Kevin Spacey Will Host The 2017 Tony Awards

The host of the 2017 Tony Awards will be Kevin Spacey: a solid, classy crossover-theater-person choice in the tradition of Angela Lansbury, who memorably hosted the awards in the late 1980s. The choice is not as out-of-left-field as it may seem to those who know the actor mainly from his work on House of Cards or from his film career, which netted him two Oscars in the 1990s. Spacey is a superb theater actor with a long history on the Great White Way. He made his Broadway debut in 1982, playing Liv Ullman’s dying son in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. He was the dissolute James Tyrone Jr. in a 1986 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (starring Jack Lemmon), and returned to play the same character in a 2007 revival of O’Neill’s sequel, A Moon for the Misbegotten; in between, he won a 1991 Tony for Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers and anchored a 1999 revival of The Iceman Cometh. For 12 years, starting in 2003, he served as the artistic director of London’s venerable Old Vic Theatre Company.

Spacey is charming, elegant and, when he wants to be, funny as hell, which should serve him nicely.