On a Tuesday night last summer-July 14, Bastille Day-I saw my first play as The Observer's new theater reviewer. It was Vanities, an awful Off Broadway musical at the Second Stage, and the evening was memorable only because it was also the night the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing, the trade groups that together produce the Tony Awards, announced they were kicking out the theater press from among the ranks of Tony voters.

It must have been something I said (and I hadn't yet said anything).

In March, finally, a deal was reached. Members of the New York Drama Critics Circle (a small and shrinking group of fewer than 20) will be allowed to vote, rather than, as before, the full roster of the so-called First Night Press List (the 100 or so reviewers, reporters, editors and, according to a version of the list I saw once, a certain aged Sulzberger, all of whom are invited to all press previews). But that deal doesn't kick in till next season.

So, for this year, we have only our columns. Here, then, are my picks for the 64th annual Tony Awards, to be presented Sunday night at 8 p.m. and televised on CBS.

BEST PLAY

Nominees: In the Next Room or the vibrator play, Next Fall, Red, Time Stands Still

Will Win: Red

Should Win: Time Stands Still

Alfred Molina gives a ferocious performance as the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko in Michael Grandage's impressive staging of Red, by John Logan. And I forgave the play's didacticism on the grounds that Rothko was, by all accounts, a didact. The great celebrity performance, the play's snob appeal, its excellent reviews and the fact it's still running should give it the edge. But Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still, an MTC production from earlier this season, was insightful, subtle and moving, and with Laura Linney, Brian D'Arcy James, Eric Bogosian and Alicia Silverstone, it had perhaps the most perfect cast of the season.

BEST MUSICAL

Nominees: American Idiot, Fela!, Memphis, Million Dollar Quartet

Will Win: Memphis

Should Win: Fela!

This is a depressing category: There was nothing on Broadway this season that properly deserves to be called a Best Musical. But Fela! is the only show that comes close. It's enjoyable, entertaining, interesting and exciting-so what if it doesn't really have a book. Memphis, the only other serious contender, is terrible; it's entirely cynically constructed, with derivative music, banal lyrics, an irritating male lead and an ersatz civil-rights message that leaves one hungering for the nuanced depiction of 1960s race relations found in Hairspray. Still, inexplicably, people seem to like Memphis. And it'll tour much better than Fela!-remember, the press isn't voting this year, but all those out-of-town producer still are-so it'll win. 

BEST BOOK OF A MUSICAL

Nominees: Fela!, Memphis, Million Dollar Quartet, Everyday Rapture

Will Win: Everyday Rapture

Should Win: Everyday Rapture

Sherie Rene Scott's adorable biographic cabaret has the only nominated book that isn't terrible. Even better, it's actually quite good: deftly constructed and very, very funny.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Nominees: The Addams Family,
Enron, Fences, Memphis

Will Win: Memphis

Should Win: None

It was such a bad season for musicals that half of the Best Score nominations are plays. And while Branford Marsalis' interstitial jazz for Fences was probably the best of the nominated music, you just can't give Best Score to a non-musical. (Yikes, or can you?)

BEST REVIVIAL OF A PLAY

Nominees: Fences, Lend Me a
Tenor, The Royal Family, A View From the Bridge

Will Win: Fences

Should Win: Fences or View From the Bridge

It's a toss-up between Fences and View From the Bridge-both tremendous productions of classic works with blockbuster leading men. But Fences is a slightly better play, and, though I think Liev Schreiber's Bridge performance was stronger than Denzel Washington's in Fences, Fences is still playing, which will give it the edge.

BEST REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL

Nominees: Finian's Rainbow,
La Cage Aux Folles, A Little Night Music, Ragtime

Will win: La Cage

Should win: La Cage

You could make a decent argument for three of the four nominees to win. (The less said about Finian's, the fourth, the better.) But Ragtime was a commercial failure and Night Music, while excellent, never quite caught fire. So the sweet, scruffy La Cage it is.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTOR IN A PLAY

Nominees: Jude Law (Hamlet), Alfred Molina (Red), Liev Schreiber (A View From the Bridge), Christopher Walken (A Behanding in Spokane), Denzel Washington (Fences)

Will Win: Denzel Washington

Should Win: Liev Schreiber

Mr. Schreiber is arguably the best stage actor working today. But Mr. Washington is a huge movie star. He'll get the award, partially because he deserves it and partially as a thank-you note from a Broadway desperate to keep the Hollywood stars coming east.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTRESS IN PLAY

Nominees: Viola Davis (Fences), Valerie Harper (Looped), Linda Lavin (Collected Stories), Laura Linney (Time Stands Still), Jan Maxwell (The Royal Family)

Will Win: Viola Davis

Should Win: Linda Lavin

In truth, any of these five women deserves the award.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL

Nominees: Kelsey Grammar (La Cage), Sean Hayes (Promises, Promises), Douglas Hodge (La Cage), Chad Kimball (Memphis), Sahr Ngaujah (Fela!)

