as Salon's description of this little theme week implies. Seems more like skimming through the theater listing and decrying the sorry state of theater (an all too familiar refrain now. Will we ever get over proclaiming theater dead?) without really giving any ideas to fix anything. "Make it more like TV" is the solution? Hardly. And not because TV isn't worthy of respect. It's because TV is best for the sort of long-form storytelling the author points out: The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Arrested Development...these couldn't exist as movies, they couldn't exist as novels, and they couldn't exist as theater. They could only be on television.

The theater is a unique form of storytelling, and it will absolutely not become any more artistically viable by emulating other forms.

No, we need to fix the business model. And we need to find more ways to make it more affordable. Or at the very least, stop hoodwinking people into buying so called "premium" seats.

Peter Birkenhead pens the final article for the week "in anticipation of the Tony Awards this Sunday"? Is this April Fools? I love Shakespeare's Sopranos, too, and I'm glad that I won't be seeing Birkenhead in the orchestra section, much less the stage, of any theater anytime soon.

The first was, of course, Bill Needle on SCTV. I recall him saying "Live theater is intrinsically inferior to movies and television. There's no way a stilted Sondheim play or a three-act Pinter dinosaur can move the imagination the way that...(wistful sigh)...Lucas did with Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Sarcastic? True. Parody? Yes. But when the whole point of Broadway seems to be reproducing the effects and experience of movies, it ain't wrong.

As for non-musical drama, about the only thing that seems to be mentioned outside New York is The Vagina Monologues, a play whose title can't even be advertised on radio or print. Whatever I see promoted in live theater, whenever I come upon a report in Salon or elsewhere, it seems to have no relevance to someone who doesn't live in New York.

By the way, years ago Showtime and sometimes HBO would broadcast plays like Sweeney Todd, and even do a sitcom based upon the very esoteric play Steambath. That was about the only thing providing some interest in New York theater out here in the middle of Real America. And when those telecasts stopped, so did our interest.

"You are of course free to sneer about your soap opera about fat middle aged men who like to kill people."

You mean you don't watch the news either?

Even the strong regional theaters in Chicago, Steppenwolf and Goodman, fall into the same trap of talking only to themselves and the cool kids they hang out with. I let my Steppenwolf subscription lapse a few years ago after a few too many "woman oppressed and destroyed by society" plays. I could have gotten that message watching Lifetime TV. I gave up on the Goodman after they brought in Peter Sellars to do "The Merchant of Venice Beach". One of the most moving works in the English language got deconstructed, or rather, smashed, and the shards stuck on a stage with TV monitors, a monument to Mr. Sellar's cleverness.

I found that I'd rather spend my money and time at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, where in recent years they've put on brilliant productions of "the Merchant of Venice", "Hamlet" and other dead white guy stuff that still entertains and speaks to the human condition with more power than anything happening on Broadway.

>People aren't staying away from the theater because it isn't ambitious enough. They're staying away because it's relentlessly "ambitious," because it keeps insisting on its own unique and righteous importance,<

I love theater, and every Broadway season brings at least two or three shows I'd like to see. (And I'm the sort of "nerd" who would see the occaisional truly terrible show just as a learning experience. :)) But at $100 a ticket, I'm lucky if I can swing one. And I'd be truly out of luck if I didn't live near NYC and had to bear the major expenses of travel/hotel. Broadway is out of reach for the very people who might make it a habit, and it's a mystery to me why TPTB don't take that fact in account.

You're right--it's been a while since cable ran any Broadway shows. (The last one I can recall was DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE with David Hasselhoff, and that was a good three-or-more years ago.) Would it hurt the fairly deep-pocketed HBO to allot some of its hours to theater instead of running MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: III for the billioneth time?

I don't think the theater audience would court the crowd who watch "The Sopranos"...celebrating thuggery isn't exactly the aim of theater crowd...Tony Soprano represents a stereotype that even the actor himself is sick of. It's boring, it's stupid and demeaning to many an Italian American who cannot relate to these mentally deficient lowlifes. TV dwells in such idiotic stereotypes all the time. Will and Grace was the Amos and Andy of gay characters...no, anyone with a brain won't be watching the nitwits on The Sopranos.

As others have pointed out, we don't like the Tony Awards because most of us who don't live in or near New York have never seen any of the plays anyway and probably will never get within multiple state borders of them. The only exceptions are the ones that happen to be mega-successful enough to go on tour (and show up in our neck of the woods five or so years after they appeared on an awards show) or downscale enough for our local theater troupes to be able to actually stage and generally botch them.

What's less fun than an awards show about shows you've never seen, attended by people you'll never know, in a place you don't ever intend to visit?

Plenty of lackluster films with similar pretensions to profundity as the plays mentioned in this article get made and rewarded at awards show after awards show. But we still watch because those awards are about culture we can access as it is happening, instead of years and years after the fact, and share with friends and family for less than a week's worth of wages.

And let me second (or third by now?) the call for more theater broadcasts on television. It was PBS broadcasts of live performances like Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods that made me excited about the theater when I was young. Now if I hear about a new fantastic play or musical, I just sigh and hope someone makes a halfway decent film out of it so I can maybe see an adulterated version someday in the far future.

It's Anthony Soprano I'll be watching on Sunday. No question. I'd almost forgotten any other type of Tony even existed.