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Article snippet: Maybe it’s time for another hostless Tony Awards. Sunday night’s broadcast of Broadway’s annual celebration of itself had trouble figuring out what to do with Kevin Spacey, the evening’s host, making use of him in ways that ranged from torturous (the opening number) to tolerable (he does pretty good Johnny Carson and Bill Clinton impressions). It fared far better when it was about the work being honored and the people who did it. The show, on CBS, opened, as it always seems to, with a not particularly amusing musical collage, this one feeling especially ill-advised because it was full of references to new musicals that most people in the television audience had not seen. Why did Mr. Spacey begin with a cast on his arm? Hope you were watching with someone who’d seen “Dear Evan Hansen” and could explain the joke. The Tonys have always had the dilemma of figuring out which audience to go after. Sunday’s opening number was clearly aimed at the theater insiders in Radio City Music Hall, not at the uninitiated TV viewer. Besides being unfunny, that also made it unwelcoming, which is not the way you want to start off a three-hour show. Maybe the opening number should have been at the end of the broadcast, by which point viewers would have known at least some of the references from having seen songs from the nominated musicals performed during the evening. That, of course, would have required a type of out-of-the-box thinking that the Tonys — and, really, all of its cous... Link to the full article to read more