But what does that make Broadway — Hollywood for the powerless? When it comes to actual theater — you know, with tickets, ushers, curtains and the whole live performance thing — it’s harder to spot a tradition of biting political commentary. That’s because America doesn’t have one. At a time when every aspect of life has been polarized both right and left — when buying a red T-shirt at the Gap is supposed to fight AIDS in Africa, and SUV drivers support the troops from their bumper magnets — mainstream drama is still content to be expensive highbrow escapism. Anyway, how can producers expect people to pay $100 a ticket to be hectored for their complacency, when attending a play is already perceived as an elitist, blue-state activity?

You can count the great 20th-century American political playwrights on one hand b

At the same time, the 2006-07 season on Broadway was remarkable for showcasing a handful of topical works. The most-heralded new play of the season was Tom Stoppard’s epic about Russian pre-Revolutionary intellectuals, “The Coast of Utopia,” which ended its limited engagement in May after playing to mostly full houses and getting miles of column inches in New York newspaper arts sections. There’s Beltway frisson over “Frost/Nixon,” Peter Morgan’s cinematic retelling of the historic 1977 David Frost interviews with Richard M. Nixon. The production, which transferred from London’s Donmar Warehouse, has strong word-of-mouth over its stars, Michael Sheen and Frank Langella. Earlier this season, English dramatist David Hare’s thoughtful wartime drama “The Vertical Hour” weathered mixed reviews on the strength of its Hollywood cast (Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy). Although “Vertical Hour” wasn’t quite the hit its producers envisioned (tickets were easy to score in the final weeks), the production earned back its $2.6 million investment.

The late August Wilson’s “Radio Golf,” a bittersweet study of the black bourgeoisie and its problematic relationship to African-American history, is hanging in with roughly 60 percent weekly attendance, but long-term ticket sales are lean. The play has earned respectful notices and has been drawing refreshingly diverse crowds, but it’s unclear whether audiences will warm to its faintly retrograde dichotomy: black heritage vs. assimilation. At the same time, you have to be excited by Wilson’s frank, profane, lyrical discussion of racial issues on a Broadway stage, when the Great White Way remains overwhelmingly, yes, white.

Several of the season’s political works started life in Britain, which has a state-subsidized tradition of civic-minded dramatists that connects the history plays of Shakespeare to Shaw’s drawing-room dialectics, Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, David Hare, Howard Barker and, recently, the edgy, issue-oriented dramas of Joe Penhall and Mark Ravenhill. Tom Stoppard, a postmodern pasticheur with a Shavian gift for rhetoric, is not usually listed in their company. His whimsical, nimble constructions (“Arcadia” and “The Invention of Love”) toy with ideas rather than use them as weapons against the status quo. Stoppard also locates himself right of center: “I am a conservative in politics, literature, education and theater,” he has said. This usually translates into a profound skepticism of idealists and moral relativists’ grafting philosophy onto the chaotic messiness of life. An unapologetic Thatcherite, Stoppard is wary of abstract, totalizing theories in the public sphere. Hence the sardonic title “The Coast of Utopia,” which is the only concise thing about the work.

The eight-and-a-half-hour trilogy centers on exiled Russian political theorist Alexander Herzen, who supported anti-czarist revolutionary ideals in the 1830s but grew disillusioned after the violence and failures of the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe. Over 35 years, we follow Herzen and his circle of friends, lovers and rivals from Moscow to exile in Paris, London and Italy. Our ideologically tormented hero suffers personal tragedy, his political philosophy acquires a darker, tragic hue and he watches Russia end serfdom and start down the bloody path to Westernization.

This bookish and tediously episodic behemoth isn’t wholly successful as theater (it’s better read and/or visualized as a BBC miniseries). The characters tend to blend into one another and the playwright seems more interested in juggling philosophies than crafting characters. But for all its repetitiveness, structural bloat and unwieldiness, “The Coast of Utopia” was a signal theatrical event in a town that is generally starved for idea plays. Scholars, historians and journalists flocked to hear Billy Crudup, as the Slavophile literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, denouncing literary thralldom to Western models; they raptly watched Ethan Hawke’s anarchist firebrand Michael Bakunin swagger about, advocating violence for its own sake. For a brief time, theatergoing seemed like a plausible pastime for New York’s intelligentsia. Stoppard both honored the passion of his obscure subjects yet ironically underscored the fact that they lay the groundwork for Stalin.

