Tony’s Little Secrets : Some Broadway voters reveal their choices and their reasons--conscience, passion, idiosyncrasy--for picking The Best . . .

Tonight, when Broadway celebrates itself in the annual Tony Awards telecast, watch the nervous nominees on the aisle seats. Observe the brave smiles, the phony laughs in response to limp jokes, the beads of sweat breaking out all over the place.

It may be just another round of rah-rah show business to us couch potatoes at home, but for many of them it ranks up there with the Big Moments. Forget about the “honor just to be nominated” platitudes. This is America. Everybody just wants to win. And this year, for the first season in a long time, there are a lot of dead heats. The suspense really is there.

Will the controversial “Miss Saigon” be snubbed as it was in London last year? Can Keith Carradine take the award away from Jonathan Pryce for best actor in a musical? Is it Mercedes Ruehl’s turn this time or will it be Stockard Channing again? And will playwright John Guare (“Six Degrees of Separation”) be gnashing his teeth on Monday morning as he was the day after the Pulitzers?

A year from now no one may care but tonight they do. You can be sure that since the nominations were announced early last May, the nominees have had their own private little tote boards whirring through their sleepless minds. Who can blame them? A Tony win not only brings prestige and a gushing 60 seconds of national TV time, it can also mean a pivotal career boost. Most importantly, bringing home the medallion can bestow on a marginally successful show the impetus for a happy and prosperous run on Broadway and around the country. We’re talking millions of dollars.

Given the stakes, the 624 individuals who vote on the Tonys loom large on the scene--at least they have during the last month during which the process of attending shows and marking ballots has been undertaken in earnest. Nominees might take comfort in the fact that among them is Kevin Dowling. The 35-year-old producer and director (“The Sum of Us”) conscientiously agonizes over his decisions, making copious notes, saving programs and taking a copy of the ballot with him to performances. On the other hand, one of Dowling’s peers describes a different dynamic that comes into play when choosing the winner. Of one of the nominees for best actor in a musical, the voter observed: “He is such an unpleasant man, I’ll be damned if I vote for him. I don’t care how much audiences love him.”

With a nod to “may the best man win,” the voting invariably becomes personal, especially in a world as insular as the Broadway community. How can it not be? Look at who votes on the Tonys and it’s clear that many of the voters must be closely acquainted with the nominees, either as competitors, peers, co-workers or friends. Since most of the voting roll is drawn from among Broadway producers and presenters, a good number of the voters have a financial interest in the ballots they are casting. And some of those who come from the crafts unions might well be voting on nominees who won the job away from them.

“It’s hard to check those feelings at the door of the theater when you enter it as a Tony voter, but you have to as much as it is humanly possible,” Dowling says. As the general manager of the musical “Buddy,” he notes that his strongest bias is toward Paul Hipp’s nominated performance in the title role. “It will be hard to see another performance that can overcome my strong feelings,” he admits. “It is unlikely that people will not vote for the shows they’re involved with. Anybody who says different is not telling the truth.”

How then does a voter hack through a thicket of bias to fairly cast a ballot in 19 categories? It isn’t easy, but interviews with a random cross-section of voters over the last couple of weeks brought up many different approaches and criteria, not to mention idiosyncrasies. Curiously enough, given the secrecy of the ballot itself, many chose to go on the record with their picks and to defend them. But what emerged most forcefully was not necessarily the arguments for one show or performance over another, but the passion that accompanied the respective choices.

“I cried at ‘Lost in Yonkers,’ ” says actress Maureen Anderman, “and I hadn’t cried in the theater for a long, long time. I’m giving it to them.”

Indeed, it has been a highly charged year and that will certainly affect tonight’s outcome. Broadway’s bad boy this season has been Nicol Williamson, whose onstage tantrums in “I Hate Hamlet” might well have cost him a nomination. (When he gratuitously whacked his co-star on the rear, the young actor walked offstage and out the door of the theater.) Reports that David Hampton, the con artist whose exploits inspired John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation,” has allegedly been threatening the playwright with violence may also influence the chances of the hit to win best play. And feminists took the producers of “The Will Rogers Follies” to task when the gigantic billboard outside the Palace Theater showed sexy showgirls branded with “WR” on flanks covered in snug rawhide.

