With the American Theatre Wing's 64th annual Tony Awards® telecast set for June 13, the list of shows that will be hoping to snag nominations this spring is already a long and exciting one. Here is a quick recap of the 2009-2010 Broadway season. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with the Tony Awards family before, during, and after the 2010 awards ceremony.

And don't forget to watch the Tony Nominations announcement, sponsored by IBM, webcast live here at TonyAwards.com on Monday, May 4, beginning at 8:30 a.m. ET.

SEASON IN REVIEW: SUMMER AND AUTUMN 2009

With acrobatic swing dancing, languid tango glides and elegant ballroom steps, the vigorously energetic international cast of Burn the Floor literally kicked off the new Broadway season last August. Couples met, broke-up and hooked up with others in the non-stop dance-a-thon. Seventeen more productions followed up to the end of the calendar year, ending with a revival of A Little Night Music in which various other couples hooked up and became romantically entangled, only this time cavorting to stately waltz-time melodies by Stephen Sondheim.

• A Little Night Music stars Catherine Zeta-Jones as Desireé Armfeldt, the actress who sets hearts aflutter during a romantically saturated weekend in the country. Five-time past Tony Award-winner Angela Lansbury plays her mother, an elegant matriarch who could teach everyone a thing or two about romantic liaisons.
• A return engagement of Irving Berlin's White Christmas, which premiered on Broadway last season, took us back to the mid 1950s with the help of a much loved song catalog, to trace two romantic stories that end up in showbiz success.
• There was a showbiz backdrop in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of the Charles Strouse, Lee Adams and Michael Stewart's Bye Bye Birdie as well--an Elvis-like rock star phenomenon threatens to upend the social mores of the late 1950s--but in this musical the romantic storyline eventually leads a pair of lovers (John Stamos and Gina Gershon) out of the limelight and into the joys of small-town life.
• And, of course, there was romance at the end of the rainbow in the fantasy world of Burton Lane and E. Y. Harburg's Finian's Rainbow, starring Cheyenne Jackson, Kate Baldwin and past Tony award-winner Jim Norton.

Romance and Other Pursuits

Ah, romance! Lovebirds did not limit themselves to the musicals this season, though amorous adventure took on a more carnal tone in Roundabout's After Miss Julie starring Sienna Miller, Johnny Lee Miller and Marin Ireland. Playwright Patrick Marber transposed August Strindberg's sexually charged classic (its original title is simply Miss Julie) about a servant and his mistress to post-war Britain. And Lincoln Center Theater presented In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), Sarah Ruhl's comedy about certain newly discovered technologies of the late 1880s that, thanks to the domestication of electricity, literally gave an extra charge to the sex lives of "hysterical" women (and even some men). Past-winners Michael Cerveris and Laura Benanti led the cast.

Showbiz romances--marriages and break-ups--were comic fodder for Hollywood writer/performer Carrie Fisher, who turned her own celebiography into a hugely entertaining solo performance titled Wishful Drinking. Manhattan Theater Club's revival of Edna Ferber and George S. Kauffman's The Royal Family (with a cast that included Jan Maxwell along with past Tony-winners Rosemary Harris and John Glover) comically portrayed a showbiz family loosely based on the Barrymores in full dramatic grandeur.

In the short-lived revival of Neil Simon's semi-autobiographical Brighton Beach Memoirs, we got a peek into the early home life of Eugene Jerome, who although he didn't know it at the time, was on the verge of becoming a Broadway-bound hit playwright. Young Eugene's family issues might have paled beside those of a famously indecisive protagonist from several centuries back who, it seems, took a perverse interest in presenting drama, if only to drive his murderous uncle/stepfather to distraction. The Prince of Denmark took a fatal hit from a poisoned rapier before he could ever made it big in showbiz, but Jude Law drew crowds to the box office as the title character in the Donmar Warehouse production of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Dramatic Situations

Speaking of the box office - some who bought tickets to Keith Huff's A Steady Rain might have been lured by the prospect of seeing James Bond and Wolverine in the flesh, but what they got was the chance to see Daniel Craig and past-winner Hugh Jackman transform themselves into a couple of Chicago cops who get into some tricky situations. One wonders how those officers would have responded to the real or imagined crimes in the two David Mamet plays seen on Broadway this season. In the revival of Oleanna, a college professor played by Bill Pullman is accused of sexual harassment by a student (Julia Stiles). In Mamet's new play, Race, an affluent white man, played by Richard Thomas, stands accused of raping an African American woman. His lawyers (James Spader and David Alan Grier) must decide if he is innocent or guilty, and whether they will take on the case regardless.

Issues of race and politics, just like romance and family concerns, inform much of our lives, and so they did on Broadway as well. Some examples:

• All these strands came together in the three interlinked stories of Ragtime. The revival of Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens and Terrence McNally's musical, set in early 20th century New York, juxtaposed the tragic tale of African American piano player Coalhouse Walker Jr. (Quentin Earl Darrington) with the story of Tateh (Robert Petkoff), a poor immigrant who becomes a Hollywood mogul; and Mother (Christianne Noll), a housewife from New Rochelle who discovers new music, new romance, and ultimately a new family.
• In Tracy Letts' Superior Donuts, an aging white man who is the lonely and disillusioned owner of a Chicago diner (Michael McKean) discovered a new purpose in life as a mentor and surrogate father to a promising young black writer (John Michael Hill).
• Memphis, a new musical from David Bryan and Joe DiPietro set in Tennessee in the 1950s, spotlights a white DJ (Chad Kimball) who falls in love with a black singer (Montego Glover) and pours all his energy into promoting the groundbreaking sounds being created in the black music community.
• In Fela!, an extended family of wives, followers, and the ghost of his assassinated mother (past-winner Lillias White) support Nigerian revolutionary Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (Sahr Ngaujah) as he battles a repressive regime with his own brand of activism and celebratory music.

