It’s the day after the Tony Awards, and impassioned theater-lovers across the globe are coming to fisticuffs over Mark Rylance’s acceptance speech for his Best Actor Award. Was it “sheer brilliance” or “impertinent gibberish?” Rylance, who won for his work in the dark and boisterous British comedy Jerusalem, chose to forego thanking his family and friends and instead delivered some passages by the Minnesota poet Louis Jenkins on the subject of “walking through walls” (and whether or not it’s preferable to walk through wooden walls or steel walls).

Rylance’s speech would have packed more of a wallop if he hadn’t done exactly the same thing two years ago, when he won his first Best Actor Tony for the French sex farce Boeing-Boeing. 

But then again, there has always been a sense of déjà vu at the Tony Awards.

Every year there is a cringe-inducing speech or two (this year Nikki James’s “bumblebee speech” was the most bizarre…until Sutton Foster started crying over her longtime dresser, who is leaving theater to pursue his passion for visual art). In addition, there’s always one actor who royally screws up his or her part. This year it was Brooke Shields, who completely messed up her four-line stanza (a bit about Anthony Weiner and sexting) in the opening number and requested not one but two “do-overs”—on national TV!!! (To make things worse, when Miss Shields appeared again as a presenter later in the telecast, she kept alluding to her earlier mishap and let loose with a couple of curse words that had to be bleeped.)

Don’t get me wrong—I love the Tonys and have been watching them without fail for nearly four decades.  I adored Neil Patrick Harris as the host of the ceremony in 2009—the infamous year that rocker Bret Michaels got conked in the head by a piece of moving scenery—and am happy as a clam that Harris was brought back again to emcee this year’s show. His opening  number, “Broadway Is Not Just for Gays Anymore,” was very funny (with lines like “Come in and be inspired…There’s no sodomy required”) as was his “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” musical banter with Hugh Jackman. Best of all was Harris’s closing hip-hop “(W)rap Up” number, which was remindful of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony acceptance speech for In The Heights two years ago. It turns out that this ingenious closing number was written by Miranda, who was backstage writing it and coaching Harris just seconds before it was performed. (Maybe they should have gotten him to coach Brooke Shields as well…)

I don’t even mind that, in the words of one of my dearest and oldest friends (a theater producer), “every year the Tonys become more frantic, more vulgar.” CBS is simply trying to ratchet up the ratings. And this year the Tony Awards had the misfortune of being up against a major sports event—the NBA finals on ABC. Or as Tony presenter Chris Rock quipped when he was handing out the much-deserved Best Musical Award to The Book of Mormon, “[A few years ago] I would never have believed I would miss the best basketball game ever to hang out with Nathan Lane."

The thing that rankles me is when the Tony Awards Committee sets up rules for the telecast and then proceeds to break the rules. The Number One Rule has long been that musical numbers can be presented only from shows nominated for Best Musical or Best Revival of a Musical. There are exceptions to the rule, which usually fall into the category of “Tributes to Beloved Composers” or “Tributes to All-Time Great Broadway Shows.”

But why oh why did this year’s telecast include a number from Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark, the infamous mess of a musical spectacle that has been previewing since last fall but still has not officially opened? (The song, by the way, was an anemic ballad for Peter Parker and his girlfriend Mary Jane that sounded like a second-rate version of “Almost Paradise” from Footloose. I expected a lot more from Bono and The Edge…)

And why was there a number from Memphis, which won last year’s Best Musical Award? Do we have to see last year’s winner propped up yet again?

Which brings me to this year’s Tribute to a Beloved Composer. The composer was Stephen Sondheim (who for the first time in years is not represented on Broadway this season by a revival of one of his shows), and the song—“Side by Side”— was performed by the star-studded cast of the recent New York Philharmonic semi-staged concert version of Sondheim’s Company. The cast included Patti LuPone, Stephen Colbert, Martha Plimpton, Jon Cryer, and Neil Patrick Harris himself, and the number (complete with straw hats and canes) should have brought down the house—except the camera work was not very good and the performers were a rehearsal away from being in perfect unison.

But still, what would the Tony Awards be without Sondheim?

For the best and funniest analysis of the Tony Awards, take a look at veteran TV comedy writer Ken Levine’s blog, which contains the following gem: “I find it a little odd that 30 million people will watch Bristol Palin clomp around like a Clydesdale on Dancing with the Stars but eight people tune in to see the finest singers and dancers in musical comedy perform magnificent production numbers.”