NEW YORK — On June 8, Brian Ronan and Steve Canyon Kennedy received Tony Awards, respectively, for “Best Sound Design of a Musical” (Beautiful – the Carole King Musical) and “Best Sound Design of a Play” (Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill). On June 11, the American Theatre Wing’s Tony Award Administration Committee announced that both awards categories would be omitted from future Tony Awards ceremonies. The move prompted a considerable amount of shock and dismay in the audio community and beyond.
Added in 2008, these awards have truly mirrored the advancement of both the art and science of theatre sound, as expressed by Howard Sherman, who was the ATW’s executive director from 2003 to 2011. “We want to reflect an evolution of the understanding of the sound designer’s role, both among artists and in the community at large,” Sherman said. “This is not an award for placing a microphone somewhere. It’s about the creation of an aural environment that impacts our relationship to a production, just like any other design.”
That statement seems pretty clear. Yet according to an unnamed source quoted in the New York Times on June 12th, the decision to drop the two sound categories was made because many of the award committee members “do not know what sound design is, or how to assess it.”
Internet Steps Up
And with a sizeable number of postings on social media lambasting the proposed award deletions, the reaction throughout the audio, music and consumer communities spread swiftly. A web-based petition on http://petition.tonycanyouhearme.com criticizing the action quickly drew close to 30,000 names, while Twitter and Facebook pages began featuring photos of numerous industry luminaries holding photos with the hashtag #tonycanyouhearme.com sharing their support.
Meanwhile major audio organizations — including the Audio Engineering Society, USITT and the London-based Association of Sound Designers (ASD) expressed their concerns. “The big topic of discussion in the AES community was the recent decision to drop the Tony Award for Sound Design,” wrote AES executive director Bob Moses in a letter to ATW. “People are really hurt, and really angry.”
Industry Reactions
Reaction to the award committee’s suggestion that the two annual sound awards could be replaced by an occasional award for sound was not welcomed as a substitute. In a press release response to the proposed change, the U.K.’s ASD stated: “To absent sound designers and their work from the awards is a failure to respect the contribution that sound designers make as core members of a show’s creative team and the artistry that they bring to a show. The suggestion that a ‘special Tony may be bestowed in the future when a production has extraordinary sound design’ — provides little consolation. Marginalizing sound design is a profoundly retrograde step.”
The USITT reaction was no less pointed. In a letter to AWT, USITT executive director David Grindle wrote that the move “implies that all previous sound design winners’ work has been unworthy.” He went on to suggest that “a week without the sound designs running on Broadway would leave audiences outraged and demanding refunds.”
Hopefully the issue will be settled to the satisfaction of the theatre sound community, but perhaps something good can come from this. “One positive thing for all of us is developing a dialog and collaboration between these two organizations [AES and USITT] that are both so important to us as designers and technicians,” said Dave Tosti-Lane, AES’ Pacific Northwest Section chair, commissioner for the USITT’s Sound Commission, and a noted educator, author and sound designer in his own right. “We are fortunate that the executive directors of both — Bob for AES and David for USITT — are committed to finding ways to work together on many levels.”
