More interested in spiritual rebirth than the usual romance that fuels musicals, with a score more attuned to British folk melodies than Tin Pan Alley hits, you can understand why 1991’s underrated The Secret Garden is rarely revived these days.

And then there is the casting challenge of its main character, 12-year-old Mary Lennox, the suddenly orphaned tot saddled with justifiable melancholy and a number of difficult, rangy songs.

The former did not faze Caldwell Theatre artistic director Clive Cholerton, who had already prepared its audiences for the unconventional by leading off the Boca Raton company’s Broadway Concert Series with several shows by Stephen Sondheim. As to the latter, he simply lucked out, when Melissa Minyard, the series’ perennial leading lady, suggested that her daughter Catherine could handle the role.

Boy, can she, as the audience at Friday’s opening performance of an all-too-brief weekend run quickly realized. The remarkably poised youngster, refreshingly absent of professional training mannerisms yet possessing an assured vocal delivery style, helped this become one of the most accomplished concerts in the series’ brief history.

The show, based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s enduring, metaphor and life lesson-laden children’s novel from 1911, was created by an all-female creative team largely outside the Broadway mainstream. Composer Lucy Simon cobbled her first theater score from folk and pop idioms, with touches of the exotic sounds of India, married to simple, unforced poetry by Marsha Norman in her debut as a lyricist.

It is the saga of Mary Lennox, whose parents and friends die abruptly in a cholera epidemic. So she is shipped off to live with her Uncle Archie, a hunchback hermit having his own problems adjusting to the death of his wife in childbirth. What’s worse, little Mary reminds Archie of his dead wife, Lily (played by the elder Minyard, who mostly wafts through the proceedings as a ghostly apparition).

If the show’s original Broadway staging had a failing, it was that it was unnecessarily cluttered with ghost figures. Cholerton’s music stands-and-microphones concert cuts back on the spectral images, erring on the side of clarity.

Whether or not he chose The Secret Garden to allow Wayne LeGette a third opportunity to take on a role closely associated with Mandy Patinkin, the area performer is a standout as Archibald Craven, with several opportunities to apply his sweet quirky upper register sound. Shane Tanner came off a tad too much like The Addams’ Family’s Lurch for my taste as Archie’s evil brother, but he came on strong in the male-male duet with LeGette, In Lily’s Eyes, arguably the score’s best number.

Other standouts in the 17-member cast include Amy Miller Brennan as spunky chambermaid Martha and John Debkowski as her brother Dickon, the charismatic gardener with a rock star manner.

Caryl Ginsburg Fantel serves as music director and sole accompanist on keyboard, handling both with uncanny ease. Sean Lawson again supplies the scene-and-tone-setting photographic projections, moody black-and-white shots until the title garden is eventually revealed in Technicolor.

The Caldwell has had a very good, comeback season, extended now to include another winning Broadway concert.

THE SECRET GARDEN, Caldwell Theatre Company, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, May 22. Tickets: $25-$35. Call: (561) 241-7432.

Whether or not the pen is truly mightier than the sword, playwright Carter W. Lewis is out to prove in his enigmatically titled The Cha-Cha of a Camel Spider that slam poetry can trump a mercenary private army.

If that sounds like an unlikely match-up, then you are grasping the surreal quality of this darkly comic tale, which seems headed towards a rant against the Blackwaters of the world, then takes a distinct left turn to demonstrate the transporting power of art.

Instead of political discourse, Lewis turns out to be interested in matters of the heart, even if the most prominent heart in the play happens to be artificial. Confused yet? Oh, just head to Florida Stage, buckle your seat belt and go along for the ride.

The theatrical odyssey begins in the headquarters offices of “e,” a corporate army training facility. There Loretta Harahan (Laura Turnbull) and her daughter Bethany (Elizabeth Birkenmeier) have broken in and hacked into the company’s computers, hoping to gain the death benefits they are owed for Loretta’s husband, a high-ranking “e” officer killed by “friendly fire” from his own operatives.

Stack and Denny (Todd Allen Durkin and Eric Mendenhall), the hit men who did in Hanrahan in Kandahar, Afghanistan, have since been demoted to stateside security guards. Between grousing jags, they catch Bethany and abduct her to a greenhouse -- impressively realized by scenic designer Victor A. Becker -- that is rapidly gong to seed.

There, Bethany attracts yet another intriguing character, a wisecracking Muslim cab driver named Ahmad Ahmadazai -- a moniker guaranteed to be mangled -- who may actually be dead. (Don’t ask, just go with it.) As played with sly comic timing by Antonio Amadeo, the character and the performer all but steal the show.