Will Win: Sahr Ngaujah

Should Win: Sahr Ngaujah

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL

Nominees: Kate Baldwin (Finian's Rainbow), Montego Glover (Memphis), Christiane Noll (Ragtime), Sherie Rene Scott (Everyday Rapture), Catherine Zeta-Jones (A Little Night Music)

Will Win: Montego Glover

Should Win: Montego Glover

All of these actresses were wonderful, but Ms. Glover managed to shine in an otherwise dreadful show. That's impressive.

BEST DIRECTION OF A PLAY

Nominees: Michael Gandage (Red), Sheryl Kaller (Next Fall), Kenny Leon (Fences), Gregory Mosher (A View From the Bridge)

Will Win: Kenny Leon

Should Win: Kenny Leon

BEST DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL

Nominees: Christopher Ashley (Memphis), Marcia Milgrom Dodge (Ragtime), Terry Johnson (La Cage), Bill T. Jones (Fela!)

Will Win: Terry Johnson

Should Win: Marcia Milgrom Dodge

I really liked the two revivals. But I was more impressed with Ms. Milgrom Dodge's minimalist Ragtime, as compared to the over-the-top original, than I was with Mr. Johnson's delightful seedy La Cage. But Mr. Johnson's show is running and Ms. Milgrom Dodge's failed, and that is what will make the difference.

BEST CHOREOGRAPHY

Nominees: Rob Ashford (Promises, Promises), Bill T. Jones (Fela!), Lynne Page (La Cage), Twyla Tharp (Come Fly Away)

Will Win: Twyla Tharp

Should Win: Rob Ashford

Mr. Ashford (and a very game cast) accomplished the impressive feat of making a terrible show look fantastic.

editorial@observer.com

Credit for this feat of alchemy goes primarily to second-time playwright Lucy Prebble, and her director, Rupert Goold, artistic director of London’s Headlong Theatre, which commissioned Enron. Together, they take the seemingly dry subject matter and, with a clever, tightly constructed script and dark, menacing, inventive staging, produce a vibrant, deeply theatrical experience.

There are songs, but it’s not a musical. There are laughs, but it’s not a comedy. Enron is history as avant-garde burlesque. “When we tell you his story,” says the lawyer for disgraced CEO Jeffrey Skilling, serving as an emcee, “you should know it could never be exactly what happened. But we’re gonna put it together and sell it to you as the truth.” It’s what theater does, and it’s what Enron did.

The script covers a wide swath. Direct-address history lessons on Alfred P. Sloan and mark-to-market accounting and structured debt join song-and-dance numbers celebrating commodities trading and spoofing enamored stock analysts, which is layered atop the character-driven morality tale that is the rise and fall of names you remember, like Skilling, Ken Lay and Andy Fastow. It indicts the rest of corporate America, capitalism at large, the Clinton administration and, of course, George W. Bush, whose presidential campaign, the play suggests, was largely funded by Enron, so that his administration would deregulate the electricity market.

The Enron board of directors are blind mice; the go-along-get-along accountants at Arthur Andersen are represented by a puppet; and the shadow companies that hold Enron’s debt and will eventually destroy it are red-eyed velociraptors, trolling the dungeon that is Fastow’s finance department and feeding on cash. Enron’s stock price is constantly ticking past on the upstage wall, rising, rising, rising—until suddenly, disastrously, it’s not.

Norbert Leo Butz stars as Skilling, the visionary CEO who leads Enron to become a corporate powerhouse, the most admired company in the world, by inventing new businesses for it—energy trading, weather-based derivatives, a bandwidth exchange—that don’t actually produce revenue. He’s charming, smarmy, defiant and excellent. Marin Mazzie is sexy and commanding as the fictional Claudia Roe, the one Enron exec to challenge Skilling; she favors tangible assets—power plants—over Skilling’s trades and swaps.

