BROADWAY BROADCAST OF PARED-DOWN TONYS

Although riding the crest of a slump, Broadway will put on its annual happy face Sunday when CBS airs the 39th annual Tony Awards show. As always, the program (Channels 2 and 8, 9-11 p.m.) will be a tuxedo junction, a night of black-tie glamour and theatrical tradition.

Beamed from the Shubert Theater in Fun City, the proceedings also will salute three top Broadway tunesmiths--Jule Styne (“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”), Cy Coleman (“Barnum”) and Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose “Cats” is still prowling the boards.

But something will be missing from the ceremonies this time--three major award categories that were eliminated for lack of suitable competition. The deleted: best actor in a musical, best actress in a musical and best choreography.

Tony night in recent years has had 19 or 20 awards, in contrast to 29 last year for television’s Emmy show and 23 this year for Hollywood’s Oscar night. Sunday, only 16 of Broadway’s top awards will be made, plus four already announced special awards.

The dropping of one, let alone three, top award categories “has not happened before, to the best of my knowledge,” says Alexander H. Cohen, who will mark his 19th consecutive year as executive producer of the Tony telecast.

He sounded unruffled, as befits a man who has been a Broadway producer since 1941.

The only real effect that the missing awards will have on the telecast “is that we’ll pick up nine minutes,” he insisted, tongue deep in cheek. The producer even professed to admire the Tony nominating and administration committees for daring to delete, even though “I think they threw off the wrong categories.”

He declined to elucidate. “Not me,” he said, laughing.

Despite several acclaimed plays, notably David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly,” and 10 Tony nominations for Roger Miller’s “Big River,” which faced meager competition, the season of 1984-85 is widely regarded as one of the Great White Way’s dimmer ones.

However, Cohen, like many Broadway inmates, tends to see things sunny side up. He exudes a feeling of “this, too, shall pass,” even though his production of Dario Fo’s “The Accidental Death of an Anarchist” was among the season’s casualties.

“Broadway is cyclical; it has its good years and bad years,” he said by phone from his office above Broadway’s Shubert Alley. “Back in 1972-73, that also was a rotten year, yet we rebounded. As they say, all we need here are three or four big hits.”

Cohen was asked a perennial question: When, if ever, will the Tony awards be expanded to include off- Broadway, or even off-off-Broadway, and thus more fully reflect New York theater?

He said he hadn’t discussed this yet with the League of New York Theatres and Producers, which administers the awards. “I have not been able to reach their interpreters,” he solemnly explained.

A need exists, he acknowledged, for a televised awards show--not necessarily the Tonys--that gives recognition to theater across America, the regional theaters, not just the houses of New York: “The Tonys cover the commercial Broadway theater, not theater in America.”

There has to be “a recognition in television terms that theater is no longer 10 blocks of midtown real estate” known as Broadway, he said.

It’s time, he added, for someone “to do something about this. . . .” He suggested that he may well be that someone. He said he’s been discussing such a theater-in-America awards show with executives at all three major networks.

Cohen also said he probably will pass the Tony-show torch to someone else after next year’s broadcast, when his contract to put together the programs expires.

“We presently have no interest in continuing the contract,” he said, taking carefully worded care to leave all his renewal options open. “Twenty years is a long hitch for doing the same format.”

During Cohen’s long hitch, the Tony program rarely has gotten the big Nielsen ratings of many other major awards telecasts. Still, he thinks Broadway’s salute to its own may get its best ratings ever Sunday.

The reason: its lead-in show, which usually gets high ratings and happens to star one of Broadway’s own. The program is CBS’ “Murder, She Wrote.” The star is Angela Lansbury, who plays a lighthearted mystery writer and solver of crime.

In 1979 she was on Broadway, participating in murder most foul, not solving it, and in the process won her fourth Tony award as the daft maker of human pies of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.”