Kevin Mccollum

On the face of it, the new Broadway musical "Avenue Q" is a delicious bit of fluff with its bright bouncy tunes and eccentric cast of slackers, a mix of humans and puppets, including the whimsically named Christmas Tree, Trekkie Monster, Lucy T. Slut and Gary Coleman. Yes, that Gary Coleman. But the central character, Princeton, just out of school and newly arrived in New York, faces a quandary out of Samuel Beckett: What am I doing on this earth?

Get out your tip sheets: It looks like Broadway may have a horse race on its hands. And what's at stake may be not only box-office grosses and Tony Awards but also whether there is room to accommodate two vastly different approaches--conventional versus experimental--to American musical theater.

ON the eve of the announcement of the 2006 Tony Award nominations that would laud a musical season bright with commercial prospects, an alternative celebration was going on at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Sundance Institute was hosting an evening of song by composers and lyricists from its Colorado-based theater development program.

"They say the neon lights are bright -- on Broadway," goes the old pop song. But "they" apparently never saw Las Vegas. Not only are the Strip's lights brighter than those on the Great White Way, but its marquees might soon look as if they're actually near Times Square, judging from the Broadway-style fare that is gradually invading.

FOR the moment, at least, the spacious executive office at the Wynn Las Vegas resort, dominated by a seminal Piet Mondrian painting, has been transformed into a Broadway piano bar. And the man singing snatches of show tunes? Chief executive Steve Wynn. "And we're so by God stubborn, we can stand touchin' noses for a week at a time and never see eye to eye," he sings, sounding like a cross between Richard Nixon and Ed Sullivan in a song from Meredith Willson's "The Music Man."

'O my youth! It is you that is being buried.' -- Rodolphe In Louis-Henri Murger's Scenes of Bohemian Life, the basis of Puccini's La Boheme New York Agentle summer rain washes the streets of downtown Manhattan, glancing off the windows of a fourth-floor rehearsal studio in a corner building on lower Broadway. Seen from inside, the misty downfall becomes a diaphanous shroud, blurring the Saturday afternoon scene unfolding below into the timeless surrealism of a French film.

In August, 44-year-old Robert Trowbridge and his wife, Denise, were among the audience at an evening performance of "Rent" at the La Jolla Playhouse. A roofer from Escondido, Trowbridge hardly fit the demographic one might expect for a Broadway musical about New York's East Village bohemians, which includes a cross-dressing hero, lingering kisses between rubber-draped lesbians, heterosexual lovers who "meet cute" over a bag of heroin and homeless people with AIDS.