AP / Joan Marcus

Who cares about the Celtics and Lakers in Game 5 of the National Basketball Association finals tomorrow night? Broadway’s 62nd Annual Tony Awards promises plenty of drama.

For starters: Will this year’s broadcast trail last year’s record-low ratings? (Just 5.7 million people watched in 2007, according to Nielsen Co., down 26 percent from the year before.)

Another milestone seems likely. While last year’s show went up against the finale of HBO’s The Sopranos, this year it’s competing against a free broadcast of basketball on ABC. Ratings have been buoyant for the NBA playoffs and finals.

Producers of the Tonys, broadcast live on CBS from Radio City Music Hall (8 p.m., Ch. 4 and 12), are hopeful that their first host in three years, Whoopi Goldberg, can deliver. And Broadway has its own new rivalry, one fitting for a year in which Democrats selected their first black presidential candidate.

The favorite for best musical, the last award of the night, is In the Heights. Top underdog is Passing Strange.

Heights features a Latino cast in an affecting drama set in New York’s Washington Heights. Passing Strange is about an African-American songwriter’s escape from middle-class Los Angeles to sex, drugs and funny accents in Amsterdam and Berlin.

Their songs should be highlights. Passing Strange has a pop-rock score that recalls the Beatles, Burt Bacharach and Lenny Kravitz. It will present “Keys,” in which a character called the youth (Daniel Breaker) arrives in Amsterdam and a Dutch beauty (De’Adre Aziza) offers her flat and herself. Stew, the show’s creator and star, narrates and mocks.

Heights will perform “96,000,” a wry rap and hip-hop-infused song about the dreams and roadblocks of the barrio.

Tomorrow’s program also features about a dozen other numbers, more than in recent years.

In addition to the other shows nominated for best new musical and best musical revival, Rent, which closes in September after 12 years, will perform a song or two. Ditto for Walt Disney Co.’s The Little Mermaid and Young Frankenstein — the season’s two big-budget monsters, which were snubbed by the Tony Awards’ 23 nominators for the top award. Likewise, A Catered Affair, a quiet and melodic musical about a family in the Bronx, N.Y., will present a song.

“The more performances the better,” said Gerard Alessandrini, the writer, creator and co-director of Forbidden Broadway, a long-running musical revue.

“It’s fine by me. I think the Tonys have been too talky in past years. I’d love to see the shows that aren’t nominated for best musical. You want to see what’s happening on Broadway, not people talking about what’s happening.”