Patti LuPone basked in applause during the opening-night curtain call for 'Gypsy' in March.

The Broadway musical is having an especially good year.

The long-running cash cows are Mama Mia! Chicago, Hairspray, The Jersey Boys and, of course, The Phantom of the Opera.

Spring Awakening (Eugene O'Neill Theatre) continues to draw young audiences, with its mixture of rock music and teenage sexuality, while Legally Blonde (Palace Theatre) bounces along light-headedly with its chewing-gum mirth.

However, the newest rages are revivals of Gypsy, starring recently crowned Tony Award winner Patti LuPone, and South Pacific - both hot tickets.

The deliberately low-keyed A Catered Affair (Walter Kerr Theatre) is a wonder in unexpected ways. It doesn't have colourful decor (just monochromatic photo projections on a Bronx tenement), big musical numbers, or characters that knock your socks off. Based on Paddy Chayefsky's teleplay, adapted by Gore Vidal for a fifties film starring Ernest Borgnine, Bette Davis, and Debbie Reynolds, it's anti-musical in the traditional sense. It earns respect, if not wild enthusiasm for its very human, very flawed family struggling to cope with a soldier son's death, a daughter's wish to have a quiet, little wedding, and the father's dashed dream of owning his own taxi.

Gay Broadway icon Harvey Fierstein is responsible for the libretto, and, uncharacteristically, he has come down on the side of littleness, even holding down his own character (Winston, the gay bachelor brother of the anxious mother of the bride) to a very credible scale. The tale focuses on the parents loveless marriage, and it's definitely to the show's credit to have Faith Prince and Tom Wopat playing these roles in a way that reaches down to the characters' pain.

A Catered Affair is one example of how the Broadway musical has changed. Two other newcomers to the genre also have urban life stamped on them, but seem fresh, exuberant, and happily rooted in American dreaming. Passing Strange (Belasco Theatre) and In The Heights (Richard Rodgers Theatre) mark the Broadway debuts of rocker recording artist/performer Stew and Lin-Manuel Miranda respectively and they are delightful contrasts in tone and style.

Passing Strange is an autobiographical satire on the rites of passage theme, following, as it does, its budding musician from his early days of struggle in Los Angeles to Amsterdam and Berlin, where he becomes part of a group of political and sexual radicals before returning to the States where he is perpetually reminded that he is an oppressed Black Man, even when he isn't. The show has a disarming simplicity with its on-stage band and librettist/narrator/rock-band-leader, and though it's loose in its episodic narrative, it's directed and performed with admirable dynamism, preserving its witty, sardonic tone.

In The Heights turns lead performer Lin-Manuel Miranda, who conceived the idea for the show, into a bona fide Broadway star. The show earned four Tonys at the June awards gala, including Best Musical and Best Original Score for Miranda. It is chiefly a series of vivid vignettes of Latino urban life in Washington Heights, N.Y., heavily steeped in sentimental melodrama and rather mechanical in its form, but it has an extraordinary musical pulse - discounting the generic and bland moments. Miranda plays the owner of a corner bodega in a neighbourhood rife with Latino dreamers with sugar and spice temperaments.

For anyone interested in how a classic musical can be re-invented, there's much to applaud in Bartlett Sher's revival of South Pacific (Vivian Beaumont Theatre) and Arthur Laurents' "take" on Gypsy (St. James Theatre).

According to audience and critical response, the overwhelming consensus is that South Pacific is a gem - a brilliant rendition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein romance that has a glorious score and a topical themes of multi-racial love and tolerance. Rather than seeming faded like an old tinted litho, the musical seems fresh and bright in Michael Yeargan's stylized South Pacific beachscape, its tone of optimism, and the director and cast's measure of love. Everyone is enraptured by Paulo Szot's Emile de Becque, the French plantation owner, and Kelli O'Hara's Nellie Forbush, the Navy nurse from Little Rock. Both performers create carefully shaded portraits and both sing marvelously.

In Gypsy, with LuPone as Madame Rose, Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, has given the show a brilliant transparency, using simple sets, placing the orchestra on stage, and emphasizing the vulnerability of characters. I had never before experienced an ensemble so wonderfully suited to its roles (particularly Boyd Gaines as Herbie and Laura Benati as Louise), and certainly no one in my experience has matched LuPone's performance as Rose. Though her voice can be shrill and somewhat lacking in warmth, her big number, Rose's Turn, is one of the greatest theatrical performances ever, as LuPone shows Rose's disintegration in a chillingly horrifying way that zings its way to the last row of the upper gallery.

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