Carbonell Cold Shoulder

Well, maybe it does. The Actors' Playhouse production of Mark Hollmann's Urinetown, from 2001, is up for a bunch of musical awards this year — Best Musical; Best Director of a Musical; Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress in a Musical; Best Musical Direction;Best Choreography; and Best Costume Design — which is as it should be. Urinetown was a hell of a show. But the competition was not exactly stiff. If Urinetown doesn't sweep the musical categories, we'll know SoFla's arbiters of theatrical taste are even crazier than we suspected.

And we suspect they are crazy indeed. The big winners so far this year are Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend, with 11 nominations, and Mitch Leigh's Man of La Mancha, with 10. (Urinetown and Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore are tied for third, with nine apiece.) There's nothing quite like the feeling of hopeless shame that accompanies the realization that your region's finest contribution to American culture in a given year might have been a rehash of a 56-year-old musical that wasn't even deep when it came out.

The Boy Friend is a spectacularly successful musical, a skillful piece of work bordering on delightful. It's also the least challenging thing a person can hope to stick on a stage, and its purpose is purely to entertain. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But the best theater should entertain an audience through ruthlessly questioning, challenging, and surprising them at the same time. This should be obvious, but it apparently needs to be said. If it didn't, those who produced Man of La Mancha for the 10 millionth time would not be looking at 10 possible Carbonell Awards this year — rather, they'd have been disqualified due to excessive conservatism. La Mancha dates from 1965 and has better music than The Boy Friend, but the two are emotionally and intellectually identical: shows that lazily tug your heartstrings while politely asking you to tap your foot.

And so it is that the three bravest and, after Animals & Plants, best shows of the year — 9 Parts of Desire, Thom Paine, and The Faith Healer — are underrepresented or ignored altogether. 9 Parts was a one-woman show in which Pilar Uribe played a slew of mostly tragic Iraqi women from across recent history; Thom Paine was a one-man show in which Todd Allen Durkin played a free-associating neurotic who, at one point, called an audience member a cunt; and The Faith Healer was an ensemble show about the way small compromises and bad faith can lead to the death of love. All three were difficult to watch. All three cost you something. And all three had the power to re-enfranchise their audiences as human beings, to explore the scary recesses of the human experience from which we all shy away in any other context.

These shows were rewarded thusly: Uribe got a nod for Best Actress, while Stephen G. Anthony and Ken Clement both received acting nominations for The Faith Healer. Thom Paine got nothing, even though Durkin's performance easily outstripped his work in Lieutenant. Meanwhile, conventionally dramatic Talk Radio is up for five awards, a good production of the now-overdone Glengarry Glen Ross is up for four, and a superficial dialectic on race relations called A House with No Walls is up for three.