“Where’s the money?” is, by a full fathom, the least appreciated famous-line Shakespeare ever wrote. The proper Elizabethan pronunciation, of course, is “wheyah’s da money?”—at least, according to Daniel Sullivan, Dean of Popular Bardology at the Delacorte Theater and Shakespeare in the Park's go-to Great Communicator. His cheerfully populist guys-and-dolls-and-clones interpretation of The Comedy of Errors—a clockwork Plautine comedy that needs little interpretation and, for exactly that reason, is always in danger of getting way too much of it—isn’t smothered under trowelfuls of thoughtful dramaturgy. No, Sullivan's basically just changing ducats to dollars, supplicating the spirit of Damon Runyon, and hoping he makes money on the exchange (and receives no hate mail from Stephen Greenblatt). The bet pays off: everyone wins. Except, occasionally, the meter. But hell, we’re Americans. Throw the meter! Cash up front!

Tonight the drama is not about Freys vs. Starkes or Joan vs. Peggy. All that can wait, because tonight is about Kinky Boots vs. Matilda, Hanks vs. Lane, and the rest of the battles of the 2013 Tony Awards. The always dependable Neil Patrick Harris is hosting the proceedings on CBS, but here at Vulture two far more opinionated minds will be narrating the show: Critics Scott Brown and Jesse Green are live-blogging the whole Tonycast, giving their expert take on who earned their victory, who got snubbed, and what it all means for the state of theater today. Join them!

Every Tony season it's a perennial temptation to frame the race as an apocalyptic battle for the soul of a perpetually embattled art form. Which is exactly what our theater critics (who'll also co-live-blog CBS’s Tonycast at 8 p.m. EST this Sunday here at Vulture) are prepared to do again this year, as Broadway theater — coming off a year of solid box office but eroding attendance, a year of abundant new work but persistent complaints about lack of creativity, deadening commercial-mindedness, and insufficient risk-taking — celebrates itself and its own for the 67th time. Insiders versus outsiders, old guard versus new, "family" shows versus more grown-up razzle-dazzle, dogged career dues-payers versus avid celebrity carpetbaggers: there are hundreds of ways to look at this year's Tony pileup, and not one of them tells the whole tale. So let's apply the philosophy of firebrand columnist Mike McAlary, as portrayed by Tom Hanks in Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy, and just print a few theories that may or may not be on their way to becoming fact.

Other than Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House, Ibsen’s plays are mostly out of fashion these days, especially the folkloric early works featuring trolls and the mystical late works featuring Great Men who, come to think of it, are also trolls. The effectiveness of those in the latter category, including The Master Builder, now being revived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, depends in part on an assumption of respect for great men in general, so that something dramatic can occur when they are found to be wanting. Our time is not perhaps sufficiently amenable to that assumption. In any case, the revival, directed by Andre Belgrader and starring John Turturro, makes an excellent case for continued neglect.

To find out where the musical is going these days, you may have to follow it into a tent. Not Pippin’s big top on Broadway but the one nestled beneath the High Line at West 13th Street, where Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, Dave Malloy’s enthralling take on Tolstoy, is playing. Actually, there’s some confusion about the setting: The tent, once you enter it, turns into a Russian supper club called Kazino, kitted out gorgeously by the designer Mimi Lien in miles of red velvet hung with framed czarist portraits. A light Russian dinner (including borscht, pierogies, vodka, and what unfortunately tasted one night like vintage black bread) is included with your $125 ticket. But the show presented right in the midst of 199 patrons at tables and bars has little to do with bread or circuses. Rather, it describes itself in its lyrics as both a novel and an opera (and, sure enough, is completely sung) while also incorporating flourishes of a cabaret act, a floor show, a Broadway music drama, and — why not? — a naughty stag party.

Especially after the loud uplift and confetti cannons of Broadway’s spring jamboree, one of the pleasures of Off Broadway in May is the chance to recalibrate your ears and expectations to a more human scale. Precision kicklines give way to the individual choices of actors working in the same room with you, inches away. Yes, it’s a blast watching drag queens do flips on conveyor belts, or Bette Midler crack wise in a caftan, but it’s also pretty thrilling to watch Deirdre O’Connell, as a beleaguered stepmother in A Family for All Occasions, walk into her home after a day at a factory and do nothing. She’s so stiff she can barely sit. Even the muscles around her mouth — which in the 90-seat Bank Street Theater you can easily see — are clenched. She’s the living embodiment of the word dour, down to the cellular level, it seems, and in the second act, when she tries out a three-speed electronic foot massager someone has brought as a gift, her pleasure is so surprising (and nearby) it makes you laugh as if it were happening to you.