Tiffany with his Tony.

“I’m always pleasantly surprised when anybody wants to see a production that I’ve directed,” said John Tiffany over the phone from Glasgow two days after the Tony Awards, erasing all traces of false modesty with child-like wonder. “I kinda go, ‘Oh, wow!’ I feel humbled and privileged that people are actually interested. I’ve a strong philosophical belief that works should be accessible and popular—there shouldn’t be obstacles to anybody being able to connect with what you do—but I wouldn’t say I have a mainstream commercial gene in my body at all. All I know how to do is tell the stories in the most accessible way possible.”

That, apparently, is enough: His Once was Tony king at the recent ceremonies, raking in eight awards in all—among them those for Best Musical and Best Director.

Music has always been a key component in Mr. Tiffany’s theatrical pieces, but never before had he attempted a musical per se—let alone one that could be considered “a Broadway musical” and would compete as such and actually win, leaving whole chorus lines of energetic evangelists and high-flying newsboys-on-strike in the dust.

Once has none of the gaudy trappings of traditional Broadway musicals. If anything, it wears its source like a flag—a quiet cult film of 2007 where Guy (a Dublin busker) and Girl (a Czech immigrant) meet, make beautiful music together but not, bitter-sweetly, a lasting relationship. Notable among the songs is “Falling Slowly,” a ballad of soaring urgency that won the Academy Award. The rest of the score, written by the two leads (Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova), is a haunting, surging dirge to the finish line. No glitz. No buck-and-wing. No 11 o’clock number.

Mr. Tiffany hadn’t seen the film when he was first approached about doing its stage facsimile. “I was with a friend back in Glasgow, who said, ‘You will love the music,’ so the first thing I did was download the album. Loved it. Then, I watched the film.”

One scene in particular triggered a childhood flashback and prompted him to do the project: “Glen takes Marketa to a party where everyone’s sitting around doing a song, and that reminded me of when my dad used to play in a brass band back in Yorkshire,” he said in the press room at the Tonys. “He would take me along on some very drunken evenings with his bandmates and everyone would do their song. There’s something about the way working-class men can communicate through music in a way they can’t in words.

“I thought, ‘Wow! I wonder if we could get that going in the play.’ That’s when I came up with the idea of having a bar on stage—the actors singing as the audience arrives, then the audience going on stage and being able to get a drink from the bar. That was my first thought, and that’s what happened. It took quite a lot of pushing to get that on Broadway—‘Audience on stage? What?’ ‘Liquor on stage? What?’—but we got that. It was an open bar on the first night at New York Theatre Workshop, and Alan Cumming asked me, ‘Is it not a free bar every night?’ I said, ‘Alan, you just think every bar’s a free bar. It’s like the Queen thinks everywhere it smells of fresh paint.’”

He told The Observer over the phone, “We were amazed 1) that the show transferred to Broadway in the first place, and 2) that we were nominated for 11 Tonys. I keep saying to the cast and company and creative team, ‘We’re so lucky in that we’ve made the show we’ve wanted to make.’ We couldn’t be prouder of it and the way it connected with its audience. Then, to get this kind of recognition and acknowledgement for doing our job is just fantastic.”

Mr. Tiffany’s voice broke a bit as he pressed on. “The best thing about it is that it made my mum and dad really proud. My dad’s a kind of quiet Yorkshire man. He doesn’t give away compliments too readily. I spoke to him the morning after the Tonys, and he said he’s never been prouder in his life, and that meant a helluvah lot to me.”

Nobody noticed, but, when Mr. Tiffany accepted his award, he was wearing his roots in his lapel—a dainty white flower from Yorkshire. He meant it as a sentimental salute to his parents, “who gave me the gift of music. They weren’t musicians—my mum was a nurse, my dad was an engineer—but they both had music as hobbies, and I grew up with music. There was something about Once and the process of working on it that made me really connect to home. I live in Scotland now, but I spend a lot of time in America, and I just thought I want to wear something from Yorkshire.”

Otherwise, the 40-year-old deputy director of the National Theatre of Scotland looked very much like a stranger in a strange land—which indeed he was, jetting in just for the awards and then back to Glasgow the next day. He was steering his pal, Mr. Cumming, through Macbeth—all the roles in Macbeth—and left him after the final dress rehearsal in possibly the biggest multiple-personality pile-up since Sybil.