Gregory Itzin makes Ken Lay, the chairman, into an avuncular buffoon—a man who enjoys the trappings of power and knows enough about what’s going on in the office to know he doesn’t want to know about it. Stephen Kunken makes Fastow, the CFO whose schemes brought down the company, a needy nerd so desperate for Skilling’s respect and attention that he invented ways to hide all those losses—and named his son Jeffrey.

Enron ends with an interesting twist: An incarcerated Skilling arguing that bubbles are ultimately good for society. One brought us the railroads, he says; another the Internet. Perhaps. But I’m not sure what of use Enron’s bubble brought us (tricks for hiding debt? Bush?), except this: one hell of a play about it.

AS THE SUFFOCATING paterfamilias Troy Maxson in the emotionally wrenching revival of August Wilson’s Fences that opened at the Cort Theatre Monday night, Denzel Washington—two-time Academy Award winner, with his first name as big as the title on the marquee—is intense and fiercely charismatic, but he’s also a little bit latter-day Pacino, from the why-is-he-shouting-so-much school of acting. 

This is the first Broadway revival of Fences since its 1987 debut, which won Wilson a Tony and his first Pulitzer, and no doubt that’s thanks to Mr. Washington’s presence. It is part of Wilson’s 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, about the African-American experience in the 20th century, and it’s directed here by Kenny Leon, who mounted the full cycle at the Kennedy Center two years ago.

Fences is set in 1957, as the world is beginning to pivot around Troy. The son of a sharecropper, he was a gifted baseball player, but before the integration of the Major Leagues. Now he’s a garbageman, but the only one forceful enough to ask the boss why only white men are allowed to drive the trucks. His son Cory is a high-school football star, about to be recruited to play in college, but Troy won’t allow it, maybe to protect his son—he learned the hard way that white men won’t allow black men to succeed through sports—or maybe to protect himself, because he’s afraid his son will achieve and outshine him. He’s been diminished by the outside world, but in the home he shares with his wife, Rose, and three children from three different relationships—a small, worn brick house, with a patch of dirt yard—he must reign supreme. Ultimately, this drives away his son, his wife, his best friend.

Viola Davis is sensational as Rose, the devoted and betrayed wife. Wilson’s lyrical script offers any number of stirring monologues, and Ms. Davis delivers hers—especially when she learns of Troy’s betrayal—with a vivid, bracing rawness. She more than holds her own against Mr. Washington, both in their tender scenes and in their explosive ones. It’s no small feat, and she does it without too much shouting.

PROMISES, PROMISES, REVIVED Sunday at the Broadway Theatre, starts off with such, well, promise. As the orchestra plays Burt Bacharach’s 1968 overture, all strings and muffled horns and shimmery high hats, the curtain rises on Sean Hayes as C.C. Baxter, an anonymous office worker in the behemoth Manhattan headquarters of Consolidated Life. He’s working away mechanistically, stamping a document and moving on to the next one, as dancers enter behind him in mod suits and ’60s-allusive choreography, mimicking Baxter’s office motions but also twisting and frugging. It looks great, it sounds great, and you’re primed for a great show.

But then the plot gets started, and it’s all downhill.

Promises, Promises was a 1968 Broadway hit with a book by Neil Simon, music by Mr. Bacharach and lyrics by Hal David, based on Billy Wilder’s 1960 classic The Apartment. (You know: Guy gets ahead by lending his apartment to the bosses for trysts; one is trysting with the elevator girl that work guy has a crush on.) It hasn’t been revived since, and it’s easy to see why: It’s not very good. Neil Simon comedy does not, it appears, age well. This isn’t the quite painfully unfunny Odd Couple of a few seasons ago—at least there are songs—but there’s not a lot to laugh at.

Sean Hayes is surprisingly charming and ingratiating as Baxter, and Katie Finneran steals the show for the scene and a half she’s in, bringing a much-needed comic jolt as the floozy Baxter picks up in a dive on Christmas Eve. But Kristin Chenoweth—who earned not just entrance applause but also entrance shrieks on the night I attended—seems miscast as Baxter’s love interest, Miss Kubelik: It’s impossible to imagine that such a no-nonsense dynamo would ever fall for Baxter’s conniving boss, much less try to kill herself when he jilts her.