What does Stoppard’s trilogy have to say about the Iraq war, American imperialism or the struggle against radical Islamists? He’d be the first to eschew utility in art. “I’m not impressed by art because it’s political,” he has said in “Tom Stoppard in Conversation.” “The plain truth is that if you are angered or disgusted by a particular injustice or immorality, and you want to do something about it, now, at once, then you can hardly do worse than write a play about it.”

If “The Coast of Utopia” was fascinated with ideas on the page but dubious about their application in the world, David Hare’s “The Vertical Hour” was precisely the reverse. Hare always strives to connect the personal and the political and to limn the ways that ideologies corrupt or purify our lives. “The Vertical Hour” centers on a power struggle between Nadia Blye (Julianne Moore), a foreign war correspondent turned Yale professor and a staunch defender of the Iraq war, and Oliver Lucas (Bill Nighy), her prospective father-in-law, an English doctor living in the Welsh countryside with a guilty past. Oliver is a sardonic critic of the American invasion in Iraq. When asked why, he quips, “Let’s just say, I knew who the surgeon was going to be, so I had a fair idea of what the operation would look like.” Over the course of an early-morning scene that mixes seduction, confession and debate, Nadia and Oliver discuss love, Iraq, freedom and how to act in the world without doing harm. For a theatergoer used to musical fluff or hoary revivals, “The Vertical Hour” was refreshing: People on a Broadway stage talking openly and intelligently about the Iraq war.

“The Vertical Hour” was red-meat political theater (as was Hare’s “Stuff Happens,” an engrossing docudrama about the run-up to the Iraq war, which opened in April at the Public Theater). By contrast, “Frost/Nixon” is about the manufacturing of political theater, rather than the thing itself. Peter Morgan, screenwriter for movies like “The Queen” and “The Last King of Scotland,” knows that his audience wants to see powerful public figures dragged down. He just doesn’t investigate the issues beyond psychological motivation. It’s all personality-driven bread and circuses to Morgan, who fudges the facts about the Frost interviews to ratchet up the excitement. The key “confession” that Nixon gives toward the end of the interviews was actually considered and prepared the day before. “Frost/Nixon” will make a fine movie when Ron Howard films it next year. As for digging into the details of media manipulation or presidential ethics, Morgan goes no further than breathless vagaries. “It was tough to tell where the politics stopped and the showbiz started,” one of his tedious narrators informs us. Lacking any core values or theories, movie-ish docu-riffs such as “Frost/Nixon” benefit greatly from that blurred line.

Can you blame Morgan, though? No one goes to the theater to be bombarded with policy wonkery or historical facts. Political theater isn’t glamorous, it isn’t sexy, and critics generally roll their eyes when a playwright holds forth on public policy. Nonprofit theaters aren’t taking the lead either, commissioning Tony Kushner to write a homegrown “Coast of Utopia,” or asking Neil LaBute to nail the pathologies of white Republican men in power.

The future of political plays belongs to the next generation. How will they respond to the historic criminality of the Bush administration, its grotesque exploitation of 9/11, its deadly mishandling of the war in Iraq and efforts to boost executive powers to fascistic levels?

It’s a commonplace in foreign-policy circles to say that Bush squandered international goodwill after the terrorist attacks. But the dissipation charge seems also applicable to American theater. Here we are, six years after 9/11, four years after the invasion of Iraq, and what do we have to show for it? There have been a handful of paranoia-tinged plays (Bruce Norris’ “The Pain and the Itch,” Adam Bock’s “The Thugs”), a prescient one by Tony Kushner (“Homebody/Kabul”) and a clunky, ripped-from-the-headlines burlesque by Tim Robbins (“Embedded”), but it feels as if our playwrights and producers are missing their historical moment. Over in England, the Tricycle Theatre is presenting “Called to Account: The Indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the Crime of Aggression Against Iraq — a Hearing,” a mock trial of Blair, through June 9. It’s hard to imagine a Broadway bigwig or a nonprofit venue with the confidence to mount a similar offense against Bush.

Die-hard practitioners still believe that rhetorical and mimetic power of theater can instruct, shame and ignite debate. In January 2005, Edward Albee addressed the issue on a Drama Desk panel. “All theater is political if it engages you,” said the “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” author. “If more people took theater seriously (and were given serious, engaging theater) we’d have different election results.”

