Picking the winners of a less-than-stellar season

June 9, 2013 at 12:00a.m.

By Linda Winer

Newsday

NEW YORK

I just finished filling out my ballot for tonight’s 67th Annual Tony Awards. This was really hard. In many of the categories, I can’t decide because — soul-crushing confession — there wasn’t much to love on Broadway this year. The 2012-13 season — artistically and, as we recently learned, financially — was busy but mostly lightweight and frequently lame.

Then there are the painfully tough categories — best actor in a play, featured actor in a play, set design of a play — where having to choose one from such extraordinary achievements made the dartboard selection technique seem awfully appealing.

Best Actor

Should we reward Tom Hanks for his major triumph in “Lucky Guy,” daring to threaten his status as Hollywood royalty with an exposed Broadway debut and a difficult new play left unfinished when playwright Nora Ephron died? What about Nathan Lane, who, despite his two Tonys for musical comedies, hasn’t been nominated in more than a decade and has never showed the mature tragic/comic depths that he does in “The Nance”?

Then there is Tracy Letts, whose unforgettable George in “Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” changed the electrical charge around the playwright’s beta-dog husband. Can Broadway vote Letts over beloved Hanks or Lane, especially when “Virginia Woolf” closed months ago?

Best Musical

Best musical is hard to pick, too, but for less inspiring reasons. The season had a respectable 15 musicals including a healthy-looking nine new ones. But both premieres and revivals have been in a creative safety zone of conventional and family entertainment. After seasons aimed at hip, adult or multicultural audiences with edgy musical appetites, this year has been resolutely in the pale middle-of-the-road.

Yes, the season’s box-office hits — “Kinky Boots” and “Matilda: The Musical” — would seem to have some cutting-edge credentials. But “Kinky Boots,” despite the title and Cyndi Lauper’s likable score, is a sentimental feel-good entertainment about drag queens saving a shoe factory. “Matilda,” adapted from Roald Dahl’s 1988 children’s novel, does have a dark side to its depiction of a little-girl genius in a world of grown-up meanies. But this is still a kids show with cartoon cruelty.

Best play

It’s thrilling that music-driven Broadway had a record 26 plays, that 14 were new and, unlike previous seasons full of English voices, almost all were by Americans. I’ll be fine if “Lucky Guy,” Richard Greenberg’s “The Assembled Parties” or Christopher Durang’s “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” is named best play.

Yes, both Greenberg and Durang have written better works in their long, prolific careers. But these were mostly lived Off-Broadway, and these lifelong dramatists should have their showcases in the center of the commercial theater.

Also, Ephron’s play, produced posthumously under great stress, turned out to be a tremendously effective character study and love letter to the vanishing world of tabloid journalism.