There is more to the plot, but much of it should remain a surprise, as Lewis leads us a few cha-cha steps away from reality. Clarity is not the strength of the play’s resolution, but then you get the feeling that clarity was never intended. What is clear in the poetic resolution is that Birkenmeier pulls off a poetic performance art tour de force, which is best enjoyed when detached from any effort to ascribe meaning to it.

Over the past two decades, Florida Stage has produced a handful of Lewis’s works, all comedies, that have grown darker and increasingly more lyrical. As The Cha-Cha of a Camel Spider demonstrates, he has not lost his ability to surprise or entertain us.

THE CHA-CHA OF A CAMEL SPIDER, Florida Stage, Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, June 5. Tickets: $25-50. Call: (561) 585-3433 or (800) 514-3837.

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Forty-ish, plain-looking Maureen Folan is no pageant contestant and the Irish village of Leenane is no winner among places to live. Still, you will want to spend a couple of hours at Palm Beach Dramaworks’ heartbreaking and perversely comic production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

It comes from the warped, yet amusing mind of Martin McDonagh, who has churned out numerous grisly tales of life in coastal Connemara, County Galway. Beauty Queen was his first work to reach Broadway, in 1998, and is a good entry port into his world.

Poor, put-upon Maureen, a spinster with no prospects of romance, has devoted her life to attending the needs of her sour, manipulative mother, Mag, out of some misplaced sense of duty. They spend each day barking at one another, rocking-chair-bound Mag demanding her porridge or tea or other sustenance, pushing Maureen’s emotional buttons, and exasperated, weary Maureen pushing right back.

Maureen sees no way out of her predicament, until a distant acquaintance, Pato Dooley, returns briefly to Leenane from his home in London. Maureen not only reconnects with him at a party, she brings him back to her ramshackle house and takes him into her bed. Mag quickly perceives Pato as a threat to her status quo and she is correct, for he later writes Maureen, telling her about a job offer he has in Boston and inviting her to join him there.

Pato unwisely entrusts his not-too-bright brother Ray to deliver the letter into Maureen’s hands. Typical of McDonagh’s mordant humor is the scene where Ray arrives with the letter, impatiently considers leaving it with Mag, whose eyes dart around the room, feverishly eager to get her hands on the missive, suspicious of its contents and determined to intercept it.

The stakes keep increasing as Maureen and Mag turn their mental tug-of-war into a game that turns violent. With devilish skill, McDonagh plays with the audience, transferring our sympathies between the two women, as we begin to see how alike they really are.

Rugged Kevin Kelly lends worthy support as Pato, particularly when reciting his letter to Maureen, and Blake DeLong is even better as gregarious Ray. Still, the play belongs to the two women and director William Hayes gets a couple of stellar performances from a couple of actresses familiar to Dramaworks’ audiences.

Barbara Bradshaw (The Gin Game, The Chairs) turns her natural likeability inside out as Mag, a mother worth hating. Yet the actress delves deeper with the character and almost has up caring about the vindictive old biddy. Kati Brazda, so impressive as Josie Hogan in A Moon for the Misbegotten, plays a similar love-starved, no-longer-young woman here, with deceptive complexity.

For the final production at Dramaworks current cramped quarters, resident scenic designer Michael Amico again turns the space to his advantage, creating a drab, grimy, claustrophobic cottage, lit lugubriously by Ron Burns.

Palm Beach Dramaworks leans decidedly towards, well, dramas, with its stated mission of “theater to think about.” But with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Hayes and company show that one need not stop thinking -- and feeling -- at a well-written, expertly performed comedy.

THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 322 Banyan Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through June 19. Tickets: $47. Call: (561) 514-4042.

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The applications of that marvelous discovery we call electricity have afforded civilization many modern conveniences, but none more revolutionary than the vibrator. That is the tongue-in-cheek view of playwright Sarah Ruhl, who explores the sexual awakening of Victorian society thanks to a little stimulation “down there,” in her Tony-nominated In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play.

This amusing one-joke comedy, overstretched to a two-act play, considers the medical breakthrough of a Dr. Givings (a charmingly solicitous Jim Ballard), who has built up a tidy practice in upstate New York treating women for the catch-all complaint known as “hysteria.”

You see, he has a marvelous wooden box with knobs and dials, attached to a humming handset which he applies with care to his patients’, um, female nether parts. The result is an abrupt contraction that Givings calls a “paroxysm.” His patients have no idea what to call it; they just know they are eager to sign up for daily treatments.

