NYT19980504.0289 NEWS NEWSWIRE A battle for 42d Street pitted Disney's ``Lion King'' against Livent's ``Ragtime'' when the 52d annual Tony Award nominations were announced Monday, but the musical rivalry was all but upstaged by the surprisingly strong showing of straight plays after a long Broadway eclipse. ``The Chairs,'' Eugene Ionesco's nearly half-century-old surrealistic drama about the unmeaning of life, received six nominations, including best revival, best leading actor and actress and best direction. ``The Beauty Queen of Leenane,'' Martin McDonagh's runaway hit about a viperish mother-daughter struggle in rural Ireland, also pulled down six nominations, including awards for all four actors, best play and best direction. With Rosie O'Donnell, the talk show host and Broadway booster, leading a triumvirate of star presenters (Bernadette Peters! Peter Gallagher!) in the time-honored ritual at Sardi's restaurant, ``Ragtime'' took the lion's share of nominations, 13. ``The Lion King'' followed with 11 and ``Cabaret'' with 10. The nominees in 21 categories were selected by a panel of 26 theater professionals. The winners will be chosen in a vote by 782 members of the theatrical profession and journalists and announced on June 7 in a ceremony presented by the American Theater Wing and the League of American Theaters and Producers. The event will be broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall, with Ms. O'Donnell again as host. A special Tony Award of $25,000 for regional theater will be presented to the Denver Center Theater Company, founded in 1979. This year's list of nominees for the Theater Wing's Antoinette Perry Awards was unusually inclusive, with only 9 of the season's 30 Tony-eligible productions failing to receive any nominations at all. Among those frozen out, however, were some big-name shows: ``The Judas Kiss,'' with Liam Neeson; ``The Old Neighborhood,'' by David Mamet; ``The Sunshine Boys,'' ``Wait Until Dark'' and ``The Herbal Bed.'' (Neeson's wife, Natasha Richardson, captured a nomination for leading actress, for ``Cabaret.'') Notable, too, were some Cinderella stories: ``The Scarlet Pimpernel,'' the French Revolution musical the critics couldn't kill, landed in the exalted company of ``Ragtime'' and ``The Lion King,'' along with the Siamese-twins spectacle ``Side Show,'' which critics couldn't save and audiences killed. ``The Capeman,'' Paul Simon's musical about a playground murder, a show that was savaged by critics and ran for only two months, emerged with three nominations, for best original score, orchestration and design. At the announcements Monday, an ebullient Pierre Cosette, a producer of ``Pimpernel,'' savored the ironies. Critics, he said, thought his show was unworthy _ he used an expletive _ ``but the people keep coming _ I can't explain it.'' Upon reflection, he credited the show's success in part to savvy marketing measures, like whetting the public's appetite with the album long before the musical's arrival. ``We did everything to overcome the reviews,'' he said. But plays were the thing this year. After seasons of lamentation for the fate of serious drama on a Broadway awash with megamusicals, ``theater'' was making a comeback, as evidenced by the 19 plays and 12 musicals that opened on Broadway last season. One, the Russian-language ``Cherry Orchard,'' was ruled ineligible to compete. Of the 31 shows that have opened since May 1, 1997, 21 are still running. Isabelle Stevenson, president of the American Theater Wing, marveled at the resurgence of drama. ``The wonderful thing is that there are so many straight plays on this year,'' she said. ``Three or four years ago, it would have been hard to get three straight plays to consider.'' ``Art,'' the young French playwright Yasmina Reza's new work about a bare painting that strips bare a friendship, won three nominations, including best play and direction and best actor for Alfred Molina, a choice that catapaulted him ahead of his two co-stars, Victor Garber and Alan Alda, in the delicately balanced ensemble piece. In the triangle of equals, however, Molina's character may be more equal thanks to a breathless monologue that often brings down the house. And ``Freak,'' John Leguizamo's category-bending, freewheeling, autobiographical one-man show, was nominated for best play while he was nominated for best actor. The nominations for ``The Chairs'' may prove particularly instrumental in keeping the play afloat, as it is what theater people call ``a nervous hit,'' a somewhat puzzling popular success quite apart from its warm critical reception. Although the play never ran on Broadway, appearing last in a small house in 1952, it was counted as a revival since it could hardly be categorized as new work. Another revival, ``A View From the Bridge,'' by Arthur Miller, won four nominations, including best play revival, a citation it shared with Eugene O'Neill's ``Ah, Wilderness!,'' which also won a nomination for Sam Trammel as best featured actor. Another play, ``Golden Child,'' and a musical revival, ``1776,'' each received three nominations, including those for best play and musical. A new musical, ``High Society,'' won two nominations, as did two other plays, ``Honour'' and ``The Diary of Anne Frank.'' The most fanfare, as usual, attended the musical awards, where ``Ragtime,'' Garth Drabinsky's production of E.L. Doctorow's fable about the nation's last millennial upheavals, edged out ``The Lion King,'' Disney's coming-of-age epic set in Africa, which began life as an animated film. The 13 nominations for ``Ragtime'' were 2 fewer than the record 15 voted in 1971 for ``Company,'' which went on to win 7 awards, including best musical. ``Hello, Dolly!'' holds the record for musical victories: 10 Tonys out of 11 nominations in 1964. That the two big musicals led the list came as little surprise, with each show representing a colossal entertainment empire that has staked out turf on a fast-redeveloping 42d Street. Ms. Stevenson of the Theater Wing said she could remember handing a modest prize eight or nine years ago to Julie Taymor, now the highly acclaimed director, artist and costumer behind ``The Lion King'' and other mask extravaganzas. ``When I gave her the check, she said: `Wow! A hundred dollars,''' Ms. Stevenson recalled. Among the surprises in the musical category were the four nominations given ``Side Show'' and the three for ``The Capeman.'' ``Side Show'' benefited from a Tonys ruling to consider the two actresses who played the twins, Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner, as a combined nominee for a musical leading actress award. In the category of luckiest stroke of fate for a Broadway actor, Peter Friedman has already won hands down. Friedman, who plays the rags-to-riches immigrant father in ``Ragtime,'' had been put forward in the leading-actor category, along with his ``Ragtime'' co-star, Brian Stokes Mitchell, who plays the noble and set-upon black man whom injustice turns into a revolutionary. At the last minute, however, Friedman sent the Tony nominating committee a letter asking to be shifted into the secondary category of featured actor, in which presumably he might stand a better chance. The panel ruled that the request came too late, and kept both actors in the running. Both, as it turned out Monday, were nominated _ for best actor.