2009 Tony Awards: What will win, and why?

"Two-thirds of that hoary cliche about Broadway being hospitable only to spectacle, songs and stars was kicked out of Times Square this season, as a raft of high-quality, celebrity-laden revivals of serious plays eclipsed the season's mostly mediocre crop of new and revived musicals.

This season's profusion of what one might call boutique, high-end productions was partly a consequence of the economic times. Assuming a familiar name -- a Geoffrey Rush, a James Gandolfini, a Jane Fonda -- has been persuaded to sign up at reasonable cost, it's relatively cheap for Broadway producers to map out a modestly profitable way to do a limited run of a prestige title and snag a few ego-enhancing Tony nominations therewith. Heck, such good works can pay off. This month, Broadway producer Rocco Landesman was nominated to chair the National Endowment for the Arts. That would have been unthinkable back in the early 1990s, when all the serious plays were going off-Broadway.

The revivals this year were a strange crop. "Guys and Dolls" was mostly terrible -- overwrought, miscast, cold, awkward. Better than the critical consensus, "West Side Story" was beautifully sung and, in the high school dance from Act One, offered the single most thrilling dance number on Broadway all season. And I thought the controversial decision to include Spanish language in the show was a fine idea -- the show just needed the nerve to take it to its logical fruition. But it was torpedoed by the total lack of sexual chemistry between the two leads, which does not a truly great "West Side Story" allow.

"Hair" is the show likely to take the musical revival prize. And, indeed, it is a very lively and musically rich restaging of a beloved theatrical icon. But it is compromised by anachronisms. On the night I saw the show, I sat behind James Lipton ("Inside the Actors Studio") and watched hippie after hippie arrive at his seat, recognize him and fawn like a flower child with an uncanny sense of the power structure of the future. It summed up the show -- a zestful, well-crafted and occasionally moving revival, but one with a very clear sense of capitalist realities.

Is there a great new play this year? "33 Variations" was consistently interesting but never a fully visceral experience. "Impressionism" was a disaster. And I find it hard to see Horton Foote's very fine "Dividing the Estate," which I first saw in Cleveland years ago, as a new play anywhere outside of the island of Manhattan. But in Yasmina Reza's "God of Carnage," there is at last a very good play, a delicious deconstruction of American parenting, marriage and morality -- all in 90 minutes. All with a quartet of the juiciest performances under Matthew Warchus' red-hot direction. All with plenty of laughs.

In a different year, maybe someone would have turned it into a musical."