Typical of the doctor’s clientele is Sabrina Daldry (Irene Adjan), who arrives with her perplexed, chauvinistic husband (Stephen G. Anthony) and is whisked into “the next room” -- Givings’ examination lab -- to get the vibrator special. The same goes for an effete artist named Leo Irving (Ricky Waugh), suffering from a similar malady. He is given the same treatment, though with a long cylindrical attachment to the handset, applied to his anus, if you get the picture.

Dr. Givings is so concerned for his patients, yet oblivious to the agitated unhappiness of his wife Catherine (Julie Kleiner), a new mother producing insufficient milk to nurse her baby. So she hires the Daldrys’ housekeeper (Renata Eastlick), who recently lost her own baby, as a wet nurse and quickly becomes resentful that her child takes so readily to the nurse.

Ruhl’s view of these Victorians is rather cartoonish and condescending. The women know nothing about sex, even as they keep popping out babies, and the men are content to keep them ignorant. Virtually every character misreads romantic signals and acts erratically on impulse, but oh, that vibrator machine, it is a marvel.

Ruhl, whose Dead Man’s Cell Phone and The Clean House have also been produced locally, knows how to create provocative situations, but then usually seems at a loss for a justifying point of view. Nevertheless, she is a critics’ darling and The Vibrator Play was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. At GableStage, Joe Adler does what he can to breathe life into the script and, despite this world of corsets and complex undergarments, he manages to find an opportunity for some nudity.

IN THE NEXT ROOM, or THE VIBRATOR PLAY, GableStage at the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Avenue, Coral Gables. Through June 12. Tickets: $37.50-$47.50. Call; (305) 445-1119.

Eight-time Jefferson Award-winning director Gary Griffin made his Broadway debut six years ago with the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s beloved epistolary novel, The Color Purple, a runaway hit now on its second national tour, completing a week’s run at the Kravis Center on Sunday.

Although this story of Celie, a young black girl raped and impregnated by her father and separated from her sister, had already been turned into a 1985 Oscar-nominated film by Steven Spielberg, to Griffin the appeal was the original material.

The attraction, he says, “was Alice’s book and the fact that I knew we were going to go into territory that would be fresh and original. We would have to. If you’re going to make a musical of ‘The Color Purple,’ you’re going to have to take a fresh, original approach with song and dance and theatrical choices.”

By the time Griffin joined the project, playwright Regina Taylor (Crowns) was writing the script, but it was not meshing with the work of pop composers Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, who would be making their musical theater debuts.

“I think their visions were different and I think we had to look at which one to continue with,” says Griffin. “You do that all the time when creating shows. You have choices and you have to decide which route to take. So the producers and I had to say that it was better to change that role in the team, rather than spending our time getting them to write the same show.”

So out went Taylor and in came Marsha Norman, Tony-winning adaptor of The Secret Garden.

As she explains, “I’m from Kentucky, I’m a woman, a writer who is able to live in the commercial world but also in the serious world. I want to entertain, but with ideas and emotions. I always felt that ‘The Color Purple’ was not this terrible, dire tragedy, but this story of how this girl survives, stronger for it all.

“In the book, (Celie’s) a pretty passive character for a long time, so that had to change. She had to grow before our eyes and had to end up a different person by the end of the show.”

Norman never doubted that this story could be turned into a musical. “The language of the novel was actually quite musical,” she says. “When the emotions run as high as they do in this story, that‘s when you have a musical, I’d say.”

In addition to making Celie a more active character, Norman’s other main chore was deciding what was expendable from the lengthy novel.

“Well, how to tell 40 years worth of story in an evening, that ultimately is the main challenge,” she says. “One of the things we had to figure out was how to deal with white people. And our ultimate solution was to cut them out. There’s the mayor’s wife and the mayor and the African colonials, we had to come to grips with the fact that it’s not about them. They always get to be onstage. This time, they don’t.”

And she had to determine what she needed that wasn’t there already. “We also added in the community, this great vibrant world where people are watching each other all the time and looking out for each other, keeping track of who’s doing what to whom,” says Norman. “We added those church women who are like a Greek chorus, as a way of commenting, talking, gossiping, in a most classical way.”

The show that eventually emerged, while necessarily dramatic and intense, has a through line of love. “I tried to be sure that everything had a universal core, that the characters were all acting out of love,” Griffin says. “Even the darkest, most scary scenes have to do with love or not getting love.”

