Will ‘Hamilton’ win them all at Tony Awards?

On Sunday night, will Broadway’s runaway hit run the trophy table? As far as musicals go, the real nail-biter at this year’s Tony Awards ceremony (airing at 8 p.m. on CBS) is not whether “Hamilton” wins a bunch of prizes. Because it will. The question is whether it wins them all.

Well, not all all, of course: It can’t grab a statuette for best revival or for best featured actor in a play. But it is possible that its 16 nominations, a record, could result in 13 Tonys — one more than reigning champ “The Producers,” which in 2001 scooped up 12 wins — including for best musical, the evening’s most coveted award.

And given the remarkable hoopla surrounding “Hamilton” — a level of public and media enthusiasm unlike anything I’ve witnessed in two decades of covering theater — wouldn’t a history-making sweep be a fitting capstone for a groundbreaking musical about the making of history?

I will be rooting for “Hamilton” to rack up the lucky 13, and not just because it makes a better story to write up in the press room of New York’s Beacon Theatre, the hall on Manhattan’s Upper West Side from which CBS will broadcast the threehour proceedings, hosted by James Corden. No, it’s because “Hamilton” deserves them. It’s because the theater community needs to acknowledge with outsize emphasis what this work and its creator, LinManuel Miranda, have done: made seeing this musical a national obsession, and musical theater a vital link, again, at last, in the American cultural chain.

A total blowout, one in which “Hamilton” wins more than half of the prizes handed out in 24 categories, is not a done deal by any means. Recognition by the 700-plus Tony voters for some of the exceptional talent in other Broadway shows this season may deny “Hamilton” the top spot on the all-time leaderboard. What follows, then, is a primer on the potential Tony night returns, for musicals and others, what to look for in key races, and how history may in fact be made.

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CHARLES SYKES/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS If “Hamilton” runs the table at Sunday’s Tony Awards, it would best “The Producers’ ” record of 12 wins.