But no one really expects theater to change the world. A tourist from Ohio who voted Republican in 2004 won’t turn blue-state after watching a Broadway play. Most of us would be happy if theater were simply relevant. Perhaps if the world keeps getting worse, the plays might get better. In January, David Mamet will premiere the presidential satire “November” on Broadway. And recall that our last major work of political theater, Kushner’s “Angels in America,” was written roughly a decade after the fictional events it describes. Perhaps, come 2012, we’ll see a generation of galvanized, morally adventurous dramatists working on a broad social canvas.

Until then, crack open a beer and let Jon Stewart make you laugh.

The cinéma-vérité documentary by Albert and David Maysles that exposed the deeply dysfunctional relationship between Edith Beale (Big Edie) and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie), and the unsanitary condition of their East Hamptons manse (fleas, mold, 52 cats), inspires perversely intense devotion among its fans. For many, the first sight of the formerly glamorous cousin and aunt of Jackie Kennedy eating out of cans, bickering and vamping is akin to a religious experience.

Spoken-word artist Juliana Luecking remembers seeing the film in 2002 and being so astonished she couldn’t move, and so she sat through it again. “The thing with ‘Grey Gardens,’” Luecking says, “is that it shows Edie and her mother finding some joy in their madness. I never knew about the utter beauty in that.”

As a documentary, and one involving filth and psychodrama, “Grey Gardens” didn’t seem like the most natural inspiration for a Broadway musical. It hardly had the pink, glittery mass potential of, say, “Legally Blonde.” Who, except fans of the film, would want to go see a show about two crazy old women living with a million cats? And wouldn’t those notoriously proprietary fans find fault with any new interpretation of their beloved movie?

The musical’s creative team — composer Scott Frankel, book writer Doug Wright and lyricist Michael Korie — were so devoted to the film and afraid of alienating its fans that they agonized over how to approach the stage project. “I was afraid of doing [the movie] a disservice, so I said no for two years,” Wright says. “Scott convinced me.” “I take them seriously,” says Frankel of the Edies. “It’s a very human tale: Beauty, money and privilege can’t insulate or isolate you from the vicissitudes of life.”

The show’s success reflects the collaborators’ many smart choices: The addition of a prologue showing the Edies in their heady socialite days, for instance, raises the stakes by highlighting just how far they had fallen by the ’70s — and dazzles Broadway audiences with glitzy costumes and grandeur before trotting out the sagging stockings and decay. But perhaps the greatest stroke of brilliance was Frankel’s decision to cast Christine Ebersole, age 54, in a tour de force dual role (she plays Big Edie in Act I and Little Edie in Act II, opposite the formidable Mary Louise Wilson). “I’d seen her in everything — dramas, musicals, TV, concerts,” Frankel says, “and always admired her as a musician, singer and comedienne. But I got the feeling you were only seeing a tenth of what she could do. She has so many talents — she can go light and dark, and it liberated us so much as far as what we could do.”

“She really is a keen observer of human behavior,” says Wright of Ebersole. “She can mimic with uncanny accuracy the accents and behaviors of other times. She has a chameleon-like quality. She can watch a flickering black-and-white movie on TV and then re-create it in front of her evening mirror.” And having watched Little Edie preen her way across the screen countless times, Ebersole had no trouble doing justice to the eccentric former socialite and her peculiar sartorial style (upside-down skirts, turbans — all celebrated in the song “The Revolutionary Costume for Today”).

Ebersole’s performance in Act I is charming and pitch-perfect, but what she does in the second act is genius. From the moment she comes out in full Little Edie regalia and coos to the audience in that singular accent: “Oh hiiiiiiii,” she becomes at once terrifying and adorable, an object of pity and of worship. This duality is exquisitely embodied in the gorgeous song “Around the World,” in which Little Edie veers from ferocious anger over feeling trapped in her mother’s house to childlike delight in her wall of special mementos. Ebersole kills with this schizophrenic solo. The key to her success, according to Frankel: “She has a beautiful voice, and she’s not afraid to use it in an ugly way.”

