Dance theater.

Dance was the prime mover in the first three Broadway musicals of the current season: Hairspray's plot revolves around dancing on The Corny Collins Show; Flower Drum Song tells great chunks of its story in dance; and Movin' Out is danced from start to finish. So when Les Miserables, one of the few musicals ever to do entirely without the services of a choreographer, announced that it would close this month, it looked as though the static, lumbering megahits that took over Broadway in the '80s had finally had their day.

But just when Broadway seems on the verge of permanent change, it always, seems to change back. Who'd have thought, in the wake of the three shows mentioned above, not to speak of 42nd Street, The Producers, and Thoroughly Modern Millie, that Broadway's next hot thing would be, heaven help us, an opera! Whenever people asked my opinion of Les Mis; I would usually tell them that it was worth seeing, but that it represented a production style much closer to opera than to Broadway. I didn't intend that as praise, and it wasn't said just because all of the show's dialogue was sung.

But it's impossible to dis opera now that La Boheme has joined Hairspray and Movin' Out as the season's best shows. There has to be another explanation for my unhappiness with Les Mis--not that anyone cares, after fifteen years and more than $390 million at the box office, about my objections.

It's not that I don't recognize why it's been so successful. The through-sung show, based on Victor Hugo's classic novel about crime and restitution in nineteenth-century France, has stirring melodies, vivid tableaux, and juicy roles. It has knockout scenic effects and unassailable sentiments on important questions of right and wrong, justice and mercy, acquiescence and revolution. But somehow, it has always seemed leaden to me. And it isn't just that so many of its key scenes are set in dark, dreary places: a hellish prison, a bleak factory, the sewers of Paris.

The problem with Les Mis has been its inertia, its plodding, heavy-footed gait. With the exception of the nasty but undeniably spirited "Master of the House" number, in which we meet the greedy and unscrupulous innkeepers, the Thenardiers, Les Mis has always felt like a show in need of something to get it moving.

A comparison with Boheme is instructive, because there are certain similarities. To begin with, like Les Mis, Boheme is big and foreign-born. Baz Luhrmann first staged this updated version of the Puccini classic at the Opera House in Sydney, in 1990, so it doesn't stint on the singing. It's cast with young but classically trained voices-not pop stars like the 1984 version at the New York Shakespeare Festival that starred Linda Ronstadt. And it doesn't stint on the production values; it's not a stripped-down miniature like Peter Brook's 1983 foray into musical theater, La Tragedie de Carmen. Luhrmann's wife and constant collaborator, the designer Catherine Martin, has given it majestic sets and striking, 1950s-style costumes that would hold the stage of any opera house in the world.

And yet, for all that authenticity-it's even sung in the original Italian, simultaneously translated, more or less, with sur-, sub- and side-titles--Boheme feels less like an opera than Les Mis does. That's because we have tended to associate opera with the stiff, stately, and serious, while Broadway shows summon up images of lively, airy entertainments. I don't mean to suggest that musicals can't be serious (after all, Man of La Mancha is back) or that opera can't be fun (check out The Barber of Seville, just for starters). But in general, opera's very grandness precludes the cocky swagger that informs our best musicals.

Don't tell it to Baz Luhrmann. His lush, bursting-with-life production makes it clear that Broadway and opera don't have to be stylistic opposites. Boheme unleashes powerful gusts of physical energy onstage-all right, let's just give in to the obvious and call it cinematic. Luhrmann, who is known in this country for his wonderfully kinetic movies-Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, and, of course, Moulin Rouge--whirls the scenery around. He choreographs the stagehands. His singers are good-looking and sexy, and even the Playbill pulses with vitality: You see a wall plastered with a huge poster that reads "La Boheme," and, in front of it, a couple in prosaic gray-flannel suits sharing a rapturous, breath-smothering kiss.

Please, hold the letters reminding me about the famously mobile barricade in Les Mis and the spectacular suicide plunge of the villainous Javert. Les Mis is constantly coming to a dead halt while the cast faces the audience and sings a song. This is standard practice in opera stagings from New York to Beijing, but in Luhrmann's Boheme, it never happens. And it shouldn't, not in the opera house and not in the theater.

But even the best staging won't always help, as another through-sung musical proved earlier in the season. Amour, which closed quickly after unenthusiastic reviews, told the fanciful story of a man who could walk through walls. And it told it charmingly, with Michel Legrand's melodic score, James Lapine's expert direction, and even an adorable can-can by Jane Comfort. The show failed because its essential whimsy couldn't co-exist with its operatic form. It should have been a dance show.

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for the Boston Phoenix, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The New York Times, and other publications.