But the Queen of the Dustups is “Miss Saigon.” What the helicopter scene stirs up inside the Broadway Theater is nothing compared to the controversies that have raged since it was announced that the London hit would be transferring to New York with non-American actors Lea Salonga and Jonathan Pryce. Equity objected, the producer canceled the $9-million production, Equity came around; then Asian-American actors picketed opening night, protesting that one of them, and not Pryce, should have gotten the role of the Eurasian pimp.

Will the Equity controversy cost “Miss Saigon” the Tony as best musical? Not according to actress Judy Rice, who has voted for the last 12 years as one of the 82 council members of Actors’ Equity. Rice is confident that her peers will be able to summon up the requisite objectivity when deciding best musical, or for that matter, best actor in a musical, which has Jonathan Pryce’s slimy entrepreneur locked in a tight race with Keith Carradine’s likable Will Rogers. “I can’t say what happens subliminally,” she says, “but you go to all these shows as a guest and you don’t go in gunning for anything. A lot of us thought about the issue very differently, anyway.”

What is likely to imperil the chances of “Miss Saigon” more is the backlash against the balloon of hype that accompanied the lavish musical as it steamed toward Broadway last March with a $35-million advance. Tony voters have traditionally looked to deny the popularly sanctioned hit if only because they’d rather see the box-office clout of the award go to a play or drama that truly may need it. For example, in 1982, the musical “Nine” stole the award from “Dreamgirls.”

Further complicating the picture for “Miss Saigon” is the conventional wisdom that the saturation point has been reached for honoring British musicals--”Evita,” “Cats,” “Les Miserables,” “Phantom of the Opera”--especially ones with dazzling special effects. Critics carped that spectacle--falling chandeliers and descending helicopters--was merely a substitute for the simple story-telling musical on which America has long held the copyright. That sort of jingoistic attitude may well favor the all-American competition: “Secret Garden,” “Once on This Island” and “The Will Rogers Follies.”

“This year, I do sense a feeling within the theatrical community not to vote for ‘Miss Saigon, “ says producer Louis Burke, who last year was nominated for the musical “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

“I do think a lot of Tony voters will vote for the American rather the English musical. But I think people can vote against ‘Miss Saigon’ simply on the merits. Take away the hype and you just have a not very good musical.”

The show does have its defenders, however. Producer Lucille Lortel is voting for “Miss Saigon.” For her, it was a seat-of-the-pants sort of thing--quite literally. She says she had first seen the British import from the mezzanine where, at each performance, 250 tickets are reserved as premium locations and sold at $100 each--$40 above the price for orchestra. She wasn’t impressed. Then, like all Tony voters, Lortel was invited back by the producers to see it from the orchestra. “I was much closer and I was with it,” she says. “It certainly changed my vote.” On such does the Tony vote sometimes revolve.

If voters are looking for an alternative to the spectacle of “Miss Saigon,” one would think the musical in the best position to capitalize would be “Once on This Island,” a modest 90-minute Carribean fantasy. However, there appears to be little enthusiasm for it. Some observed that the show was simply too “small and Off Broadway,” as Lortel put it, to measure up to their conception of what a Tony-winning musical looked like.

In fact, up until two weeks before the ballots were due, there appeared to be little consensus developing behind either of the remaining contenders: “Secret Garden,” about a young orphan’s coming of an age in a big gloomy house, and “Will Rogers,” a sketchy biography of the beloved American pundit in a Ziegfeld revue format. But then critic David Richards raved about “Will Rogers” in the Sunday New York Times.

“That Sunday morning, I opened the paper and said to myself, ‘There goes the ballgame. It’s ‘Will Rogers,’ ” says one Tony voter who wished to remain unidentified. “People were really looking for an excuse not to vote for ‘Miss Saigon’ and the Times gave them a justification. If ‘Will Rogers’ wins, the producers should send a basket of flowers to Richards.”

Though the Tony is a virtual cloister compared to the politicking that goes on in Oscar campaigns, press reviews and feature articles must have an impact on the voting. To guard against being influenced by the media, Douglas Leeds, an advertising executive who votes as a member of the Theatre Wing board, says that he refuses to read any reviews until after he has sent in his ballot. “I’ve clipped and collected them all,” he says, “but I haven’t read them.”