The critics agree. “Watching [Ebersole's] performance is the best argument I can think of for the survival of the American musical,” wrote New York Times chief drama critic Ben Brantley. In its 2006 Off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons, Ebersole won the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Obie and Drama Desk Award, and she was given a special citation from the New York Drama Critics and the Drama League for Performance of the Year. The Broadway show is nominated for 10 Tonys. As Elaine Stritch put it in a recent interview: “Christine Ebersole in ‘Grey Gardens’: That’s coffee! That’s coffee! That’s talent!”

The tall, blond Ebersole, relaxing backstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre before a Wednesday matinee in loose, pajama-like pants, a black coat and leopard-print mules, says being cast in the show was “fate.” Actually, she talks about fate quite a bit. Her red-carpeted dressing room, featuring a pillow-laden leopard-print daybed and gold and red curtains, is like a shrine. Covering a large gold mirror are rosaries, one of which has saint images contained in each bead. On the walls hang several crosses (when pressed, Ebersole says she’s Christian — “My name’s Christine; I have no choice!”). But there is also a mandala, a Buddha, an image of Krishna, a book on shamanism and, on the door frame, a mezuza. Her doting dresser, Jill, jokes, “She likes to cover her bases.”

But it runs deeper than that. Ebersole was born in Illinois and raised Unitarian but now sounds more like an adherent to theosophy, the 19th-century spiritualist movement that sought to unify all the religions. She sees spiritual forces at work in every aspect of her career and personal life. Speaking of Little Edie, she says, “I do feel like I’m channeling her.” And she believes that both Edies’ spirits are with her when she performs. “I believe that when people die, they only leave their bodies,” she explains. “But our spirit doesn’t have a beginning or an end. So when we leave our bodies, we still influence things, but it’s just from an invisible place — from beyond the veil.”

The musical contrasts the stultifying propriety of the women’s lives in 1941 (Act I) with the oddly liberating squalor of their lives in 1973 (Act II). A 1975 review of the film in the New York Times said it made moviegoers feel like exploiters, but the musical, more clearly than the film, illustrates how the high-society women were, in their incredibly weird way, happier in the filth than they had been in the finery.

“They welcomed the Maysles,” says Ebersole. “They were very proud of the movie. And they were very happy the movie was made. We’re, ‘Oh my god, the neighbors are coming! We’ve got to clean up!’ You don’t want people to see your mess. But they didn’t care. In fact, they said that the only thing they wished of the film was that there was more music and more dancing.” Et voilà.

In recent years, Ebersole has done period pieces like “42nd Street” (for which she won a Tony) and “Dinner at 8″ (for which she was nominated for one). In the latter, she delivered a pitch-perfect rendition of ’30s-comedy hysteria. She seemed as if she’d stepped right out of a Preston Sturges movie and onto the stage. Old movies have an escapist quality she appreciates: “Even the bad elements could be sentimentalized or made not soooo bad!”

Like the screwball comedy stars she admires, Ebersole is able to laugh off the more difficult parts of her career, such as the season she spent on “Saturday Night Live” in 1981. A “Weekend Update” co-anchor, Ebersole, who had no stand-up comedy experience, at times seemed distinctly uncomfortable. “I was getting off the road playing Guinevere with Richard Burton in ‘Camelot’ … My marriage was ending. I was moving out of my apartment. So I got a new job, was getting divorced and moved in seven days. It was like standing on the head of a pin.”

She moved to Los Angeles in 1985, did film (“Amadeus,” “Tootsie,” “My Favorite Martian”) and TV (“The Cavanaughs,” guest spots on “Will & Grace” and “Ally McBeal), then moved back to New York in 1999. She now lives in Maplewood, N.J., in a very full house with her mother, her husband, Bill Moloney, and their three children. “The Kristin Chenoweths and Audra McDonalds go home and go to bed,” said Frankel, who described Ebersole as a superwoman. “She’s got eight shows a week, three kids, 47 animals … a partridge in a pear tree.”

How many animals, exactly?

Ebersole hoots. “Let’s see … two cats, two kittens, beyond cute, three dogs, a guinea pig and a fish.” The rescued kittens are just 4 weeks old — gifts, she says, from the universe after her favorite cat was killed by a car. “It was kind of a miracle that this presented itself to me at this time. Because this is really the crazy time, with the nominations and the pressure and the luncheons and the speech here and the interview there. It’s a way of focusing in on what’s real.”

