Tony Awards 2012: What time is the show? Here’s the curtain-raiser

What time are the Tony Awards? You don’t need to break a leg to find out.

The 66th annual Tony Awards will take place in a three-hour ceremony at New York’s Beacon Theatre. The show will be broadcast at at 8 p.m. Sunday on CBS -- live on the East Coast and tape-delayed on the West Coast. Theater fans who want to follow the red carpet live will have to content themselves with the Tonys’ online feed at www.tonyawards.com, starting at 3 p.m. PDT. (And of course, we’ll have fulll coverage on Culture Monster throughout the night.)

Neil Patrick Harris will host Broadway’s biggest night for the third time, but don’t expect the actor to repeat anything like his over-the-top opening number about Broadway last year, which featured the chorus “It’s not just for gays anymore.” The show will instead open with a performance from last year’s best musical Tony winner,”The Book of Mormon,” which was written by the duo behind the raunchy TV show “South Park.”

TONYS 2012: Red carpet | Winners & Nominees

“It’s a tricky line to draw, because if I try not to do what I did the last two times then I’m not really honoring the night,” Harris told The Times during rehearsals. “But I also don’t want to replicate what I’ve done in the past. I didn’t want to do an acerbic, pushing-the-line opening dance number this year because, well, that went well last year and I don’t want to seem redundant.”

As a whole, the show is expected to take a different tack, given that it won’t have a hit like Trey Parker and Matt Stone‘s “Book of Mormon” that resonated with the masses. The leading nominees this time are the intimate Irish musical “Once” and “Newsies,” and new dramas like “Clybourne Park” and “Desert Cities.”

In addition to featuring numbers from “Newsies,” the Disney family romp based on the 1992 movie, as well as the physical comedy of plays such as “One Man, Two Guvnors” and “Peter and the Starcatcher,” the Tonys are slated to include appearances from such up-and-comers such as Jessica Chastain and Jim Parsons and standbys like Matthew Broderick and Angela Lansbury.

PHOTOS: Tonys 2012 red carpet arrivals

So who will take home the night’s big awards? Tell us in the comments below, read Times theater critic Charles McNulty’s take, and tune in Sunday night.

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