“I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to come because we were right in the middle of the creation process when the Tonys were happening,” Mr. Tiffany said. “If I wasn’t co-directing this with Andy Goldberg, I wouldn’t have been able to come—but, luckily, I was, I could, and I did. It was an absolutely fantastic night. The really great thing about New York theater life is that, if they like you, by God, they let you know!”

This one-man, 100-minute Macbeth—which premiered June 15 at Glasgow’s Tranway Theatre and will transfer to New York’s Rose Theatre July 5-14 as part of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival—is the result of “a meeting of three minds”: Mr. Cumming’s, Mr. Goldberg’s and his. And, yes, as a matter of fact, the actor did come first.

“Alan approached me at the beginning of last year and asked, ‘You fancy doing Macbeth?’ He had the idea that the actor playing Macbeth (i.e., him) and the actress playing Lady Macbeth could swap parts every other night since there’s so much language and talk about masculinity and femininity, so we did a reading in New York. A good friend and collaborator of mine, the New York-based director Andy Goldberg, came to the reading, and afterward we were talking. He said, ‘I always thought a one-man version of Macbeth set in a psychiatric hospital would be great.’ That idea got us both suddenly excited, so we took it to Alan, and he went for it.”

They were preaching to the converted. The first Shakespeare that Mr. Cumming ever read was Macbeth—plus, he hails from Aberfeldy, in Perthshire, Scotland, where the play’s place names (Bertram Woods, Dunsinane) are a hop, skip and jump from home. Such a contagious kinship to the characters almost insisted he play them all.

“You kinda have to see the show to see what Alan is doing—it’s incredibly fluid and subtle,” said Mr. Tiffany of the multitasking. “When we first meet him, he’s just arrived at the psychiatric hospital. Then, he starts to inhabit the characters and stories of Macbeth. As the production progresses, the reason he’s doing that becomes clear. There are no costume changes, no props as such. He’s trapped in this room.”

This is not Mssrs. Tiffany and Cumming’s first time at the gender-bending rodeo. Three years ago to the day of the Macbeth opening here, their National Theatre of Scotland version of The Bacchae bowed at the Rose and was a pretty rippin’ go at Euripides.

As Dionysus, that overheated hedonist and God of Good Times, Mr. Cumming made a rock-star entrance—handcuffed, dangling upside down by his ankles from the flies at the top of the theatre, wearing a kilt (and you know the old rumor about kilts).

Mr. Tiffany also tossed him the perfect one-liner when Dionysus overreacts and incinerates a whole set in a pique: “Too much?” he asks as an afterthought. (Fire marshals monitored the scene carefully, and a flash of heat warmed audience faces.)

Startling the audience is a specialty with Mr. Tiffany. In Black Watch, his stunner about a Scottish Army regiment in Iraq, soldiers make their entrance by ripping their way through a pub pool table. It won 22 awards, including an Olivier for his direction.

One of the people Mr. Tiffany specifically thanked in his Tony acceptance speech was Steven Hoggett, who, billed as “Associate Director,” kept the Black Watch cast in a sweaty state of perpetual motion with marches and military drills. Once gives him credit for “Movement,” and Peter and the Starcatcher calls him “Choreographer.”

“I’ve known Steven for 25 years,” said Mr. Tiffany. “Our kind of collaboration in life and work has been sustaining in so many inspirational and amazing ways. He’s incredible. His form of choreography and movement is, I think, truly innovative.

“Theater is so much more than just walking into an auditorium and sitting down and letting the curtain go up. It can be anything and anywhere, and I think we, as theater-makers, should start celebrating the ‘liveness’ of our form. Theater starts from the moment someone has the idea to go see a performance. Then, it’s about where to buy the ticket. It’s about how much that ticket is. It’s about what the marketing is, what the publicity is. It’s about where the nearest bar is to get a drink afterwards. Theater is a social experience from the first moment you hear about the possibility of going, and we need to celebrate every single element of that social experience. If that involves letting an audience go on stage during a big music session and have a drink from the set bar—and if that makes them more alert to the possibility of what that story might be or what theater can be—that excites me.”

The unifying theme of Mr. Tiffany’s shows is that they don’t unify at all. “They’re incredibly disparate,” he pointed out with some justified pride. “Theatre is a medium that can’t be digitalized. You actually have to buy a ticket and come into a space to see what we do. We really have to explore and exploit that sense of live experience.”