Ebersole dotes on her three children, all adopted: Aron and Mae Mae are 10; Elijah is 13. Her decision to adopt she calls “a moral reckoning. At first, I thought that my value as a mother depended on whether I had the ability to get pregnant. And not to be able to get pregnant, I had this sense of being a failure. And then I realized that was an illusion, that being a mother was not defined through biology; it was defined through spirit.”

While Ebersole’s enthusiasm for life and all its creatures has a giddy live, live, live! quality reminiscent of Auntie Mame (whom she played at Paper Mill), she’s the opposite of flighty. Her connection with the Edies (whose Grey Gardens she has visited twice, once to sing “Evergreen” at a party thrown by its current owners) is no ghost story. “Ghosts are like Casper. I don’t think of it as ghosts. Ghosts seem empty and hollow, but spirit doesn’t send that same message to me. Spirit seems full.”

Ebersole is grateful she didn’t grow up sway to any one philosophy. “You know, I think I’m lucky I was raised Unitarian,” she says. “Without religiosity, I was free to just take everything in.” Ebersole, like Little Edie, cobbles together outfits and worldviews as they suit her, and they suit her fine.

But that era — which resulted in the long runs of such self-mocking and satisfying shows as “Hairspray,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and “Spamalot” — may now be over. When Brooks’ new stage show, “Young Frankenstein,” makes its expected bow on Broadway this fall, it might be too late to enjoy the era its author created, the atmosphere in which a show like “Frankenstein” would blossom. The reason? Two shows: “Grey Gardens” and “Spring Awakening.”

These two daring, surreally unusual musicals — both transfers from the 2005-06 Off-Broadway season — have dominated Broadway during the past six months. Together, they will likely walk away with many of the Tony Awards in the major musical categories. Just as quickly as “The Producers” made “Les Misérables” and “Phantom of the Opera” look like musty warhorses, “Grey Gardens” and “Spring Awakening” — and, to a (much) lesser extent, “LoveMusik” — have recast “The Producers” and its stylistic brethren as so much low-brow cavorting. In Times Square, audacious visions are the new black, and “Young Frankenstein” may very well be faulted by critics for wanting in the smarts department.

Critical winds have already shifted a bit. Two cases in point: “Curtains,” a hybrid backstage drama and murder mystery, and the first new John Kander and Fred Ebb musical to be staged on Broadway since Ebb’s death; and “Legally Blonde,” a once-promising stage adaptation of the popular Reese Witherspoon film comedy about a savvy SoCal ditz who takes on Harvard Law. Both shows couldn’t have made it clearer that a good time at the theater was the lead item on their artistic agenda. No life lessons here. No furthering of the art form. And had these shows premiered in New York in, say, 2005, their success might have been assured. In the post-”Grey Gardens”-and-”Spring Awakening” world, however, “Curtains” was dismissed by many reviewers as old-fashioned and corny. “Legally Blonde,” meanwhile, was deemed bubble-headed, a feast of empty calories.

That two shows as singularly odd as “Grey Gardens” and “Spring Awakening” should have climbed the Everest of critical and popular opinion amounts to one of the most unlikely success stories in the theater since a sassy puppet musical called “Avenue Q” whomped the witchy butt of tween magnet “Wicked” at the Tony Awards. Each is drawn from source material that any fool would see as ludicrously inappropriate for a musical. “Grey Gardens” takes its inspiration from the 1975 Maysles brothers film of the same name, which documented, with a hungry and cruelly unblinking eye, the squalid-cum-triumphant lives of Edith Bouvier Beale and her middle-aged daughter, “Little Edie.” An aunt and a cousin of Jackie Kennedy and one-time society queens, they had mysteriously descended into tragicomic agoraphobia, living out their eccentric, deluded, codependent lives with a few dozen cats and raccoons in a dilapidated East Hampton manse. The film developed a cult status over the years, particularly among gay men, who see the Beales as staunch iconoclasts and different-drummer romantics.

“Grey Gardens” was written by the previously unknown composing duo of Scott Frankel and Michael Korie. Its book is by “I Am My Own Wife” and “Quills” scribe Doug Wright, America’s playwright laureate of sacred monsters. The musical is divided into two distinct acts. The second act faithfully reproduces the film’s various eccentric episodes — the fights, Little Edie’s nonstop monologuing and impromptu dance recitals. The first act, set three decades earlier when the family was in clover, tries to imagine how the once wealthy and well-positioned Beales got from A to B. It plays like a double feature of “The Philadelphia Story” and “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” Critics complained that it didn’t all work, but few said it wasn’t spellbinding.