Unlike many, Griffin is not critical of Spielberg’s film and its well-polished visuals. “I think he took a very respectful view of the characters. He understood how to get that story to an audience that probably wouldn’t see it otherwise.

“It’s a beloved story and it should be beloved. And I think everybody has a feeling about how they want it expressed. I know there are people who wish the musical were more like the movie,” Griffin says. “And so it was a balancing act all the time, of being sure the audience understood the impact of what was going on, but pointing them towards the resilience of the characters to get them to the next moment.”

The show breaks from the images of the movie in its beginning moments. “It opens with a musical montage that does everything that a musical’s opening number should do,” says Griffin. “It tells you why it’s a musical, it gives you an introduction to the characters, it gives you a taste for the kind of score that you’re going to hear, and propels you into the world of the piece.”

As the musical evolved, Pulitzer Prize-winner Walker was on the scene, but she never pulled rank about the way her story was being retold. “She was fantastic,” says Griffin. “She would respond occasionally to things she would see that she questioned, but she was never demanding of ‘this must change.’ She liked the musical a lot so she was nothing but helpful and supportive.”

Also instrumental in the show gaining credibility was a producer who came on the scene -- Oprah Winfrey.

“Clearly the stamp of approval for whatever they make in America is Oprah,” says Norman. “But the fact is that this story meant so much to her. When she did the movie, she wasn’t famous enough to get on the poster. She feels very strongly that that is her story, at least emotionally. As does much of the audience by the end of it.”

The show opened in Atlanta in the summer of 2004 and was immediately embraced by audiences, but Griffin knew it was a long way from being ready for Broadway.

“It needed clarification and focus. It needed to do its job with more power, to be more assertive,” he says, scoffing at the suggestion that the show was ever in trouble. “I made adjustments and worked on the show and experimented with different approaches to the scenes and the show evolved over time. I’ve been around troubled out-of-town tryouts and this really wasn’t one of them. I think that only happens when people panic.”

The Color Purple opened on Broadway on Dec. 1, 2005, to mixed responses. “I think the pure musical theater audience was challenged by it because it was a score written by pop writers. Some people had issues with that, which we could do nothing about,” Griffin concedes. “But there were a lot of people who really understood it and got it, who came in skeptical and were surprised at how affecting it was.”

The show ran a little over two years in New York, and has been touring the country, drawing standing ovations ever since. Asked what he thinks the show taps into, Griffin says, “It’s the kind of church we want to go to. If you love church already, you’re gonna love it. If you don’t think you love church, this might change your mind. Because in church, a lot of time, we go and we sing and we hear a great story.

“And if the story is told well, it helps us figure out the problems we have in our lives. Then we can come to this place together and celebrate it, celebrate our struggles,” he said.

“I think that’s why it’s great. It’s a good visit to a church.”

THE COLOR PURPLE, Kravis Center, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday. Tickets: $25 and up. Call: (561) 832-7469 or (800) 572-8471.

When two-time Tony Award-winning writer-director Arthur Laurents died on Thursday, the theater and film world lost one of its great creative talents. And one of its most difficult.

He died at his home in New York at 93, after a short illness. There will undoubtedly be an outpouring of praise for Laurents, particularly for his two most acclaimed musicals, West Side Story and Gypsy, for which he wrote the books, and for such screenplays as The Way We Were and The Turning Point. His place in show business history is secure, despite the stories of his quick temper and mean disposition which will surely soon surface.

I only met Laurents once, interviewing him in his Greenwich Village house in 1985, just prior to a major revival of West Side Story and a national tour of La Cage aux Folles -- which he directed -- arriving in Washington, D.C., where I wrote for The Washington Times. (No Moonie jokes, pleases.)

I was writing a fluffy preview feature, but that did not prevent Laurents from being sour and combative in his responses to me. He was not actively involved in the West Side Story revival, so he had no qualms about saying “t would be interesting to have a new take on” Jerome Robbins’ choreography, which was being carefully reproduced and duplicated. During the run of the show in Washington, an interview with Robbins in The Washington Post fired back at Laurents, with the original director-choreographer suggesting that it was Laurents’ script that needed “a new take.”

It always amused me that I helped foment a feud between these two theater icons, or at least offered a vehicle for them to bicker publicly.

The only other time I spoke with Laurents was after my unenthusiastic review of Tyne Daly in a production of Gypsy that ran in 1989. Laurents called me up to berate me for my opinion, a habit of his I was later told.