Seating was on the sidelines for Black Watch, bracing audiences for some theater different from what they’re used to. With Once, they go on stage and knock back a few. Macbeth has a comparable thing going. “I really like playing with audiences’ expectations, with their experience of what the event is,” Mr. Tiffany admitted. “Theater-makers should create work that is unique, that can only exist for an audience. Always, always, always think about your audience. The only thing you’re doing it for is an audience. Develop a generosity of storytelling and a desire to connect.”

editorial@observer.com

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Andrew Garfield, both Tony nominees for 'Death of a Salesman.' (Getty Images)

The Tony nominations were released this morning, and the musical film adaptation Once leads the field with 11 nominations; it's nominated for Best Musical alongside Newsies, Nice Work If You Can Get It, and Leap of Faith. The nominees for Best Play include Clybourne Park (a Pultizer-winning play), Other Desert Cities, Peter and the Starcatcher, and Venus in Fur. Among the races to watch are Best Performance by an Actor in a Play--wherein Philip Seymour Hoffman, James Earl Jones, Frank Langella, John Lithgow, and James Corden (of the hit One Man, Two Guvnors) square off--and Best Costume Design of a Musical--where Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark received one of its two nominations, for the late costumer Eiko Ishioka. Hugh Jackman and Actors' Equity are to receive special awards.

Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti in 'Once.' (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Before reckoning with the new, exceedingly lovely, and disappointingly thin Broadway musical Once, which opened Sunday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, let us first discuss what might be called the War Horse Insufficiency.

The symptoms of this malady are stunning stagecraft and a lack of compelling story or emotional richness, a visual display so creative and impressive that the theatergoer wants to believe the play or musical he’s seeing to be great, but with a book insufficient to live up to the production. War Horse, the British story of a boy and his beloved horse at the Vivian Beaumont, is its most prominent current example: gorgeous design, breathtaking puppetry, insipid story.

Once, which offers pretty, tuneful indie-folk songs, nontraditional, dynamic staging and choreography, and a series of smart, witty directorial flourishes, alas suffers from the War Horse Insufficiency. Everything about it is lovely; nothing about it is moving.

The story of two mildly depressed musicians in Dublin whose lives are changed by a weeklong romance, Once began its life as a 2006 Irish independent film that became a sleeper hit and won the Oscar for Best Original Song. Transformed into a stage musical by the director John Tiffany and choreographer Steven Hoggett, it was an off-Broadway success at New York Theater Workshop in the fall, leading to its current Broadway engagement.

Messrs. Tiffany and Hoggett are the team behind Black Watch, the fascinating and stunning  retelling of the history of a Scottish army regiment disbanded in 2006 after hundreds of years of history and recent service in the Iraq war. (Mr. Hoggett has also choreographed the angst-ridden pop-punk musical American Idiot and the gleefully silly Peter and the Starcatcher.) When it came to St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2007, Black Watch was a powerful production, both as a document of the war’s impact on the men fighting it and as a piece of stagecraft, integrating live action and video projections with highly choreographed movements that propelled their story forward.

In Once, Messrs. Tiffany and Hoggett again use innovative and interesting movement to help tell their story, and they do it on a welcoming Irish publike set by Bob Crowley that serves with little embellishment as the various settings of the play—a musical-instrument store, a vacuum-repair shop and so on. The actors in the play are also its musicians, and they sit with their instruments along the sides of the pub set when they’re not in a scene. As the audience enters, these musicians are jamming on stage; during intermission, audience members are invited to cross the footlights and order drinks from what is transformed into a real bar. The effect is to render the play, somewhat magically, as a tale told among friends over drinks, something that happened once.

It’s acted and sung by a splendid cast led by Steve Kazee as the Guy, as he’s called in the cast of characters, a sad, brooding, guitar-slinging songwriter living with his father above the family shop and left heartbroken by a girl who’s moved to New York, and Cristin Milioti as the Girl, serious and also sad, a Czech immigrant with a young daughter, an estranged husband and an abiding love of the piano. Individually, together or backed by supporting players from the group, they sound terrific singing and playing the songs written by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who starred in the initial film.

But for all these lovely performance elements, Once doesn’t succeed in elevating itself from an interesting evening into an engaging one. Its book, adapted by Enda Walsh from John Carney’s screenplay, never succeeds in making either of its protagonists human or compelling, in making you care about them. The Guy is a passive cipher, the Girl a collection of quirks. This makes their affair an intellectual exercise, rather than a passionate pairing. For the audience, there is no connection, no engagement.

