It's Tony time

Nominations for the 62nd annual Tony Awards will be announced bright and early Tuesday morning in Manhattan.  David Hyde Pierce, the Tony-winning star of Curtains and TV's long-running Frasier, and Sara  Ramirez, who won a Tony for Spamalot and is now a Grey's Anatomy star, will do the honors. And I'll be among the gaggle of media types watching it all unfold live.

I've been seeing this spring's crop of Broadway shows since last Wednesday, so I know that certain nominations are sure things.  Lincoln Center Theater's glorious revival of South Pacific will be the front-runner for best revival of a musical.  Opera star Paulo Szot will be nominated as best actor in a musical -- and should win.  He's from the Errol Flynn-Kevin Kline school of handsome leading men, his acting is of a piece with the other performances in the show (terrific), and when he sings This Nearly Was Mine, he earns a mad chorus of "bravos" for his thrilling show-stopper (if Szot doesn't give you chills, check to see if you have a pulse).  His slender blonde costar, Kelli O'Hara, will get a best actress in a musical nod (deservedly so -- she's wonderful).  But Patti LuPone is as close to a sure thing as you can get in that category.  Her Mama Rose in the revival of Gypsy is a magnificent, force-of-nature star performance.  She gets "bravos" and a standing "o" after Rose's Turn.

As for plays, Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County has little competition for the best play Tony.  If you know Letts' work (Bug, Killer Joe), imagine that crossbred with Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, and you get a hint of what Letts' darkly funny, disturbing, long family drama is about.  Deanna Dunagan, who plays the clan's dying, pill-popping, tart-tongued matriarch Violet, is a shoo-in for a best actress nomination (and will probably win).  But Amy Morton, a fellow Steppenwolf company member who plays Violet's eldest daughter, is mesmerizingly good too.

The season's new musicals are all over the place, from the colorful spoofiness of Cry-Baby to the campy Xanadu to the old-fashioned A Catered Affair to the intriguing, rock-driven Passing Strange.  A disappointing Young Frankenstein proves that, despite all the roiling storms onstage, lightning (ala The Producers) didn't strike twice for Mel Brooks.  I'm betting that Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights, a joyous musical about people from different Latino cultures living and loving in New York's Washington Heights neighborhood, is going to get multiple nominations -- and quite probably, the win.