Three Broadway shows - Buena Vista Social Club, Death Becomes Her, and Maybe Happy Ending - each earned a leading 10 Tony Award nominations as nominators spread out the joy and gave nods to George Clooney, Sarah Snook and Bob Odenkirk in their debuts.
Twenty-nine shows got at least one nomination across the 26 Tony categories, even long-closed shows like A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical and Swept Away.
James Monroe Iglehart, who played Armstrong in his musical, wasn't expecting the nomination and woke to his phone blowing up.
"I was like, 'What's going on? Is everything OK?' And then I was, 'OK! How cool is that?" he said.
"I'm just really excited to be a part of this crop of amazing performers."
Buena Vista Social Club, which takes its inspiration from Wim Wenders' 1999 Oscar-nominated documentary on the making of the album of the same name, will face off for best musical crown with Death Becomes Her, based on the 1992 cult classic film about frenemies who seek a magic eternal youth and beauty potion.
The category also includes Maybe Happy Ending, a rom-com musical about a pair of androids that crackle with humanity, and Dead Outlaw, a musical about a real-life alcoholic drifter who was shot dead in 1911 and whose afterlife proved to be stranger than fiction as he was displayed at carnivals for decades.
A second show with a corpse, the British import Operation Mincemeat, also made it, the improbably true story about a British deception operation designed to mislead Nazi Germany about the location of the Allied landing at Sicily.
"What I think is so cool about this year is that the shows are so widely different, and I love that for Broadway," says Christopher Gattelli, the choreographer and first-time director of Death Becomes Her, who earned nods for both jobs.
"We have chamber pieces and really small intimate shows and these wildly funny black box shows, and so, I love that it's been such a great scope of a year. I love that we get to add to that mix."
Dead Outlaw - conceived by David Yazbek, who wrote the music and lyrics with Erik Della Penna - reunites Yazbek with book writer Itamar Moses and the director David Cromer, who collaborated so winningly on the Tony-winning The Band's Visit.
Yazbek said that the team learned a lesson from that show that they applied to Dead Outlaw.
"If you make the thing you want to make and make it true to itself and leave the rest of it up to the fates, then you might actually get the reception that you want. And so we sort of stuck to that approach," he said.
In the best play category, English, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sanaz Toossi's look at four Iranian students preparing for an English language exam, made the cut.
As did The Hills Of California, Jez Butterworth's look at a family gathering for the impending death of its matriarch, set in a hotel in the summer of 1976 in England.
They will compete with John Proctor, Is The Villain, Kimberly Belflower's examination of girlhood, feminism, the MeToo movement and a compelling rebuttal to The Crucible, and Purpose, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's drawing-room drama about an accomplished black family destroying itself from within.
The category is completed with Oh, Mary!, an irreverent, raunchy, gleefully deranged revisionist history by Cole Escola centred on Mary Todd Lincoln, a boozy, narcissistic, potty-mouthed first lady determined to strike out of the subordinate role into which history has placed her.
Clooney got a nod as a leading actor in a play for his retelling the story of legendary reporter Edward R Murrow in an adaptation of his 2005 film Good Night and Good Luck.
The Tony Awards will be handed out on June 8 at Radio City Music Hall during a telecast hosted by Wicked star and Tony winner Cynthia Erivo.
With AAP.