“I really think that some voters don’t see all the performances,” says Dennis Cunningham, a voter and television critic. “In fact, I think they are too stupid to know one thing from the other, and so they rely even more on what they read and hear than we may realize. I know for example, that the year ‘Torch Song Trilogy’ was up, people were screaming they were going to vote for Harvey Fierstein, and they hadn’t even seen it.”

The Tony rule is quite clear: You are not to vote in a category unless you have seen all four nominees and that the voter’s signature on the ballot signifies that you have met that criteria. Fourteen of the 19 categories feature shows that closed before the nominations were announced.

Furthermore, two of the major nominations went to “Those Were the Days,” a revue musical in both Yiddish and English that many voters did not see during its short run. Among those who missed it is Greg Evans, the 31-year-old second-string Variety critic who is voting for the first time. He says that he will strictly abide by the rule. Many others, however, say that they will simply ignore it. “It’s a bit of an ethical dilemma,” says Dowling, “but my sense is that I will vote in those categories. I don’t want to be unfair to the other nominees.”

“I think a vote on a dead show is a wasted vote,” says Heidi Landesman, the producer and set designer who has been nominated in both capacities for her work on “Secret Garden.” “The function of the Tony is to help theater flourish and you can only flourish if you’re alive.”

Landesman is particularly bitter about the nominating process because both Mandy Patinkin, the star of “Secret Garden,” and Susan Schulman, the director, were overlooked. (“Those Were the Days” director Eleanor Reissa got the nod instead.) Landesman says that she intends to join with the “rebels” who are planning to write in Schulman’s name on the ballot. Under the rules, write-ins are not allowed and are not counted. A wasted vote? “Maybe, but one has to make whatever protest one can make,” Landesman says.

Many agree that the hotly contested race for best actress in a drama is between Stockard Channing’s sophisticated matron in “Six Degrees of Separation” and Mercedes Ruehl’s loopy aunt in “Lost in Yonkers.” As someone who was up for the role that eventually went to Channing, Maureen Anderman says divorcing her feelings, both personal and professional, has not been easy.

“You can watch somebody on stage,” she explains, “and say to yourself, ‘I can do that, I can do that, I can do that.’ But then there comes a point when something else takes over. As I watched Mercedes Ruehl, I wasn’t sure I could do what she did. It was a very brave performance. She’s got my vote.”

Having been a part of the business for more than 20 years and a steady Broadway theater-goer, Anderman adds that she has no problem in making choices in the more technical area of costumes, lights and sets that makes many other voters uncomfortable. “I think I’m a good judge,” she says.

Given the inexperience of most voters, however, those awards tend to go to the flashiest, says Jim Ryan, a television production designer who votes as a council member of the United Scenic Artists, a crafts union. “A big elaborate design tends to win more frequently over a small, but exquisite one, unfortunately,” he says. “Take Jane Greenwood’s costumes for ‘I Hate Hamlet,’ which weren’t even nominated. A textbook example of defining characters through design.”

Having said that, however, Ryan concedes that he is leaning toward Steve Hersey’s lighting for “Miss Saigon” for the win in that category, despite his admiration for Jennifer Tipton’s problems in lighting the all-white set of “La Bete.” “I’m probably going to vote for ‘Miss Saigon’ for all those reasons I just put down as why you shouldn’t vote for it. It was just so big and so spectacular, but so well done.”

Like many voters, Ryan says that he is still undecided about which play will get his vote for best drama, though he admits that he is “going towards ‘Lost in Yonkers’ ” in a category that also includes “Six Degrees of Separation,” “Shadowlands” and “Our Country’s Good.” “I think it was generally conceded to John Guare and ‘Six Degrees’ and then Simon won the Pulitzer.”

Others counter that the surprise choice of “Lost in Yonkers” over “Six Degrees” for the Pulitzer simply assures Guare of the Tony. Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright whose “Heidi Chronicles” won both the Tony and Pulitzer in 1989, is too diplomatic to reveal her choices in either writing category: best book for a musical or best drama. She admitted, however, to a tradition of voting for the play that most makes “you want to write plays.”

“I admire story-telling,” she says, “and here are two plays, very different, which work beautifully. You go into the theater and they are playing their audiences --people are laughing and crying . . . so many of the nominated productions have achieved wonderful things on stage, things that can only happen in the theater. When I go to mark my ballot, the memory of that is what I hope will guide me.”