NEW YORK -- You'd scarcely know times are hard from the crowds thronging around Times Square and into Broadway theaters for the Great White Way's version of a stimulus package.

Shows that opened during the 2008-2009 season, which officially ended a week ago, grossed more than $943 million. That gross is up $6 million from the year before, in part due to higher ticket prices, although attendance dipped by 120,000, with 12.1 million tickets sold this season.

The trade group the Broadway League tallied 10 new musicals, eight new plays, four musical revivals, 16 play revivals and five special performances, for a total of 43 shows -- the most since the 50 that opened during the 1982-83 season. When times are tough, the statistics suggest, we yearn more than ever for escape.

After a grim January with numerous closings, Broadway has come bounding back with a few new musicals and lots of small-cast plays. The television exposure from next Sunday's Tony Awards should further fatten the box-office take for shows like Billy Elliot, God of Carnage, Next to Normal and West Side Story.

Here's a look at seven shows vying for honors at the 63rd annual Tonys, which will be broadcast 8 to 11 p.m. June 7 on CBS.

Billy Elliot, Imperial Theatre, 249 W. 45th St.; $41.50-$136.50; Telecharge: YouTube superstar Susan Boyle is older than the aggregate age of all three young actor-dancers who alternate in the title role of Broadway's Billy Elliot. But the heartstrings that get tugged as we watch the real-life Boyle and the fictional Billy are remarkably similar: An ordinary person defies expectations and finds deliverance through a life-changing artistic passion.

The 2000 movie and the 2005 stage musical version of Billy Elliot, both directed by Stephen Daldry and written by Lee Hall, tell the Cinderfella story of the 11-year-old son of a striking British miner. Billy (played by dynamic dancers Trent Kowalik, David Alvarez and Kiril Kulish, who share a Tony nomination) stumbles into a less-than-impressive ballet class only to discover that dance does for him what boxing couldn't. It becomes a transcendent expression of his soul, something he can articulate only through movement. Billy's artsy aspirations put him at odds with his working-class clan and community, though the story leads to the self-affirming ending that any modern fairy-tale demands.

Elton John composed the show's stirring score, his best theater work yet. Daldry's direction is -- not surprisingly, but most effectively -- cinematic. Peter Darling's choreography embraces everything from balletic power and grace (when the younger and older versions of Billy dance together, they're glorious) to Broadway razzle-dazzle. For this one, the best musical Tony is a lock.

God of Carnage, Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St.; $66.50-$116.50; Telecharge: While certainly not the emperor's new clothes (it is likely to cart home the best play Tony), Yasmina Reza's withering small-cast comedy is no Art, either. It is both a demonstration of how quickly seemingly reasonable people can turn savage and an excuse for a quartet of star turns. Not that the actors in the Tony-nominated cast -- Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden -- need an excuse to dip into their take-no-prisoners bag of acting tricks.

The four actors play parents brought together after one kid bashes another with a stick, wrecking two teeth. Pretty white tulips adorn the chic Brooklyn home of the victim's parents (Harden and Gandolfini), and at first the conversation between them and the perpetrator's folks (Daniels and Davis) is carefully civil -- that is, whenever Daniels' scorched-earth attorney manages to get off his cellphone long enough to converse with the humans occupying the same space. Eventually, the tulips wind up all over the stage, as does an oh-so-recently consumed clafouti, which Davis uses as fuel for what must be one of the more memorable projectile vomiting scenes in Broadway history. Ugh.

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