Counting Tony Awards With Counting Crows

I'll go into detail about the Tony awards telecast in my next column, but for now I'll say that the winners in all the major categories were exactly as predicted, which was a good thing in the case of the volcanic Patti LuPone. (By the way, she should have won another award just for her heart-stopping performance of "Everything's Coming Up Roses" on the Tonys and then another one for her fiery acceptance speech. No one can tell an orchestra to shut up with the charm of this little titan.) At the after party at Rockefeller Plaza, I ran up to Adam Duritz from Counting Crows while flailing my arm cast (from a bike mishap) and saying, "Look! I fisted Stew!" Nicely enough, he not only didn't twist my hand in horror, he even laughed a little. Duritz told me he's indeed close with the Passing Strange guy and in fact loves all theater because rock, which also involves being in the moment, is a vaguely similar proposition. "Oh, yeah," I cracked, "I just saw Axl Rose at Macbeth. Not surprisingly, he loved it." Just then, an out-of-drag drag queen saved Duritz from more of my material by cornering me to say that at the Tony rehearsal, LuPone couldn't hear the orchestra well enough, so she had them moved way down to the pit. A great idea; once you have those people closer, it's much easier to tell them to shut up. So give the woman...a hand?