WINTER AND SPRING 2010

The plays and musicals of 2010 also touch on the same themes and concerns in ways that are both familiar and unique.

• Family values lie at the core of a delightfully macabre new musical based on much-loved characters created by cartoonist Charles Addams: past Tony-winners Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth headline in The Addams Family written by Andrew Lippa, Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice.
• Georges (Kelsey Grammar) and Albin (Douglas Hodge) celebrate their alternate family in the revival of the Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical La Cage aux Folles.
• Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone (past Tony-winner Liev Schreiber) would have liked to keep his attractive niece (Scarlet Johansson) in the family and to himself in this winter's revival of Arthur Miller's working-class drama A View from the Bridge.
• A revival of August Wilson's 1987 Tony Award-winning Best Play Fences features Denzel Washington as a sanitation worker who, having fought against race barriers in his youth, now faces the challenges of being a husband and a father. The production also stars past Tony-winner Viola Davis.
• "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" is the title of a well-known song in the Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Neil Simon musical Promises, Promises, in a revival starring Sean Hayes and past Tony-winner Kristin Chenoweth. But guess what: (spoiler alert!) True love does win in the end.

A pair of other shows this season take a close look at the nature of relationships after love's first bloom, pitting couples against the harsh realities of life.

• In Geoffrey Nauffts' Next Fall, Adam (Patrick Breen) and Luke (Patrick Heusinger)'s five year relationship is tested against religious beliefs and a catastrophic accident.
• Manhattan Theatre Club brought us Donald Margulies' new play Time Stands Still, in which a journalist (Eric Bogosian) and a photographer (Laura Linney) examine their relationship in the aftermath of their experiences in the Iraq War.

American Idiot is about buddies and not couples, but they too must confront the harsh realities of adult life and the prospect war in the new rock musical based on the Grammy award-winning album of the same name by Green Day (with a book by Billie Joe Armstrong and Michael Mayer). The cast includes past Tony-winner John Gallaher, Jr.

Living Legends

What becomes a legend most? In the case of Stephen Sondheim, aside from the frequent revivals of his work, it's a new revue based on his life and work titled Sondheim on Sondheim. The multi-media portrait of the composer/lyricist is created by his frequent collaborator James Lapine and features a cast that includes past Tony-winner Barbara Cook, along with Tom Wopat and Vanessa Williams. English playwright and actor Noël Coward once decided the best way he could showcase his own talent was to write a bravura part for himself. In Roundabout's revival of Coward's Present Laughter, Victor Garber took on that role, an actor in mid-life crisis on the eve of a touring engagement to Africa.

If you ask Dame Edna Everage, certainly a legend in her own mind, the best way to celebrate a megastar icon was to put herself at the center of a new musical extravaganza titled All About Me, which enlisted the help of singer/pianist Michael Feinstein as her co-star and rival. But if the boozy, intense Tallulah Bankhead were still with us, she might have growled that it's really all about Tallulah, and so it was in Looped, a new play by Matthew Lombardo. Valerie Harper played the larger than life husky-voiced actress in a show that recreates an eight-hour recording session during which Bankhead attempts to "loop" a single line of recorded dialogue to a previously shot movie.

Director/choreographer Twyla Tharp has created a new dance musical woven round the immortal songs of pop-music legend Frank Sinatra: Come Fly Away spotlights four couples who romance the night away at a dance club. And Alfred Molina brings the famed 20th-century painter Mark Rothko vividly to life in John Logan's new play Red, a London import.

A legendary moment in recording history is celebrated in Floyd Mutrux and Colin Escott's musical Million Dollar Quartet, which recalls the day in December 1956 when, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley serendipitously came together for the first and only time to record an impromptu jam session. On a different note, but a no less legendary one, is the story of the deaf and blind prodigy Helen Keller, and the dedicated teacher who showed her how to communicate with the world. The revival of William Gibson's The Miracle Worker starred Abigail Breslin as Helen and Alison Pill as her mentor, Annie Sullivan.

Notoriety can become the stuff of legend too, and the wheeling and dealing that signaled one of the last decade's major financial scandals is the context for Lucy Preeble's new play Enron, which arrives on Broadway starring past-winner Norbert Leo Butz, following a successful run in London's West End. And while we are watching real life stories on the stage this Broadway season, we will also get the opportunity to reflect on the ethics of appropriating other people's lives for art. In the Manhattan Theater Club's revival of Collected Stories by the aforementioned Donald Margulies, past-winner Linda Lavin plays a writer whose friendship with a younger writer (played by Lisa Morrison) forces her to ask difficult questions of herself about her life and her art.

A late entry to the season, Sherie Rene Scott's Everyday Rapture, is the musical story of a young woman's psycho-sexual-spiritual journey on the rocky path that separates her mostly Mennonite past from her mostly Manhattan future.

And this memorable year on Broadway also embraced stage comedy of two distinct varieties. Tony Shalhoub, Justin Bartha, and past-winner Anthony LaPaglia star in a new production of Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor, a classic backstage farce. Then there is a new work from playwright Martin McDonagh, best known for serving up hilariously macabre dark comedies. McDonagh's new work, intriguingly titled A Behanding in Spokane, stars Christopher Walken. The play involves a couple of con artists and man who wants his lost hand back. Your guess is as good as ours at this point as to how it works out in the end. Which is, of course, why we can expect to see you at the theatre this season.

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Note: all Tony eligibility determinations are made exclusively by the Tony Awards Administration Committee.