NEW YORK -- Good plays found a home on Broadway this season, though on this Sunday before the 62nd annual Tony Awards, not so many of them are still open for business.

Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, the revivals of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming and William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba and Cyrano de Bergerac -- all yielded Tony nominations, and all are gone.

But the best play of all? It's still around. Though it has nominal competition from Patrick Barlow's The 39 Steps, The Seafarer and Rock 'n' Roll, Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County is the play to beat this year.

Though not drawing huge audiences -- on Broadway, only musicals do -- Letts' riveting play is a testament to two things: the virtues of the ambitious, well-constructed, old-fashioned family drama, and the rich acting to be mined from performers who have worked together for many years, as is the case with this cast full of actors from Chicago's famous Steppenwolf Theatre.

On the new musical side, the two top Tony contenders are anything but traditional or formulaic: In the Heights, an ebullient show with a score full of Latino and hip-hop sounds; and Passing Strange, a rock-driven piece about a young black man's journey through life and love. Each of the season's two best musical revivals, a standard-setting Gypsy and an exquisite South Pacific, would be a clear-cut Tony winner in a season when they weren't competing with each other.

Here's a look at nine Broadway shows you'll see represented when the Tonys are handed out at Radio City Music Hall next Sunday. Buy tickets via Telecharge at 1-800-432-7250 or www.telecharge.com, Ticketmaster at 1-800-755-4000 or www.ticketmaster.com, or contact the Roundabout Theatre Company as indicated.

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, Music Box Theatre, 239 W. 45th St.; $76.50-$102.50; Telecharge: Letts, a member of Chicago's groundbreaking Steppenwolf Theatre Company, is an incendiary actor-playwright whose darkly comic successes include Killer Joe and Bug. August: Osage County, an engrossing drama about a dysfunctional Oklahoma family, is marbled with that same dark humor. But its craft, scope and obvious progenitors -- watching it you cannot help thinking about Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night -- helped elevate the play to this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Staggering toward death, Violet Weston (Deanna Dunagan) -- cancer-stricken, pill-popping and vituperative to the bone -- seems determined to inflict soul-deep wounds on as many members of her family as possible. Her spirit-crushing sister, Mattie Fae (Rondi Reed); her daughters Barbara (Amy Morton), Ivy (Sally Murphy) and Karen (Mariann Mayberry); her pot-smoking sexpot of a young granddaughter Jean (Molly Ranson) all fall victim to her dagger of a tongue. During this family's own long journey into night, people laugh, rant, weep, display crushing cruelty and pitiable vulnerability. August: Osage County is a gripping, grand exploration of the ties that bind -- and sometimes strangle.

CRY-BABY, Marquis Theatre, 1535 Broadway; $35-$120; Ticketmaster:Hairspray it isn't. The second Broadway musical based on a John Waters movie, Cry-Baby isn't nearly as entertaining as either its 1990 source material or the rollicking stage hit that Hairspray became. With a script by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan (who won a Tony for their Hairspray book) and a score by Daily Show writer David Javerbaum and Fountains of Wayne rocker Adam Schlesinger, Cry-Baby confirms that turning movies into musicals is far from a sure thing (see Young Frankenstein below).

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