It’s pretty to watch, but, for a romance, insufficient.

“At least twice during his new show, the virtuoso monologist Mike Daisey refers to himself as an actor. Twice more, he calls himself a storyteller. He is of course both things, but the descriptors miss the true impact of what he has accomplished in his powerful piece The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which opened Monday night at the Public Theater. As much as he is a performer, Mr. Daisey is also an investigative journalist, even, in the best sense, a muckraker.” —The Observer, reviewing that show, Oct. 24, 2011.

“I stand by my work … What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.” —Mike Daisey, posting to his blog, March 16, 2012.

Mike Daisey’s reputation was destroyed last weekend. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, meted out the destruction, but the real work of it was done by Mr. Daisey himself. Through hundreds or thousands of performances over the past several years, he has presented as fact his The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, purportedly an honest recounting of his visits to the factories in Shenzhen, China, where Apple products are made. “Tonight,” he would say near the end of his monologue, “we know the truth.”

But, it turned out, we didn’t. A China-based reporter for public radio’s Marketplace, rereporting a version of the monologue that aired in January on This American Life, revealed numerous falsehoods in Mr. Daisey’s story. The most troubling were the creations: people he claimed he’d met—a man disabled making iPads who’d never seen one in use until Mr. Daisey swiped on his own, a group of preteen workers—who didn’t actually exist but made for compelling moments in his performance.

As someone who was snookered, I’m angry about the snookering. But more than that, I’m angry about the damage Mr. Daisey has done to himself. I’m not convinced, as some commentators have argued, that what he says on stage need be as rigorously accurate as what appears in The Times. But I do believe that if it’s not, he may not actively present himself as a lone truth-teller, as he did. And I further believe that he cannot actively conspire to hide his evasions, as he did in misrepresenting himself to This American Life’s producers.

Now apologetic for those fact-checking lies but still defiant about his theatrical work, Mr. Daisey continues to insist that his factual manipulations are less important than the larger points he is persuasively conveying. He seems unaware that he has in fact hurt that greater cause, by allowing his opponents to dismiss his work, and that he’s damaging not only his own credibility but that of advocacy theater.

editorial@observer.com

It's 2 a.m. and you awake with a jerk, alone in your fully lit apartment and still on the couch. On TV, the credits of some movie you've already seen a billion times are scrolling by. It feels like rock bottom. And we know, because we're just like you: single.

Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to Once [starting @ 11 p.m. on @Max]

Why we’ll try to stay up and watch it: As if we needed more proof that sometimes the best movies are the most simple, here’s Once. John Carney’s minimalist tale of unrequited love is so sparse and uncluttered (it barely hits 85 minutes with credits) that the mere thought of it working seems like a put-on—back in the summer of 2007 when Once was the indie belle-of-the-ball and you couldn’t walk three feet without someone saying how good it was, we bristled at the prospect of seeing a “musical” fronted by an Irish folk singer. Cut to December of that year when we finally got it from Netflix and … well, let’s just say we needed to find an extra box of Kleenex. Tears! Once doesn’t just wear out your heart muscles, it sticks with your soul like a hearty breakfast.

Clearly, the reason for the successes here lies within chemistry. Obviously when you’re dealing with films about relationships, the spark produced between the two leads is of utmost importance. (Part of the reason why (500) Days of Summer doesn’t congeal as it should is because you never get the idea that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel could be anything other than friends.) In Once, the Guy and the Girl—no names allowed, which helps add to the simplicity of the story—are played by lead singer of the Frames, Glen Hansard, and Czechoslovakian singer-songwriter Marketa Iglova, and the electricity flying between them is impossible to resist. Don’t think it doesn’t hurt us now to know that the real-life couple—they got together post-Once, natch—has broken up. We thought those kooky kids were going to make it!

When we’ll probably fall asleep: While we could easily stay awake until the tearful conclusion, we’re not sure we want to cry that much before we go to sleep. So! Instead, we’ll punch out a bit earlier, around midnight, 60 minutes in, when the Guy and Girl record the song “When Your Mind’s Made Up” at a studio to the delight of even the beleaguered engineer. It’s a clichéd moment, sure, but it’s also really a good song! And that’s the sneaky thing about Once: It shouldn’t be anything all that special, and yet it really is. Where are those tissues again?

