Last Monday, the day after it won a record 12 Tony Awards - the annual accolades for Broadway theatre - the smash hit musical The Producers took in $1.3 million in ticket sales, adding to its pre-Tonys advance of $33 million.

That same day Proof, the winner of this year's Best Play Tony, took in $112,000 at the box office - triple its usual 24-hour earnings, while 42nd Street and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, winners of the Best Musical and Play Revival awards respectively, both doubled their box office figures.

Elsewhere on Broadway, the news was hardly as good. In the two days following the awards, three musicals - A Class Act, Bells are Ringing, and Jane Eyre, which all failed to win Tonys - announced that they will have closed by now, at a collective loss of $17 million. (Somewhat bizarrely, Jane Eyre had only remained open until the Tonys because the pop singer Alannis Morrisette, a friend of one of the show's producers, wrote a personal cheque for $150,000 to cover the production's running costs in the final weeks leading up to the awards).

These are big bucks we are talking about - so big, in fact, that bucks are just about the only thing people talk about at Tony time.

While the two organisations that run the Tony Awards - the League of American Theatres and Producers and the American Theatre Wing - are quick to characterise the Tonys as an arbiter of artistic excellence, most people who observe the Broadway scene agree that the Tonys are all about money - about the awards' ability to generate revenue for productions and, to a lesser extent, to publicise and market Broadway theatre as a whole.

"There's no question," wrote Don Shewey in an article in Performing Arts magazine as far back as 1989, "that today the Tony Awards are an economic proposition, pure and simple."

It was not always thus. When they were first established in 1947, the Tonys (which were named after the pioneering stage director and Theatre Wing founder Antoinette Perry) were not thought of as competitive awards but as recognition of noteworthy work; nominations were not made public until 1956.

In the chronology of the Tony Awards, however, the year 1967 stands out most prominently - the first year the awards were televised. It is the promotional power of television exposure on the Tonycast that has completed the transformation of the Tonys from a nod to artistic achievement into (in the words of New York Magazine's Jeremy Gerard) "the heroin of the Broadway establishment".

Consider the numbers. This year 30 seconds of commercial time on the CBS-TV broadcast of the Tony Awards cost $200,000. As part of the broadcast, the Best Play and Best Musical nominees were each allotted four minutes of air time for a production excerpt - that is, over a million dollars worth of free advertising each. (One can only imagine the chagrin, therefore, of the producers of this year's Irish Tony contender, Stones in His Pockets when it received nominations for Best Actor (Conleth Hill and Sean Campion) and Best Direction (Ian McElhinney) but not for Best Play - no free ad for them.)

Getting exposure on the Tonycast and winning Tonys can extend not only the life of a production on Broadway but beyond - shows have a better chance at regional productions and national and international touring if they've got a few awards under their belt. And for individual artists, winning a Tony definitely opens up doors: "It has given me an entree into a market that's very far away from Britain and Ireland," says Garry Hynes, winner of the 1998 Tony for best direction and who has since directed two high-profile productions for New York companies.

But how effective are the Tonys as an award-giving system? Closer scrutiny reveals some rather gaping holes in the overall conception and administration of the awards - holes that the Broadway establishment apparently has little interest in filling. A fundamental limitation is the fact that the Tonys are awarded to Broadway shows only, so excluding productions that play off- and off-off-Broadway and in the regions - which is where much of the creativity and innovation in American theatre takes place.

The last nine plays that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for example, originated in regional or off-Broadway theatres; this year's Tony winner for Best Play, David Auburn's Proof, also won the Pulitzer, but it originated at the off-Broadway Manhattan Theatre Club over a year ago.

Jed Bernstein, executive director of the League of American Theatres and Producers, says the reason the Tonys stay exclusive to Broadway is because of the level playing field argument. Comparing productions produced on a Broadway scale with ones done in a tiny downtown theatre is like comparing apples and oranges." Bernstein also downplays the Tonys' overall importance: "They're not about identifying the best performances in New York or America as a whole - they are just about identifying professional achievement among these particular contestants." And, some would argue, putting more money in those contestants' pockets.

Another chronic problem with the Tony system, according to New York Magazine's Jeremy Gerard, is the fact that its voting is unsupervised.

The Tonys are decided by a group of some 700 theatre professionals and critics, who vote by mail-in ballot and who are theoretically required to vote only in those categories in which they have seen every production.

But the Tony administration has no means of checking that voters accurately represent what they have and haven't seen, and Gerard believes corners are being cut across the board.

"My bet would be that this year very few industry people saw the Tom Stoppard play( The Invention of Love) because of the assumption that Proof would win, and I wonder how many bothered to see Bells are Ringing, which got pretty bad reviews" says Gerard.

Broadway is a cosy community of some 40 theatres located( with a few exceptions) in the same 11 block radius of central Manhattan. Opening up the system would doubtless result in that money being spread out into a greater number of hands.

That Stones may well prove "Tony-proof" has a lot to do with it's scaled down production values - with two actors and no set, it costs a fraction of what it takes to keep a musical such as the Producers on its feet. But Moylan says that, like most other shows on Broadway, Stones, will continue to list its Tony nominations in its marketing materials.

Whatever the faults of the system, the Tony imprimatur remains a vital element of Broadway success, and introducing any changes in that system seems at the moment as impossible as- well- getting tickets to The Producers.