“Spring Awakening” was also written by a little-known composing team — little known to theater types, anyway. Songwriter Duncan Sheik had his day in the sun as a pop star with hits like “Barely Breathing.” Since then, he’s turned to theater, with help from playwright-lyricist Steven Sater. A musical adaptation of a once scandalous, 1891 expressionistic drama by German playwright Frank Wedekind, “Spring Awakening” had been knocking about the workshop world for a few years without finding a home — probably because it was a musical adaptation of a once scandalous, 1891 expressionistic drama by German playwright Frank Wedekind. (Surprisingly, it was once scheduled to run at the usually faint-hearted Roundabout Theater Company.)

The story follows a group of boys and a parallel group of girls tormented by their libidos and ignorance. They are kept miserably in the dark by their teachers and parents until their lives careen horribly off the track. When it finally bowed at the Atlantic Theater Company Off-Broadway, critics were shocked how well the fin de siècle story of a sexually repressive society fit with Sheik’s punkish score. Sheik’s rock music and Sater’s poetical colloquial lyrics played like a concert by one of those garage bands fed by the muse of adolescent angst. And the show’s bracketing of Victorian-era Germany and fundamentalist, Bush-era America was one of the cleverest theatrical tricks in memory.

The double triumph of these shows is more considerable still when one considers the uncompromising artistry of each production’s staging. Michael Mayer is the director of “Spring Awakening,” Michael Greif of “Grey Gardens”; each man is a known quantity in the New York theater, with both hits and misses to his credit. But something in the material seems to have brought out the fight in them. Mayer’s wizardry is the more striking. Onstage seating surrounds a spare world of wooden chairs and bare light bulbs. Youths dressed in short pants pull cordless mikes out of their wool jackets, wailing to an unhearing world about “My Junk” and “The Bitch of Living.” They twitch and sweat through Bill T. Jones’ semaphore-like choreography — the most distinctive and individualized movements a musical has owned since the days of Robbins and Fosse. When, in a late number, the cast leaps about the stage chanting “Blah, blah, blah,” they’re unleashing a rage at the daily yoke of life we all wish to express.

Greif’s main accomplishment is probably the performance he drew out of Christine Ebersole, the star of “Grey Gardens.” Ebersole offers two eerily complete variations on frustrated independence, playing “Big Edie” in Act 1 and “Little Edie” in Act 2, and she is the artistic soul of the show, the creative team notwithstanding. She does not say “Blah, blah, blah” at any time, but instead “Da da da da dum.” The phrase comes three times in “The Revolutionary Costume for Today,” a song at the top of Act 2 that in many ways is the show in microcosm: determinedly eccentric, loving of its protagonist and on message — that message being, to put it crudely, don’t let the bastards get you down.

Greif stages the more conventional first act, in which Little Edie’s engagement party to Joe Kennedy Jr. is brought to grief, as a sort of 1930s musical comedy manqué. In contrast to its frothy frivolity, the second act is dark-hued cinéma vérité. The inescapable Grey Gardens mansion is seen from various angles, folding in on its inhabitants from all sides. At the end of each act, Ebersole peers out the window as if bitterly understanding she is incapable of leaving. Grey Gardens is a haunted house in a horror film where the boogeyman is life.

Leaving either of these shows, one feels exhilarated, disoriented, enchanted and confused. You don’t skip down the street the way critics seem to think one must after attending a first-rate musical comedy. You walk unsteadily, as if still inhabiting the shows’ dream worlds.

Why, one might ask, are these shows even on Broadway, which is regularly condemned as a mausoleum of faded and corrupted art? What is a show like “LoveMusik,” a high-minded, heavy-browed jukebox music about the curiously joined lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, doing at Manhattan Theater Club’s Biltmore Theater rather than some black box in the East 30s? It’s a good question and one easily answered. For a few years now, the Off-Broadway commercial theater has been a wretched, suffering wreck. Rising production costs and low ticket prices, relative to Broadway, have made it nigh impossible for producers to make a profit in these smaller houses, no matter how popular the show. Off-Broadway is no longer a good long-term option; if the risk of transferring a hot show for an open run is to be taken, let it be taken where there’s a chance for financial success.

