Tonys: You Call This ‘Passion’? : Commentary: The best musical award was to be the main event, but the presentation to Sondheim and Lapine was antiseptic, reflecting a category in which getting enough nominees was difficult.

The high point of Sunday night’s Tony telecast came when award presenter Paul Sorvino remarked, innocently, “What a season!” He seemed immediately to regret the words, which apparently compromised the impish honesty of his co-presenter Madeline Kahn, whose eyes rolled skyward. Always the lady, she corrected herself with a delicate smile.

What a season indeed. Last month the Tony nominating committee was forced back into its pen when it emerged with only two best musical nominations--for “Passion,” the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine show, and for Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” popularly resented among insiders for having the subtlety of an Ice Capades (the irony here being that in past years the awards community resented Sondheim for not having the subtlety of an Ice Capades).

Willing to do anything to avoid the embarrassment of seeming to endorse “Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public,” the committee reappeared with nominations for two defunct musicals, “A Grand Night for Singing,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein revue that seemed to have wandered accidentally from a cabaret onto a Broadway stage, and the baffling Dutch import “Cyrano,” from which the telecast didn’t bother assembling a scene (the given reason: The show is playing “around the world,” where, one hopes, it is recouping the $8 million it lost in New York).

The evening’s main event, in which “Passion” KO’ed “Beauty and the Beast,” was strangely antiseptic. James Lapine exhibited the emotion of a man picking up his laundry when he won for best book, and for his part Sondheim mentioned it was “always great doing business” with Lapine. Perhaps that lack of excitement is natural when you win for a work far less substantial than the one you should have won for ten seasons back. That was the year that Jerry Herman’s “La Cage aux Folles” won over “Sunday in the Park With George,” the first Sondheim-Lapine collaboration. The contest was rather like the “Star Wars”/”Annie Hall” runoff at the Oscars in 1977, with “La Cage” representing the gauche entertainment whose win would signal the end of western civilization and “Sunday” the smart, elegant epitome of what made life worth living for the true connoisseur.

Although it’s politically incorrect to say so, this year the dichotomy was a false one. Despite its overproduction, a dreadful child actor and some cheesy special effects (hello, Doug Henning!), “Beauty and the Beast” offers a terrific score, funny and often deeply felt. In fact, its best lyrics (which, like “Passion’s,” examine the irrelevance of beauty and the liberating aspects of love) are more generous and even inventive than anything in Sondheim’s carefully constructed logic.

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One couldn’t help rooting for “Beauty” when composer Alan Menken blinked back tears at the nominator’s mention of his longtime collaborator, the immensely gifted lyricist and bookwriter Howard Ashman, who died in 1991. Menken’s face was a reminder of the effulgence of emotion in “Beauty” and of its unashamed desire to give pleasure (did anyone miss the dancers with spinning plates as tail-fans?).

The further irony is that Sondheim, who can summon up great wells of passion on the subject of artistic obsession (“Sunday”) or obsessive vengeance (“Sweeney Todd”) can only cerebrate on romantic passion.

The best play competition was a meatier contest, with two vastly different and equally worthy plays to root for or against. I wanted to see “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” win and not only because Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” won last year. The Anna Deavere Smith play is faltering at the box office; it was pushed out of Pulitzer consideration for reasons that seemed arbitrary and wrongheaded; and finally, Diana Rigg took best actress over Smith, leaving Smith’s overwhelming achievement completely unheralded.

In her play about the 1992 riots, Smith approaches one of the great and most complex questions of the century, that is, “How could this have happened?”--the same question addressed, for instance, by filmmaker Marcel Ophuls in his Holocaust documentaries “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “Hotel Terminus”--as a cubist puzzle, addressing it from all possible sides and interpreting it with a generous and compassionate intelligence.

Kushner, on the other hand, asks the question, “How do we live with what’s happened?” and his subject is, of course, the devastation of AIDS. The play ends with a blessing on the audience, a blessing of “more life” bestowed by the character Prior Walter, a man who has learned to live after being abandoned by his lover, who has learned to live with physical pain and partial blindness, a man who has been chosen by a council of angels for an otherworldly relief from this life. But Prior declines, and when he comes back to Earth and bestows that blessing, audiences enjoy a rare sensation--that whatever may come after leaving the theater is in fact a miracle and a blessing. So one can’t possibly begrudge this award, because “Perestroika,” the play’s second half that won on Sunday night, is a stunning achievement, more moving and less bogged down with exposition than the play’s first half, “Millennium Approaches.”

In fact the entire play is much more entertaining and less earnest than a TV viewer might assume from Kushner’s acceptance speech. Additionally, the playwright seemed to have been dressed by one of the “Best Little Whorehouse” designers, in gold lame vest and red satin cravat. This year he made no mention of the “scary orchestra” that threatened to engulf loquacious speakers with strains of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” The song starts softly but quickly gains alarmingly in volume, and it did seem to scare “Passion’s” Donna Murphy who raced it to a finish.

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But the real purpose of the Tonys, as everyone knows, is to make an hourlong national commercial, primarily to sell musicals. Unfortunately, this pressure sends producers into a tizzy, and more often than not the natural charm of a musical is completely lost. “Damn Yankees,” for instance, features a lovely, human moment near the top of the show that could have translated onto the small screen.

A middle-aged man who has just sold his soul to the devil sings a lovely farewell to his sleeping wife and races down the stairs, only to emerge from his suburban front door as a strapping young baseball player, who finishes the song in a thrilling, virile baritone. It’s one of those moments that goes far beyond its function in the plot--serving also as an ode to aging and loss--and one that is electrifying in its theatrical simplicity. Instead of showing that (or, bewilderingly, a song by star Bebe Neuwirth, familiar to TV audiences from “Cheers”), the “Damn Yankees” segment featured a dance number with prancing baseball players, and it seemed that someone on speed had set the metronome. The number had a slight whiff of desperation.

One of the show’s most entertaining moments came in the first half. Unfortunately, it was in a commercial in which “Seinfeld’s” Julia Louis-Dreyfus offers to color the hair of another passenger on a New York City bus (the results elicit a “she looks fabulous!” from a nonplussed passenger). All told, the season wasn’t as bad as Madeline Kahn’s mugging might have indicated, but it’s still a sad day when Broadway producers can take a clue from Clairol about how to sell a product.