Whether or not his volatile personal style drew out the best in the casts he directed is certainly debatable, but Laurents’ writing skill is not. Gypsy’s book is widely considered the finest script for a musical ever, for its economy, dramatic structure and vividly drawn characters. And of course West Side Story is Laurents’ audacious rewrite of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set against the mean streets of New York, revived yet again in 2009 with a bilingual twist.

He debuted on Broadway in 1945 with the play Home of the Brave, about anti-Semitism in the military, later filmed by Stanley Kramer. More successful was the romantic comedy The Time of the Cuckoo, about a spinster in search of love in Venice, which became the Katharine Hepburn film Summertime and then the short-lived musical Do I Hear A Waltz?, written by Laurents with his West Side Story colleague Stephen Sondheim and composer Richard Rodgers.

In 2000, Laurents wrote his autobiography, Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood, a real volatile page-turner that candidly discussed his homosexuality, the Hollywood blacklist he found himself on and the legendary figures he worked with in his more than six decades in show business.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s irreverent, yet surprisingly traditional musical comedy, The Book of Mormon, went into this morning’s announcement of Tony Award nominations as the prohibitive favorite to win the all-important Best Musical award. It emerged with 14 nominations, making it even more of a lock to clean up at the Tonys ceremony on Sunday, June 12, and -- at least mathematically -- a chance to cop a record number of Tonys.

Like The Producers a decade ago, this buddy musical was nominated in every category possible, but had no candidate for Best Actress. Both of its male stars, Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, will be vying for the Best Actor Tony, also a repeat of The Producers’ contest between Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.

Book of Mormon’s nomination haul included Best Book (Parker, Robert Lopez and Stone), Best Score (Lopez, Parker and Stone), Best Featured Actor (Rory O’Malley), Best Featured Actress (Nikki M. James), Best Scenic Design (Scott Pask), Best Costume Design (Ann Roth), Best Lighting Design (Brian MacDevitt), Best Sound Design (Brian Ronan), Best Direction (Casey Nicholaw and Parker), Best Choreography (Nicholaw) and Best Orchestrations (Larry Hochman and Stephen Oremus).

As a marketing tool for Broadway, the Tonys usually slight shows that opened early in the season and have since closed, but this year The Scottsboro Boys -- the final musical by the late Fred Ebb, which transferred from off-Broadway and never managed to attract a Broadway audience -- earned 12 nominations. Other shuttered shows remembered with nominations, largely to fill out categories, included Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (3 nominations) and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2). Still, the odds against either of them winning anything are astronomical.

In the play categories -- the stepchildren of the Tony telecast -- the British import Jerusalem and the rudely titled, but serious drama The Motherf**ker with the Hat each pulled in six nominations. They will compete with War Horse and Good People, making it two American plays versus two British.

The Tonys may have gotten over their crush on movie stars which dominated last year’s results. Among the Hollywood fixtures who appeared on Broadway this year but failed to get nominations are Daniel Radcliffe (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), Robin Williams (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo), Chris Rock (The Motherf**ker …), Kiefer Sutherland (That Championship Season) and Jim Belushi (Born Yesterday).

Undoubtedly Bengal Tiger was hoping for a Best Play nod to help its flagging box office. Also looking for better returns today was Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a jukebox version of the 1994 Australian flick, which scored nominations for Best Actor (Tony Sheldon) and its costumes, but not Best Musical.

Snubbed productions with slumping ticket sales often post their closing notices soon after the Tony nominations are announced. My pick for first to close is the Shirelles show Baby, It’s You, which had to settle for one nom, for Best Actress candidate, Beth Leavel. Also earning one nomination and facing a shaky future are the panned revival of House of Blue Leaves (Featured Actress Edie Falco) and bio-play Lombardi (Featured Actress Judith Light).

Here is the complete list of today’s Tony Award nominations:

Best Play

Good People, Author: David Lindsay-Abaire

Jerusalem, Author: Jez Butterworth

The Motherf**ker with the Hat, Author: Stephen Adly Guirgis

War Horse, Author: Nick Stafford

Best Musical

The Book of Mormon

Catch Me If You Can

The Scottsboro Boys

Sister Act

Best Book, Musical

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Alex Timbers

The Book of Mormon, Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone

The Scottsboro Boys, David Thompson

Sister Act, Cheri Steinkellner, Bill Steinkellner and Douglas Carter Beane

Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre

The Book of Mormon, Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone

The Scottsboro Boys, John Kander and Fred Ebb

Sister Act, Alan Menken, Glenn Slater

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, David Yazbek

Best Revival of a Play

Arcadia

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Merchant of Venice

The Normal Heart

Best Revival of a Musical

Anything Goes

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Best Actor in a Leading Role, Play