“Grey Gardens” and “Spring Awakening” went to Broadway after their initial runs at Playwrights Horizons and the Atlantic Theater, respectively, because there was nowhere else to go. And they’re not alone. “In the Heights,” the Off-Broadway hip-hop and salsa musical about life in Washington Heights, and “13,” Jason Robert Brown’s show about the lives of teenagers, performed by teenagers, which premiered last December at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, have announced plans to transfer to Broadway. A decade ago, they never would have entertained such a move.

This is good news for theater; tough, interesting shows are being given the splashiest showcases in town. It’s a challenge, however, to musicals that don’t shoot for the moon. Both “Grey Gardens” and “Spring Awakening” have their flaws. Sater’s lyrics are often slapdash, and there is an interchangeable quality to many of the score’s songs. “Grey Gardens” can come off as one big pet project: the first act written as an excuse to do the second act; the second act only done to pay tribute to the film. But the audacity of each creation is enough to win you over. Many theater critics regard themselves as charged with safeguarding the health and reputation of the musical theater. They will always gravitate more toward the show that is trying something new than to something safe and familiar. They also hate to be caught simply enjoying themselves. (Witness their spurning of “Coram Boy,” which was nothing more than a hugely entertaining, hyper-theatrical melodrama. Ick!) Better to champion a show that edifies and illuminates.

So Mel Brooks had better watch out. We’ve had our five-year binge of fun. Now, critics — and perhaps audiences as well — want nourishment. A slickly staged laugh-fest with a tap-dancing monster and plenty of jokes about knockers may not do the trick anymore.

Specials

The new documentary Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days (7 p.m. PST/ 8 p.m. EST, Fri., American Movie Classics) takes a close look at the making of Marilyn’s last movie, the never completed “Something’s Got to Give,” which also starred Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. Friday would have been Monroe’s 75th birthday. The 2001 ALMA Awards (8 p.m., Fox) salutes the achievements of Latino performers over the past year. The marathon June Bugs (beginning 11 p.m. Fri., Cartoon Network) unspools 176 Bugs Bunny cartoons and runs until midnight Sunday. That’s a whole lots of wabbits. Before she was Buffy’s meddling little sister, Michelle Trachtenberg was the meddling title character of Harriet the Spy (7 p.m. Sun., ABC), an adaptation of the book about a preteen who can’t keep her nose out of other people’s business. Chazz Palminteri plays former Gambino crime family capo Paul Castellano in the new TV movie Boss of Bosses (8 p.m. Sun., TNT). Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick host the 55th Annual Tony Awards (9 p.m. Sun., CBS). Lane and Broderick are also up for Tonys themselves, as is their toast-of-Broadway musical, Mel Brooks’ “The Producers.” Fix! Iron Chef 21st Century Battle (9 p.m. Sun., Food Network) is a rematch between the formidable Masahiro Morimoto and American challenger Bobby Flay, who maintains he wuz robbed in their last pan-to-pan meeting. Biography: The Impressionists (9 p.m. Sun., A&E) is a two-part, four-hour special profiling Degas, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and other painters who shocked the art world in mid-19th century Paris. (Concludes Monday.)

Sports

Baseball:
Braves at Pirates (7 p.m. Fri., 7 p.m. Sat., 1:30 p.m. Sun., TBS)
Tigers at White Sox (7 p.m. Sat., FX)
Reds at Cardinals (8 p.m. Sun., ESPN)

NBA playoffs:
76ers at Bucks, Game 6 (9 p.m. Fri., NBC; Game 7, if necessary, 7:30 p.m. Sun., NBC)

Stanley Cup Championship:
Avalanche at Devils, Game 4 (8 p.m. Sat., ABC)

Talk

Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) Meredith Vieira, Vicki Lewis (rerun)
David Letterman (CBS) Carson Daly, CBS Giant Orchestra (rerun)
Jay Leno (NBC) George Clooney, Tracey Ullman (rerun)
Dennis Miller (HBO) George Carlin
Politically Incorrect (ABC) Dave Matthews, Ann Coulter
Conan O’Brien (NBC) Christopher Walken, Mr. T (rerun)
Craig Kilborn (CBS) Carmen Electra, Esai Morales (rerun)

All times Eastern unless noted.