COMMENTARY : The Cloud Over Broadway Looms Over Tony Show Too

History repeated itself at Sunday’s Tony Awards when “Lost in Yonkers’ ” win for best play was accidentally revealed too soon as Anthony Quinn opened the wrong envelope.

It was not Quinn’s fault. He apparently was handed the wrong envelope at the wrong time in the wrong category. But it recalled an earlier incident that marked Neil Simon’s win of the Pulitzer Prize for “Yonkers” when an overzealous Hollywood publicist issued a press release some 24 hours before the news was official.

Simon cleverly defused the situation Sunday when he accepted his award for “Yonkers,” after Shirley MacLaine announced it at its proper time, in its proper category.

“I was in the men’s room when Anthony Quinn was on,” Simon quipped. “Did anything interesting happen. . . ?”

You might say it was the only interesting thing that happened in an evening of other missteps, forced patter and predictable winners. This taste for phony glitz proved more trying than ever for a set of awards increasingly hampered by its own geographic restrictions and made worse by the shrunken number of contenders in the season just ended.

Sheer embarrassment may shame the Tony committee into doing what it has resisted all these years: expand its borders to include off-Broadway.

It has been a self-imposed curse, this insistence by the committee to limit the winners to Broadway--a place where perspectives have narrowed like aging arteries in recent decades and where the prevailing conspiracy is to pretend that nothing is wrong when everything is.

In some circles that’s called hype. Anyone who doubted the degree to which it is propping up a dying--if not dead--horse, need only have listened to the level of desperation in Sunday’s self-congratulation.

Personal achievement in good times and bad is a constant, but Tony winners deserve better than the parody that these once-prestigious awards have become.

The highlight of the evening was director Lloyd Richards’ acceptance of the special Tony given to the Yale Repertory Theatre. The speech was direct and uncontrived, perhaps because it was backed by Yale’s genuine and uncontrived achievement.

You know something is very wrong when you can get Penn and Teller to be unfunny, when Jackie Mason sounds like the uncle you wish wouldn’t visit and when air time is denied to scenes from nominated plays in the interest of saving time. What about the time idly and abundantly given to songs from “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot”? To Michael Crawford singing “Music of the Night”? To the touring “Bye Bye Birdie,” yet to be announced for Broadway but plugged in a manner that suggested pre-Broadway advertising?

Aside from the “Yonkers” blooper, nothing symbolized the evening’s gaucherie more than another blip that may have gone unnoticed by the vast majority of viewers.

The camera, which made a point of focusing on each nominee as his or her name was read, panned right past Mark Lamos (nominated for his direction of “Our Country’s Good”) and settled on a stranger sitting next to him.

Lamos is not a Broadway face. He is the talented artistic director of the Hartford Stage in Hartford, Conn., one of those regional theaters where Broadway is beginning to admit that good work happens. Adding injury to insult, “Our Country’s Good”--good, bad, or indifferent, the evening’s most nominated play--won absolutely nothing.