The spoken word sneaks up on the blockbuster musical 

Who would have thought that safe, predictable big-musical Broadway would become the home for new productions of plays?

In the last two months, Broadway had openings of fourteen plays, more than the number currently playing commercially on London's West End.

Broadway remains the home of the big commercial musical, Mary Poppins, Shrek, Mamma Mia! and Wicked, which draw tourists and sell lots of merchandise and keep the Times Square sidewalks thick with families and sightseers. But this season actually has a successful, commercial run of an Ionesco play, Exit the King, which is of all things one wouldn't expect to see on the Great White Way, about the acceptance of death. Ionesco. On Broadway?

We've also had Chekhov's The Seagull, in an acclaimed London production. (Chekhov has been more at home on the London stage in recent years than on Broadway), as well as Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. (Ibsen has been popular in London, though, too – A Doll's House is on the boards there.) And two stirring three-hour nights of the theater, August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Schiller's Mary Stuart (with Harriet Walter and Janet McTeer reprising their London roles).

There's also the three plays that make up Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests (its production and cast imported from London as well). Not to mention the Yasmina Reza God of Carnage (which was a hit in London), a new work by Neil Labute, Reasons to Be Pretty, which marks the Broadway debut of this off-putting playwright, and Jane Fonda in Moisès Kaufman's 33 Variations, a play in which the lead character is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease (sure, it's Wit-meets-Amadeus, but nevertheless, it's not your typical matinee fare).

Even among musicals it's not all fluff and nonsense: Next to Normal tackles the subject of mental illness and its affect on a family. And it's been playing to full houses.

Wasn't Broadway supposed to be tame? Wasn't London, now home to a stage version of Dirty Dancing and the seemingly perpetual Grease, the place one looked to for stirring, adventurous, controversial theater?

Things turn around faster in theater than I'd thought possible. Even as recently as January, when more than a dozen shows closed within days of each other, the atmosphere on Broadway was thick with doom. But just as the best and brightest in finance left the world economy into a shambles, predictable Broadway has become unpredictable.

And while the biggest new musical is a revival of West Side Story, about rival gangs, the hottest ticket in town is the four-actor play God of Carnage, about two squabbling couples. Sure, it stars James Gandolfini of "The Sopranos," but something other than the chance to see Tony Soprano in the flesh is luring people to pay over $100 in a down economy.

Could it be that even when conventional wisdom says we want escapism in entertainment when the economy is tanking, we still want to be challenged when we spend money on theater?

If nothing else, theatergoers love to be surprised.