While precious little is known about Mr. Eastwood's Gran Torino, the score is available online over at the Warner Brothers awards site--a site with which we've become mildly obsessed. Buried at the bottom of that page is a song called "Gran Torino", written by Mr. Eastwood, Mr. Cullum, Kyle Eastwood (Clint's son, who also co-wrote the entire score) and Michael Stevens (the other co-writer of the score). It's a slow and meditative number at first; all lilting piano notes and cymbal brushes. So far, so good. But then Mr. Eastwood begins singing with a voice that reminds us of Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Christian Bale-as-Batman in The Dark Knight. (We assure you, it's not as awesome as that sounds.) Hearing Mr. Eastwood growl his way through rudimentary lyrics like "gentle now, the tender breeze blows, whispers through my Gran Torino" is just about as terrible as you'd imagine.

Thankfully for Clint's sake, he only sings the first verse. When Mr. Cullum starts in verse two, the song actually starts to sound like a real song and not some spoof. So here's hoping for a Best Original Song nomination for Mr. Eastwood and a subsequent performance at the Academy Awards. At the very least, hearing "Gran Torino" performed live will be more exciting than watching Peter Gabriel.

It’s fitting then that Hansard and Irglová have found a home for their music where sap can be the coin of the realm. That would be Broadway. Yup, according to the Los Angeles Times (via Stereogum), Tony-award-winning producers Jeff Sine, Fred Zollo, and John Hart Jr., have purchased the theater rights to Once, and the trio has every intention of bringing the musical to Broadway during the 2010-11 season. "In a landscape where the American musical must evolve, Once provides a wonderful, unique opportunity," Hart told broadwayworld.com. “The film was shot modestly, on a shoe-string budget and managed to capture the hearts of fans around the world, wildly exceeding all critical and box office expectations,” Zollo goes on. “It did so, because it invited its audience into the process of artists making music and did not stoop to melodrama.” Well… maybe a little stooping.

The project’s creative personnel are still very much a mystery, though Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick are rumored to be involved. Anyway, we're sure you'll be hearing more. For now, you can catch Hansard and Irglová, performing as The Swell Season, on tour this coming November… that is, if you happen to be in western Europe.

Tuesday: Top Gun
Remember when Tom Cruise was a lovable mega star, and not quite such a sideshow freak? We do! Top Gun was Mr. Cruise's first smash hit at the box office and it's still righteously awesome. The action! The music! The motorcycle! The volleyball! With apologies to John McCain, Mr. Cruise will always be the original Maverick. [HBO Family, 3:20 a.m.]

Wednesday: Once
Once is such a simple and intimate movie that we can hardly believe how powerful it is. Easily one of our favorites from 2007, John Carney's film about an Irish busker (Glen Hansard) and his vacuum toting soul mate (Marketa Irglova) is perfect. Most great films are lucky to have one moment that actually elicits chills from audience members. Once has two: the first performance of Oscar-winning "Falling Slowly" and the film's denouement, an act of perfect romantic selflessness. Believe us: Once is that good. [HBO Zone, 12:10 p.m.]

Thursday: Life on Mars
There is entirely too much television to watch on Thursday nights! This week alone brings new episodes of Grey's Anatomy and The Office, the season premiere of CSI and the series premiere of Kath and Kim. Not to mention Weekend Update Thursday, the first primetime Saturday Night Live election special. So with all that to catch live, we'll happily DVR Life on Mars. Based on the BCC series of the same name, Mars follows a New York City cop (Jason O'Mara) who, after getting hit by a car, time warps back to 1973. The original pilot by David E. Kelley was scrapped and much of the show has been recast, so our hopes aren't entirely high. Still, any chance we get to see Michael Imperioli, forever Christopher Moltisanti, is one we'll gladly take. Check out his ridiculous facial hair! We're sold. [ABC, 10 p.m.]

Friday: The Manchurian Candidate
Dark, bizarre, creepy and incredibly ahead of its time, John Frankenheimer's signature film is just as good now as it was when we first saw it. Of course, Angela Lansbury steals the show, while Frank Sinatra yeomanly plays his part of the confused hero. However, we'll take Laurence Harvey over both of them. Mr. Harvey's Raymond Shaw is ... the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being we've ever known. [Encore Drama, 7 a.m.]