The best part of the show is director Rob Ashford’s wittily retro choreography. It’s a shame he didn’t do it for Bye Bye Birdie instead: Maybe we could have had one successful Mad Men revival this season instead of two disappointing ones.

THE PROBLEM ENDEMIC to authorized biographies is that cooperating subjects generally prefer a sanitized version of their own life. This remains problematic even when the gauzy biopic is presented on a Broadway stage.

The Roundabout Theatre Company’s Sondheim on Sondheim at Studio 54, the umpteenth tribute to the composer in his 80th birthday year—this one sung by a stellar cast headlined by Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat and narrated by the man himself in vintage video clips and current talking-head interviews—is a pleasure to listen to. It’s also entirely unrevelatory.

Indeed, it’s cleverly withholding: We get just enough information to feel like we’re learning something about Mr. Sondheim without actually learning anything about him. We’re shown his studio and told he writes on yellow pads with soft pencils, but we don’t learn anything substantive about his writing process. We’re told he had a terrible relationship with his mother, but we don’t really learn how that affected him. We’re told he was confused about his sexuality at 35 and had his first serious relationship at 60, but he doesn’t mention anything—even the gender—of the person he met at 60.

It’s a live-action A&E Biography, and it’s a dull one. But, hey, you can’t complain about the soundtrack.

IF YOU HAVE THE CHANCE to see a play by Annie Baker, do it. The young playwright deeply impressed critics and audiences with her Circle Mirror Transformation at Playwrights Horizons in the fall. Now she’s back with The Aliens at the even tinier Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

Once again, she is examining the lives of regular folks in small-town Vermont—here, a trio of otherwise friendless sad sacks who hang out behind a local coffee house and believe each to be a misunderstood genius. The writing is beautifully crafted but simple, naturalistic dialogue that manages to be almost accidentally funny and wise. For much of the play, little happens, but we’re rapt. (Finally, something does, and it’s almost disappointing: This perfect little fascinating-nothing creation has been sullied by a plot.)

The acting, too, is excellent. It’s never clear whether the three are the geniuses they think themselves to be or merely losers deluding themselves. They’re believable either way, and it’s clear which Ms. Baker is.

editorial@observer.com

So do you think there will be any perp walks? And why haven’t there been any yet?
I would be stunned if there weren’t at least indictments at Lehman and some of the other large institutions that have failed. I don’t know why there haven’t been any yet, but it’s amazing that it’s taken them this long. We’ve known about Lehman’s books since late 2008, but we just needed it confirmed by someone who wasn’t a short seller, since we’re not to be trusted. [laughs] We’ve known something was wrong with their books since the collapse.

Fuld apparently loved the report and has been telling people it vindicated him. He can sleep easy now, which must be nice.
I’d say that reaction is not inconsistent with the way he ran his firm.

You were very supportive of Obama during the election, and showed that support in the best possible way, i.e., through cash. How do you think the administration has been doing?
You know, I agree with the White House that they were dealt an awfully bad hand and number one, we have to understand that. Number two, the economy does appear to be getting better and the markets certainly have righted themselves. I do not agree with some of the financial rescue decisions that the administration made, which were simply follows-on of the previous administration. And I think that’s still politically hurting this White House. The real problem isn’t the White House; it’s Congress. It’s just completely broken down. On the financial regulatory front we still need to see what happens in the near future. We’ve got the House bill, we’ve got the Senate bill, and I think there’s some good steps in both, and some steps that need to be changed. However, it still amazes me that the banking industry continues to have the clout in Congress that it does, after all that’s happened. I’m stunned by the amount of power they still wield down in Washington.

What do you think the passing of the health care bill will mean for the economy?
I don’t think health care is out of the woods yet long term, because it’s still increasing as a percent of the economy, and that’s the real problem. In fact, if you look at the two areas of our economy where the government has very large and growing exposure, it’s residential real estate and health care. And both at the end of the day are fairly nonproductive, long term, for our economy. Putting more and more money into housing and keeping us healthy in our golden years doesn’t necessarily make us a more productive society. We should be devoting more of that money to technology and education.

