Is dance on Broadway in trouble? What you see depends on where you look.

So is the glass half empty, or is the glass half full? It's understandable if Broadway dancers can't decide.

Pessimists have plenty to be cheerful about. Of the three musicals that opened in the first half of this season, not one had a traditional dance ensemble--La Cage aux Folles came closest, with a kick line composed mainly of men in high heels. Those dozens of tapping feet at 42nd St. and the undulating torsos in Bombay Dreams are history. And there's no obvious, surefire hit among the musicals scheduled for the test of the season.

Optimists, however, can counter with the news that Christopher d'Amboise, Peter Pueci, and Scott Wise are all working on dance shows for next season. And even if they don't make it, Twyla Tharp's Movin' Out is still going strong; one of her former dancers, John Carrafa, has directed and choreographed the new Beach Boys musical, Good Vibrations; there will be dancing a-plenty when Sweet Charity returns next month with choreography by Wayne Cilento, and even straight-play audiences got to see a bit of Sean Curran choreography at the end of the Lincoln Center production of the classic Restoration comedy The Rivals.

The fact is, you can make a case that dance is thriving on Broadway. And you can make a case that it's in trouble. What you see depends on where you look.

Negativity is an old theater disease--sometimes it seems as though the death of theater has been imminent pretty much since the Greeks invented it. But with the latest round of muttering and doomsaying come some admittedly grim facts and figures about Broadway. Only one new American play opened in the first half of the season. The two new musicals that arrived, Dracula and Brooklyn, did not look like good bets for long runs. A new report found that regular theatergoers, of at least those living in the New York metro area, currently make up only 40 percent of Broadway spectators--spelling doom for new shows without a tourist hook. It's become a truism that, with rare exceptions, the theater no longer makes its own stars--it must borrow them from movies and television. And everything in our culture, from the music on the radio to the content of our politics, reminds us that the theater which once fed the nation's entertainment media has devolved into irrelevance.

This was brought home with some force at the end of last year, when PBS, with great hoopla, rebroadcast Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1957 made-for-television musical, Cinderella. Even as a 9-year-old, I was caught up in the excitement--carefully orchestrated, as it turns out--surrounding the original event: the leading composers of the day creating a show to be performed just once, with Julie Andrews heading a cast of Broadway stalwarts. All of America--or at least, a staggering 170 million viewers--tuned in to watch the live broadcast. And what they saw was a superbly written, elegantly produced 1950s Broadway show, complete with hummable score, charming comic business for lesser characters, and glamorous dancers swirling past the camera in ball gowns.

It was lovely to see it again, and to find it remarkably undated nearly 50 years after its creation. But my pleasure was tempered by the realization that such an event would be utterly impossible today, and not just because Broadway doesn't have the cultural clout or the mass appeal it once enjoyed. It's because the musical theater's resources, too, have been downsized. Who's our Julie Andrews? Which composers would provide a score for her? There's no avoiding the fact that the changes that have overtaken the theater in my lifetime do not bode well for its future.

Of course, they were saying this in the '20s as movies started making inroads into the theater and in the '50s when television started keeping audiences at home--not for nothing is Broadway called "the fabulous invalid." And even as we bemoan the decline of theater in general and musicals in particular, Pucci and d'Amboise and others seem eager to make their way from concert dance to Broadway. Of course, there's been a well-worn, two-way street between Broadway musicals and concert dance for a long time, going back to the 1930s and Balanchine's day. For him, as for those who cross over today, there was a very compelling reason to take theater jobs: They pay, especially when compared with the economics of smaller, less-established dance companies.

It's hard to swallow the idea that bad times for the theater might mean good times for dancers. But the out-of-towners who now make up the bulk of Broadway's ticket-buyers want big, glitzy shows with elaborate production numbers--and that means dancers. Foreigners, lured by a sinking dollar, don't want to have to struggle through a book musical in English--and that means dancers. Bankable new musicals are few and far between, so producers bring in revivals--and that means dancers. Theater may, as usual, be dying. But its legs seem healthy indeed.

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for Newsday and The New York Times.