The musicals are a-changin'

"And what is the business that brings you to New York?" asks the guy in passport control at JFK Airport. "I'm here to review some Broadway shows," I tell him, adding ingratiatingly, "if you can call that 'business'." The face of this kindly official cracks into a wide grin. "You most certainly can, sir. Sitting through some of those shows can be work. Why, only last Saturday I had to walk out of a new musical at the interval!" He goes on to complain about the prohibitive cost of tickets on the Great White Way (the equivalent of £65 for a prime seat) and to explain how he manages to afford his theatre habit by being part of a club. For an annual fee, members get last-minute tickets cheap. I am curious about which show provoked his early exit, but he won't tell me. "I don't want to prejudice you, sir. You go with an open mind."

I thought about this man on several occasions during my week in New York, where I saw three new musicals (Grey Gardens, Spring Awakening and High Fidelity), two classic revivals (Company and A Chorus Line) and the sparkling Broadway transfer from London of Richard Eyre's Disney/Cameron Mackintosh production of Mary Poppins. I gradually came to the conclusion that it must have been The Times They are A-Changin' from which the passport-control guy gratefully bolted at the first polite opportunity. This (by all accounts) misbegotten miscegenation of the songs of Bob Dylan and the choreography of Twyla Tharp (eviscerated in The Independent by David Usborne) managed to close just before I arrived, a matter of weeks after its opening.

That's my hunch, because I can't readily imagine anyone wanting to make a self-protective mercy-dash out of any of the musicals I witnessed. Of the three new pieces, two - Grey Gardens and Spring Awakening - are quite outstanding in terms of score, lyrics, dramatic power and staging. Not a bad strike rate. And it's significant, I think, that both shows have moved to the Great White Way from smaller off-Broadway outfits, respectively Playwrights Horizons and the Atlantic Theater Company. They have both been lovingly nurtured and (for the most part) improved in their passage by people who really believe in them as artistic, as well as commercial, propositions. Broadway may be a market-place, but the emergence of these two shows proves that producers in that sector do not all fall into the category of unimaginative purveyors of what people already think that they want. Some are intent on giving the public what they do not yet know that they want.

With an astringently witty and achingly wistful score by Scott Frankel and sharp lyrics by Michael Kovie, Grey Gardens (at the Walter Kerr Theatre) is derived from the 1975 documentary by the Mayles brothers about Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, the aunt and cousin of the former First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, née Bouvier. From a to-the-manner-born high-society life that embraced "le tout Park Avenue and the cream of Hyannis", this mother-and-daughter duo had toppled, by the time the cameras turned on them, into batty, reclusive eccentricity, holed up in the eponymous mansion, now infested by cats, raccoons and fleas and of a squalor that would make WH Auden's living arrangements look almost hysterically house-proud. Add to this predicament a festering mass of mutual recrimination and you have both the documentary and Act II of this wonderful musical.

Doug Wright, who is responsible for the shapely and very shrewd book, has created a speculative first half that suggests reasons for the duo's decline. Set in 1941 East Hampton on the day of Little Edie's abortive engagement to Joseph Kennedy Jr, it is like an envenomed Philadelphia Story, with the tragicomic mix of Tennessee Williams-style Gothic grotesque and Beckett-like reciprocal imprisonment in the act located 30-odd years later in the midden of Grey Gardens. Straddling both halves is Christine Ebersole who, hilarious and desperately sad, gives one of the greatest performances (or rather two of the greatest performances) I have ever seen in a musical. In the East Hampton summer residence, she plays the soignée but stage-struck mother, who outrages her Major father with her un-ladylike opera-star pretensions and possessively overshadows Little Edie, whose engagement she casually jeopardises.

