New season--new era? (Dance Theater).

FOR DANCE FANS, ONLY ONE MUSICAL this season is going to matter. Twyla Tharp is trying Broadway again, and everything else seems somehow--oh, let's just say less momentous.

Not that there aren't plenty of goodies to look forward to. There's another Rodgers and Hammerstein revival, the rarely seen Flower Drum Song. Line dancing makes its Broadway debut in a stage version of the 1980 John Travolta movie Urban Cowboy. And Baz Luhrman, the Australian director who filmed the memorable dance sequences in Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge, is bringing his celebrated 1990 production of La Boheme to America, first to San Francisco and then to New York.

But Tharp's Movin' Out has something none of these upcoming projects can hope for: It has the potential to rewrite the rules for Broadway musicals. Because it isn't a musical at all. It's a dance work.

Admittedly, the line between musical theater and dance theater can be pretty fuzzy, and Susan Stroman's Contact made it even fuzzier. But as a general rule, if nobody onstage sings or talks, it's dance. And Movin' Out features some of Tharp's favorite dancers--John Selya, Elizabeth Parkinson, Keith Roberts, and American Ballet Theatre's Ashley Tuttle, among others--dancing wordlessly to a suite of Billy Joel songs. The songs will, in fact, be sung, but not by the characters portrayed in them--Michael Cavanaugh, who leads the band, is the vocalist.

Broadway audiences have certainly embraced straight dance before: There was the Matthew Bourne version of Swan Lake in 1998, which was marketed--very successfully--as a Broadway musical; Tango Argentino and Riverdance were unambiguous dance shows and unambiguous hits. Tharp herself has rented Broadway houses for her company.

But it's hard to imagine that smart, experienced Broadway producers like the Nederlanders and Emanuel Azenberg would be backing a dance show without the dance precedent set by Contact and the pop music precedent set by Mamma Mia! Remember, Tharp's 1985 outing on Broadway, when she directed and choreographed Singin' in the Rain, did not cause theater critics to genuflect. And it ran less than a year.

That, of course, was a standard book musical. Movin' Out, despite its very specific narrative, will be much closer in form to what she has succeeded at. Tharp's appetite for and understanding of music has always been the bedrock of her genius; so if anyone can take the rollicking oeuvre of Billy Joel and turn it into great theater, she will. And if she does, it could well open yet another chapter in the long, intertwined history of Broadway musicals and concert-dance choreographers.

Until that happens, though, it's business as usual for the 2002-03 season of Broadway musicals, which began last month with the openings of Hairspray (at the Neil Simon Theatre) and The Boys From Syracuse (from the Roundabout). Based on the 1988 camp classic directed by John Waters, Hairspray is directed and choreographed by the team that did The Full Monty, Jack O'Brien and Jerry Mitchell. (They're now at work on Imaginary Friends, due in December and billed as a "play with music"--Marvin Hamlisch and Craig Carnelia wrote the score, Nora Ephron the book.) Syracuse is a revival of the 1938 hit by Rodgers and Hart, and director Scott Ellis and choreographer Rob Ashford (Thoroughly Modern Millie) have big shoes to fill: The original was done by two Georges, Abbott and Balanchine.

Movin' Out (at the Richard Rodgers Theatre) arrives in October, along with two other musicals. Flower Drum Song, the 1958 show set in San Francisco's Chinatown, has been revamped by playwright David Henry Hwang and directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom (who did the brilliant but underappreciated Sideshow). I can remember seeing Miyoshi Umeki and Pat Suzuki performing numbers from the delicious score on television, but who knew that Gene Kelly and Carol Haney were, respectively, the director and choreographer? This production comes to Broadway by way of Los Angeles. Amour (at the Music Box) comes by way of France, with a score by the famed film composer Michel Legrand and a story set in 1950s Paris. James Lapine and John Carrafa, who collaborated so successfully last season on Into the Woods, are set to handle the direction and choreography.

Carrafa, who did two shows last season, is busy again: In November, he teams with his Urinetown director, John Rando, for Dance of the Vampires, which is based on Roman Polanski's 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers and features a score by rock composer Jim Steinman. And the year closes out in December with La Boheme (at the Broadway Theatre), a heralded update of the Puccini opera to be sung in Italian.

AFTER NEW YEAR'S DAY, WE CAN LOOK forward to Urban Cowboy, with Belinda Roy choreographing to country music hits; The Look of Love, based on the songs of Hal David and Burt Bacharach and choreographed by Ann Reinking; and a pair of revivals, Nine and Man of La Mancha.

Although not officially on Broadway, Harlem Song, the George Wolfe production now at the Apollo Theatre, has Broadway written all over it. The revue traces the history of Harlem and has choreography by Ken Roberson. And on a smaller scale, this month Lincoln Center Theater opens the latest work by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (Ragtime). It's based on the lovely 1994 film A Man of No Importance, which starred Albert Finney as a dedicated director of amateur theatricals. If you missed it, do yourself a favor and rent it. It will remind you of why we theater addicts keep dreaming about the next season.

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