Brian Bedford, The Importance of Being Earnest

Bobby Cannavale, The Motherf**ker with the Hat

Joe Mantello, The Normal Heart

Al Pacino, The Merchant of Venice

Mark Rylance, Jerusalem

Best Actress in a Leading Role, Play

Nina Arianda, Born Yesterday

Frances McDormand, Good People

Lily Rabe, The Merchant of Venice

Vanessa Redgrave, Driving Miss Daisy

Hannah Yelland, Brief Encounter

Best Actor in a Leading Role, Musical

Norbert Leo Butz, Catch Me If You Can

Josh Gad, The Book of Mormon

Joshua Henry, The Scottsboro Boys

Andrew Rannells, The Book of Mormon

Tony Sheldon, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Best Actress in a Leading Role, Musical

Sutton Foster, Anything Goes

Beth Leavel, Baby, It's You!

Patina Miller, Sister Act

Donna Murphy, The People in the Picture

Best Actor in a Featured Role, Play

Mackenzie Crook, Jerusalem

Billy Crudup, Arcadia

John Benjamin Hickey, The Normal Heart

Arian Moayed, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Yul Vázquez, The Motherf**ker with the Hat

Best Actress in a Featured Role, Play

Ellen Barkin, The Normal Heart

Edie Falco, The House of Blue Leaves

Judith Light, Lombardi

Joanna Lumley, La Bête

Elizabeth Rodriguez, The Motherf**ker with the Hat

Best Actor in a Featured Role, Musical

Colman Domingo, The Scottsboro Boys

Adam Godley, Anything Goes

John Larroquette, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Forrest McClendon, The Scottsboro Boys

Rory O'Malley, The Book of Mormon

Best Actress in a Featured Role, Musical

Laura Benanti, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Tammy Blanchard, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Victoria Clark, Sister Act

Nikki M. James, The Book of Mormon

Patti LuPone, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Best Scenic Design, Play

Todd Rosenthal, The Motherf**ker with the Hat

Rae Smith, War Horse

Ultz, Jerusalem

Mark Wendland, The Merchant of Venice

Best Scenic Design, Musical

Beowulf Boritt, The Scottsboro Boys

Derek McLane, Anything Goes

Scott Pask, The Book of Mormon

Donyale Werle, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Best Costume Design, Play

Jess Goldstein, The Merchant of Venice

Desmond Heeley, The Importance of Being Earnest

Mark Thompson, La Bête

Catherine Zuber, Born Yesterday

Best Costume Design, Musical

Tim Chappel & Lizzy Gardiner, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Martin Pakledinaz, Anything Goes

Ann Roth, The Book of Mormon

Catherine Zuber, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Best Lighting Design, Play

Paule Constable, War Horse

David Lander, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Kenneth Posner, The Merchant of Venice

Mimi Jordan Sherin, Jerusalem

Best Lighting Design, Musical

Ken Billington, The Scottsboro Boys

Howell Binkley, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Peter Kaczorowski, Anything Goes

Brian MacDevitt, The Book of Mormon

Best Sound Design, Play

Acme Sound Partners & Cricket S. Myers, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Simon Baker, Brief Encounter

Ian Dickinson for Autograph, Jerusalem

Christopher Shutt, War Horse

Best Sound Design, Musical

Peter Hylenski, The Scottsboro Boys

Steve Canyon Kennedy, Catch Me If You Can

Brian Ronan, Anything Goes

Brian Ronan, The Book of Mormon

Best Direction, Play

Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, War Horse

Joel Grey & George C. Wolfe, The Normal Heart

Anna D. Shapiro, The Motherf**ker with the Hat

Daniel Sullivan, The Merchant of Venice

Best Direction, Musical

Rob Ashford, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Kathleen Marshall, Anything Goes

Casey Nicholaw and Trey Parker, The Book of Mormon

Susan Stroman, The Scottsboro Boys

Best Choreography

Rob Ashford, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Kathleen Marshall, Anything Goes

Casey Nicholaw, The Book of Mormon

Susan Stroman, The Scottsboro Boys

Best Orchestrations

Doug Besterman, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Larry Hochman, The Scottsboro Boys

Larry Hochman and Stephen Oremus, The Book of Mormon

Marc Shaiman and Larry Blank, Catch Me If You Can