If Act I ends with the daughter's temporary escape, Act II, which is full of artfully distorted echoes, ends with the same daughter (now 56 and brilliantly played by Ebersole herself) attempting and failing to break free from the deathly symbiosis with her still-overbearing mother (superb Mary Louise Wilson). One of the pleasures of the piece is its ambivalence. Are this pair a couple of selfish cranks or oddly admirable individualists ranged in battle against the moneyed conformity of their neighbours? "They can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday," wisecracks Little Edie in her weird upper-class twang, before demonstrating, in a knockout comic song, how her bizarre improvised attire is "The Revolutionary Costume for Today": "Staunch, staunch women/We just don't weaken/A little known fact/To the fascist pack/Who come here for antiquin'." And is Little Edie's embittered enslavement to the tart-tongued mother a straightforward outrage or also a convenient excuse for her various failures on the acting, singing and marriage front? In a score that ranges from pining poignancy to uproarious fun, it's a particular delight to hear duets pitched for the cracked beauty of the elderly female voice and its liquid middle-aged counterpart, and to hear Ms Ebersole as Little Edie endeavouring to compete with a recording of her mother in youth (the lovely tones provided by Ebersole herself in her previous guise).

The matinée audience waited until Ebersole's appearance at the curtain call before they rose unanimously to their feet, whereas the enraptured preview audience at Spring Awakening leapt to a standing ovation the split-second that the lights went down on this truly extraordinary show. Composer Duncan Sheik and book-writer and lyricist Steven Sater have broken with convention to uplifting effect in this rock-music version of Frank Wedekind's still-controversial play (written in 1891) about pubescent angst and anger, replete with masturbation and homosexuality. For a start, they have not gone in for facile updating. Instead, the show keeps the repressed provincial 19th-century setting and costumes, and finds in the metaphor of heady, pounding rock music a potent metaphor for the libido that is raging to pupate out of these schoolboys (played by older actors) constrained in their worsted uniforms. The joint - the Eugene O'Neill Theater, which has been given an ecclesiastical overhaul to accentuate the transgression - jumps to the electrifying guitar licks as the group - led by the sensational, shock-haired John Gallagher Jr in the role of Moritz - rail against "The Bitch of Living": "Had a dream there was an angel/Who could hear me through the wall/As I cried out, like, in Latin/This is so not life at all".

Occasionally, Spring Awakening put me in mind of a latter-day Hair in its passion and its protest. But this show isn't as naively sold on sex as an all-purpose solution. It depicts the dangers as well as the delights of nascent eroticism. And in another welcome break from current, sex-saturated convention, it implies that the erotic is the route to wider discoveries about the nature of existence, not a clammy cul-de-sac.

Apart from a diabolically well-drilled Chorus Line at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre (a show that is a bit too metallic for my taste), the Broadway season features three musicals with British connections. With the delightful Ashley Brown at the helm as the sweetly severe supernanny, Richard Eyre's production of Mary Poppins blithely surmounts a baffling New York Times review, to make contact with a public who hang around in dazed groups at the end, as though not wanting the collective magic to finish. Having had a Tony Award-winning triumph with his recent production of Sweeney Todd, the British director John Doyle applies his trademark style - using actor-musicians whose instrument-playing becomes an extension of character and situation - to Stephen Sondheim's Company (Ethel Barrymore Theatre). The material is less suited here to Doyle's approach, though there is drama in the fact that the one person who cannot join in the instrumental razzmatazz is Bobby, the watchful bachelor and ami de maison who prowls the edges of the choppy pool of commitment and is here portrayed with a dark, sexually magnetic passivity (and soaring voice) by Raul Esparza.

Finally, the American musical version of the American film of Nick Hornby's novel, High Fidelity (Imperial Theater), has some deeply built-in flaws, not least that the new songs (by Tom Kitt and Amanda Green) often feel like pale imitations of the music it should be more directly referencing. But I'm glad I caught the show before it closed: starring the amiable Will Chase, it has an appealing spirit, with its faddist failures and geeky music-snobbery ("I love it that my lover slept with Lyle Lovett" is surely the last word in loser-dom). And here are some statistics, in the manner of the hero's lists, that may soothe troubled Brits on the one hand and cause concern on the other: the three main straight play openings in New York this autumn are all by English authors (David Hare, Tom Stoppard and Simon Gray); all the musicals in the current London boom are by Americans (bar Spamalot). That says something, for good or ill, about our relative traditions and suggests that to write the obituary of straight drama in the West End would be somewhat premature.