* If you're betting on winners tonight, put money on Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created In The Heights. He wrote the musical during his sophomore year at Weslyan University in 1998 so I ask, "Did you do it because you needed to write or because you needed to act?"  “I needed to write," he says. "I wasn’t even IN the original.” And he laughs when I ask if the musical for which he is being honored  Sunday night  is anything like it was when he was writing it nine years ago. Says Miranda: "I think there might be five notes that are the same."

* Though she’s already got one Tony win (in 1993 for My Favorite Year), Young Frankenstein’s Andrea Martin, 61, was nervous about this year’s nominations. “I just wanted the anticipation to be over,” she says. “I was in Boston at the Harvard Faculty Club, getting dressed and ready to go down for my complimentary breakfast, so I was hoping someone would call before 9 a.m. when they take the croissants away. I got a phone call and a free breakfast!”

*Patti LuPone, nominated for her starring role in the revival of the musical Gypsy tells us her favorite show (other than her own) now is August: Osage County. A veteran of the stage and the award show, LuPone doesn't mince words and tells us one thing she certainly does NOT want to see more of on Broadway is  “heiresses, models and sports stars. I don’t pick up a baseball bat...” She believes actors need training and told her 17-year-old son if he wants to get involved, he needs to study."It’s a craft.” LuPone gets in shape for a show: “I work out, eat well, get a lot of sleep. At this age, it’s about conservation of energy and distribution of energy.”

*The above-mentioned Stew says he is a songwriter who writes theater. "I don’t write characters according to what they say," he says, " I write according to how words sound.” He never even dreamed about Broadway or the Tonys or anything like it. He grew up in Hollywood and started figuring out the various instruments and beats to the music coming out of his radio before he could write. His four Tony nominations are, he says, "the continuation of this crazy feeling that it is a dream, but it is someone else's dream.. it’s like waking up in a suit. It’s a suit that fits and I like it.” Stew says he has been welcomed by theater people. Plus, “they've given me something...appreciation for a good lyric and a good story. Ironically, that’s more appreciated here than in the rock world."