NEW YORK -- Though a late surge in plays helped Broadway weather the recession and take in more than $943 million during the 2008-2009 season, musicals are what keeps box offices fat. So musicals, with their easy-to-showcase and time-polished numbers, will again dominate Broadway's annual amalgam of awards show and infomercial, better known as the 63rd annual Tony Awards.

The splashy if perennially ratings-anemic Tonys unfold from 8 to 11 p.m. Sunday at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall. How I Met Your Mother star Neil Patrick Harris, a TV veteran with Broadway cred, is hosting the CBS telecast, which will try to turn viewers into ticket buyers by giving them little tastes of big musicals -- including a few from seasons past.

Dolly Parton, a nominee for best score, will sing with the cast of 9 to 5: The Musical, even though the show was snubbed for a best-musical nod. Elton John will help deliver his score from Billy Elliot, which earned a competition-leading 15 nominations and is favored to win best musical. No less than four leading actors from different Jersey Boys companies will make like Frankie Valli -- though it's been three years since Jersey Boys won the best-musical Tony. And both the touring Legally Blonde and a now-vintage Mamma Mia! will have a musical presence on the show.

And amid all that marketing, some awards will be handed out.

The nominees for the 63rd annual Tonys include two South Florida-raised actors who have been there before. Not that Raúl Esparza (a four-time nominee) and Marc Kudisch (this is his third nomination) expect to win this time either.

Esparza is nominated as best leading actor in a play for his performance opposite (in succession) Jeremy Piven, Norbert Leo Butz and William H. Macy in the revival of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow.

Though he's happy about his nomination, Esparza agrees with the oddsmakers that Geoffrey Rush is a shoo-in to take the Tony for his flamboyant performance in Exit the King.

The former Miamian has already moved on to his next leading role, beginning previews in Twelfth Night opposite Anne Hathaway at Central Park's Delacorte Theater on Wednesday. What thrills him most about this year's Tony nomination is that with it, he ties a record held by actor Boyd Gaines. Both have been nominated for all four performance Tonys an actor can receive -- leading and featured roles in both plays and musicals -- though Esparza did it in six years versus 20 for Gaines.

Kudisch, a big-voiced, deftly comic actor who earned his third Tony nod for playing the unapologetically sexist boss Franklin Hart Jr. in 9 to 5, professes surprise and indifference about his nomination.

'I don't effin' care. I seriously don't,'' says Kudisch, who grew up in Plantation and got his training at Florida Atlantic University. ``At the end of the day, if you allow that to define what you're doing, you'll put your energies in the wrong place. . . . Some of the best stuff hasn't been nominated for anything.''

True enough.

NOT NOMINATED

Among the overlooked: a glowingly reviewed Kristin Scott Thomas for The Seagull, Daniel Radcliffe for his Broadway debut in the buzzed-about Equus, director Arthur Laurents for his reconceived West Side Story.

A nomination is great, winning even better, but it's clear that showbiz politics, sentiment and a particular season's playing field factor into the Tonys as much as they do into every awards show. Esparza absorbed that painful lesson in 2007, when most pundits predicted he'd win the Tony for his much-honored performance as Bobby in the revival of Company -- yet he lost to David Hyde Pierce for that actor's sly comic work in Curtains.

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