broadway melodies; This month, three new musicals hoof into town, writes Adam Green.(The Drowsy Chaperone)(Theater review)

Not long ago, Casey Nicholaw, the droll, inventive choreographer of Spamalot, asked Sutton Foster, the sunny, Tony-winning star of Thoroughly Modern Millie, "What kind of tricks can you do?" As it turned out, all kinds-and they're all on display in Nicholaw's directing debut, The Drowsy Chaperone. Fresh from a hit run in L.A., it promises to be, with The Pajama Game, the sleeper of the season.

With a clever book and a breezy score by four Canadian writers, this meta-homage to 1920s musicals is about a lonely theater fanatic whose studio apartment gets taken over by the cast-and the sets-of his favorite Broadway show, a chestnut called The Drowsy Chaperone. "It's a real love letter to musical comedy and to the people who find an escape from the harsh realities of life in it," says Foster, who spent an unhealthy amount of her childhood in her room listening to show tunes. Foster appears as a bride-to-be named Janet Van De Graaff and the fictional Prohibition-era actress who plays her, known as the "Oops" girl. As for the tricks-in her big number Foster gets to turn one-handed cartwheels, dive through hoops, spin plates, and charm a snake while singing "I don't wanna show off."

Based on the 1998 Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore romantic comedy, The Wedding Singer pays tribute to the songs of a very different era (the 1980s) and to the big-haired guys who performed them. Here, the blithely profane singer-songwriter Stephen Lynch plays Robbie, a rocker on the I Do circuit in suburban New Jersey, and Laura Be_nan_ti is the waitress he loves. The book and score are by youngish newcomers, but the presence of such grown-ups as the director John Rando (Urinetown) and ...