The current Broadway season began with a portent of bad things to come. Almost a year ago, on June 14, 2011, the much-maligned musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark opened after a record-breaking 192 previews, with a record-breaking cost estimated at $80 million.

Although records are not officially kept, the high-flying, special effects-heavy show surely set new marks for performer injuries, lawsuits and reviewer vitriol, as it drew near-unanimous pans.

Nevertheless, it continues to draw crowds and pull in more than $1 million a week at the box office. And it set the tone for the season being celebrated Sunday night at the Tony Awards.

It was a year crowded with indifferent musicals — commercial successes like Newsies and Once, probable money-losers like Ghost: The Musical and fast flops such as Leap of Faith and Bonnie and Clyde — all based, often with unnerving fidelity, on popular movies.

Because of long-running hits such as The Lion King, Wicked and last year’s runaway hit, The Book of Mormon, plus spiraling ticket prices — $175 for an orchestra seat to Mormon — box-office totals are likely to set a new record for the season. Still, this year’s crop of new musicals is considered the worst in a long time.

How bad were the new musicals this season? When the Tony nominating committee had to fill four slots for best score, they gave two of them to plays with incidental music — Peter and the Starcatcher and One Man, Two Guvnors.

On the other hand, non-musical plays — which were pronounced dead on Broadway just a couple of seasons ago because of rising costs and sinking audience interest — are having a banner year.

The star-filled dysfunctional family drama Other Desert Cities still draws theatergoers after opening off-Broadway almost a year and a half ago.

The racial satire Clybourne Park, 2011’s Pulitzer Prize winner, has settled in for a commercial run, as have the Peter Pan prequel Peter and the Starcatcher, and the adult sexual tug-of-war, Venus in Fur.

 Broadway has rarely been short of recycled plays and its field of revivals was again strong this season.

The dominant production was Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which won the best play Tony in 1949 when it premiered.

It also won the award for best revival in 1984 and 1999 and is the odds-on favorite to win again this year for Mike Nichols’ reproduction, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Although he has been dead for nearly 75 years, composer George Gershwin had a good season.

His masterwork, Porgy and Bess, was reconceived and re-orchestrated as a musical rather than a folk opera, but its theatrical power remained intact, and musically it made all of the new shows sound anemic.

His popular song trunk was again raided — much as it had been in 1983 (for My One and Only) and 1992 (Crazy for You) — for a “new” Gershwin show, Nice Work If You Can Get It, a tuneful romp about a rich playboy and a comely bootlegger, in the style of the frivolous musicals of the Prohibition era.

For those who complain that they “don’t write ’em like they used to,” there was plenty of evidence to back that impression this year on Broadway.