To Create or Re-Create? This Season, There's No Question.

Musical theater has never been a good place to look for trends. The gestation of a musical can take months--or years. And it can be transformed several times over before it is finally ready to open. So when two or three or even four shows with a common theme or a shared perspective arrive in a single season, it's much more likely to be a coincidence than a cultural portent.

But there is one trend in Broadway musicals that seems undeniable: This season's lineup, like last season's lineup, promises musicals based on old movies, old plays, old novels. It's more than a little frightening that in a culture addicted to novelty, our commercial musical theater is content to refurbish and recycle the tried-and-true. Of the dozen or so shows liable to open on Broadway this season, only one, The Rhythm Club, is being created from scratch (by newcomers Chad Beguelin and Matthew Sklar).

Not that I'm complaining about the steady stream of revivals we've been getting. They are healthy--even necessary--for a form that's now been around for nearly a century. Revivals let us reconsider shows that were underappreciated when they were new, as Ann Reinking's lustrous 1996 retooling of Chicago did. (This season, Jerry Herman's 1974 Mack and Mabel, about silent-film maestro Mack Sennett and his star, Mabel Normand, gets a second chance to be a hit.) Revivals also allow artists to reconsider classics that may have become ossified in our minds, as Sam Mendes did in 1998, when he revivified Cabaret. (This season, director Trevor Nunn's London production of Oklahoma! and playwright David Henry Hwang's reworking of Flower Drum Song will hopefully refresh those glorious Rodgers and Hammerstein scores.)

The revivals worry me far less than do "new" musicals that are hardly new at all. They are old plays with new songs added (The Visit), or old movies with new scores (Thoroughly Modern Millie), or old, books newly dramatized with music. There's even Mamma Mia!, which opens next month and can be described as old records linked with a new story. And creators don't gaze fixedly backward because it provides a guarantee of success: Last season, Jane Eyre and Tom Sawyer died untimely deaths even though they were based on beloved books; A Class Act was built around the songs of Edward Kleban, the lyricist of A Chorus Line, and didn't last. Relying on established material means only that, more likely than not, a musical will be a work of interpretation rather than creation, limiting the possibilities for the breakthroughs that advance the form.

It's not a hard-and-fast rule, of course. Oklahoma! stretched the form even though it was based on an earlier work, Lynn Riggs's play Green Grow the Lilacs. And the production that arrives in March, with Susan Stroman's acclaimed choreography, apparently does some rethinking of its own. But of the four musicals found worthy of revival last season, only 42nd Street had been derived from previously existing material. Follies, Bells Are Ringing, and The Rocky Horror Show were originally original, and surely that was part of their success. Decades from now, who will want to see revivals of our retreads? Even off-Broadway, where producers should be more daring because audiences (and costs) are limited, the hotly anticipated musical is Reefer Madness, based on the 1936 anti-drug propaganda film that marijuana-smoking 1970s audiences loved to hoot at. Produced successfully in 1999 in Los Angeles, the show is written by Dan Studney and Kevin Murphy and will be choreographed by Paula Abdul.

And Broadway will look like the aisles of your local video store. In spring there will be a musical version of Sweet Smell of Success, the acrid 1957 movie with Burt Lancaster as a vicious gossip columnist and Tony Curtis as a toadying publicist. Trying out in December in Chicago, it's written by John Guare and composed by Marvin Hamlisch. The director is Nicholas Hytner, who did the glorious revival of Carousel a few years back. And ballet fans will note that the dances will be created by Christopher Wheeldon, the remarkable young choreographer-in-residence at the New York City Ballet.

Other movies getting the Broadway musical treatment this season include Thoroughly Modern Millie, the 1967 flapper musical that starred Julie Andrews (Michael Mayer directs and Rob Ashford choreographs); and A Face in the Crowd, Elia Kazan's 1957 drama about how a canny guitar-strumming hillbilly (Andy Griffith) is packaged and sold--first as a TV star and then as a politician (Walter Bobbie directs). And you can bet that the trend-spotters will blame The Producers if The Night They Raided Minsky's, another 1968 movie comedy about show biz, makes it to Broadway this season. But that show was already on the drawing boards last season.

Another holdover from last year is Little Women. Whether or not the novel by Louisa May Alcott finally makes it to the stage, there's at least one book-to-musical project that's a sure thing: Susan Stroman is directing and choreographing Thou Shalt Not, based on Emile Zola's Therese Raquin. The story of adultery and murder has been updated to the 1940s and moved to New Orleans, and the score is by Harry Connick Jr. It opens next month under the auspices of Lincoln Center Theatre, which mounted Stroman's unequivocally original Contact.

As for the plays that are returning with the added fillip of song and dance, Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor has been turned into Lone Star Love, set you know where, directed by Michael Bogdanov and choreographed by Patricia Birch. And Chita Rivera opens this month in Chicago as the millionaire who returns to her hometown to settle old scores in The Visit, with a Terrence McNally book based on Friedrich Durrenmatt's play, and music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Ann Reinking has done the choreography, and assuming all goes well in Chicago, the show will proceed to Broadway, where, of course, Lynn Fontanne starred in 1958--in the original.

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