Let’s talk about hate, and that of Goldman Sachs. The other day an ad on Craigslist offered payouts to anyone who would tape him or herself spitting on the Goldman building, peeing on the building, spitting on an employee or peeing on an employee, if the footage was uploaded to YouTube. While it must chafe that you didn’t come up with the idea yourself, you were actually first on the Hate Goldman Trade. [Mr. Chanos had a high-profile public feud in the summer of 2007 with former Goldman Sachs managing director Marc Spilker, Mr. Chanos’ neighbor in the Hamptons, who decided in order to “maximize” his beach enjoyment, he needed to cut down Mr. Chanos’ hedges, without asking permission.] Is that a source of pride?
[laughs] I wasn’t the first on the “Hate Goldman Trade,” I was the first to point out that certain Goldman bankers acted as if the rules of society didn’t apply to them. It led me to vent at the time that it seemed that Goldman was not putting clients’ interests ahead of its own. And I think we’ll leave it at that.

So you don’t want to comment on whether or not you’ve been breaking bread with Lloyd Blankfein since Spilker retired a few months ago?
I’d love to break bread with Lloyd. But he has to buy, because Goldman had a better 2009 than I did! But seriously, I did have a real issue back then and believed that the little episode was symbolic of a situation that would not have happened at Goldman Sachs perhaps 10 or 20 years ago. The concept that a Goldman MD would physically knock down property of a client was just sort of a stunning admission as to where their priorities were.

Bess Levin is editor of DealBreaker.com.

editorial@observer.com

Unfolding on the very doorstep of the G-20 meeting in London and in Washington is the instructive story of Joseph Cassano, former head of American International Group’s Financial Products Group, whose role in his company’s crash—which triggered the ruin of world money markets—may soon lead to criminal charges against him. What the Cassano story points up once more is how the existence of tax and regulatory havens across the world encourage nefarious conduct, lack of transparency, evasion of taxes and corporate criminality.

According to a new investigative report from ABC News, Mr. Cassano is the subject of a criminal fraud investigation by the F.B.I. that is examining how he and his colleagues in AIG’s financial products division set up the scheme to insure more than a trillion dollars of junk mortgage paper held by major banks. He walked away from those bad deals with over $300 million in personal profit. Aside from the fascinating matter of how he managed to commit these catastrophic bets without interference from his superiors, the most pertinent question is how he gamed the gaping loopholes in the international regulatory and legal systems.

Evidently Mr. Cassano established dozens of separate companies, including many that were located offshore, to handle the allegedly fraudulent transactions—a maneuver that was designed to keep the deals effectively off the books of AIG and to mislead regulators in the United States and Britain. The crooks at Enron Corporation used the same techniques, essentially, to conceal what should have been reported on their corporate balance sheets—and they too used offshore locations as instruments of fraud.

Jack Blum, a former Senate staffer who helped to lead the investigation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International more than a decade ago, told ABC reporters that the abuse of tax havens “is the other very important issue underneath the AIG scandal. All of these contracts were moved offshore for the express purpose of getting out from under regulation and tax evasion.”

Massive fraud has been at the center of this crisis from bottom to top, as everyone paying attention must know. The criminal mind-set extended from the bankers and mortgage agents who made loans to unqualified borrowers and sometimes tricked them into signing agreements they could not fulfill. (Among the most industrious marketers were many with actual criminal records, whose entry into the mortgage industry was not blocked by the state regulators.) They marketed those same bad loans with false assurances of their soundness to convince investors to buy them—and somehow induced rating agencies to offer hollow testaments to their creditworthiness. Investors then resold the toxic packages to other investors both here and abroad. At every step, the inflation of the bubble was hastened by fraud, forgery and deception.

At the highest levels, those fraudulent transactions were aided by the existence of “secrecy spaces” in nice quaint places from Switzerland to Anguilla, where the malefactors could rely upon local authorities to collude in their conspiracies. Not only do the governments in the tax and regulatory havens pretend not to see what their corporate visitors are doing, but they actively shut out the scrutiny of anyone who might take action.

The costs imposed on the world by those selfish little entities are too great to ignore any longer. Vast amounts of taxable wealth, last estimated to exceed $12 trillion, are hidden in the protected banks of tax-haven principalities, with annual losses to the U.S. Treasury that may well be greater than $100 billion. But those same places appear to have provided a regulatory twilight zone where financiers like Joseph Cassano could run wild and ruin the rest of the world for profit. The urge to cheat on taxes and the desire to evade regulation represent the same destructive impulse, which governments around the world should now take steps to suppress.

jconason@observer.com