Twisted Broadway. (Dance theater).

IF WE CAN ALL AGREE--AND I THINK we can--that there is a form called "The Broadway Musical," then we probably have to agree that there is also something called "The Off-Broadway Musical,"and that the two differ substantially. In some ways, the off-Broadway musical is defined by the things it doesn't have: It tends not to have big, fancy sets, a large cast and chorus, and a happy, upbeat mood that will appeal to the widest possible audience.

But even before Hair muddied the distinctions between on-and off-Broadway musicals, Broadway had formal experiments like Allegro, dark-hued hits like West Side Story, and chorusless shows like I Do! I Do! And there were largish, lighthearted romps like Little Mary Sunshine and Dames at Sea playing off-Broadway. Exceptions,exceptions, exceptions--any attempt to be strict about the differences between Broadway and off-Broadway musicals will inevitably fail, especially now that Broadway producers regularly raid off-Broadway for material and off-Broadway producers seek out both old Broadway hits and old Broadway flops for revival. And let's not even mention the resident theaters, all looking to find their own version of A Chorus Line to ride to financial stability.

Sometimes, it seems like the only thing you can consistently find in off-Broadway musicals is the sensation of looking at Broadway through a funhouse mirror. Broadway likes the story of a deformed composer who haunts the bowels of the Paris Opera? Let's give them Bat Boy, a musical about a creature who lives in a cave and craves a very literal recipe for a Bloody Mary. Go to the gently satiric revue of Allan Sherman songs, Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!, and you see a spoofy reference to the dance the Little Old Ladies do with their walkers in The Producers. Go to an early work by Jonathan Larson, tick, tick ... BOOM!, and there's a delicious parody of the even more delicious central number in Sunday in the Park With George: This time, instead of capturing on canvas a Sunday afternoon on a riverbank near Paris, the artist--an aspiring composer who waits on tables--paints a verbal picture of Sunday brunch in a contemporary New York restaurant.

Still, it is possible to generalize and say that most off-Broadway musicals will fall comfortably into one of two categories: the spiritual descendants of The Threepenny Opera, the caustic Brecht-Weill musical that was resuscitated off-Broadway in 1954 after failing on Broadway in '33, and the descendants of The Fantasticks, the sweet, minimalist musical, based on a forgotten Edmond Rostand play, that has been running in its tiny Greenwich Village theater for forty-one years. In both cases, the casts are likely to be actors rather than trained dancers--never mind those exceptional exceptions, A Chorus Line and Contact.

This Broadway season already has two downbeat children-of-Threepenny Opera on the boards. Director Joe Mantello has mounted Assassins, the 1990 Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical about the charming folks who have attempted to murder the American president. But the newest off-Broadway musical to make the move is Urinetown, by writer Greg Kotis and composer Mark Hollmann. It was first produced at the New York International Fringe Festival, moved on to an off-Broadway production last season, and kicked off the fall Broadway musical season at Henry Miller's Theatre. Like Rent, which also took a determinedly downtown sensibility to the big time, Urinetown is not one of those generic-set, five-character off-Broadway mini-shows. What made it typically off-Broadway was the nature of its subject matter: a society so hard up for water that the only toilets are pay toilets, and the only pay toilets are owned and operated by a vicious, all-powerful corporation.

While the critics lauded John Carrafa's "choreography," he calls what he does "musical staging" because, as usual, the performers are not trained dancers. Still, in Urinetown, says Carrafa, "A lot of the story is expressed through musical staging. In a way, it's a very conventional musical, because it has these kinds of numbers that you've seen in every show. There's a gospel number, a jazz number, a folk-dance number--these are musical-theater archetypes. So I did my own spin on these archetypes, and it turned out that there's wall-to-wall dancing. It turned out that that's how these characters would express themselves."

Although Carrafa was pleased that the move to Broadway allowed him the opportunity "to look at it again" and "think about all the things that I wanted to make better," he didn't have to redo his original staging. Because Henry Miller's Theatre isn't a traditional house with fixed seating, the Urinetown producers were able to duplicate the size and shape of the show's original stage, and the only changes Carrafa needed to make were to compensate for some altered sight lines. "We wanted to keep the integrity of the show," he says. "We certainly did not want to turn it into something it wasn't."

He did give the Broadway production "a few little extra dances," as well as a splashier curtain call. But, he says, "This show is not a very show-bizzy show." In other words, off-Broadway to the end, even in Times Square.

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