NEW YORK -- You might doubt it, what with the relative proliferation of plays on Broadway this season, but the musical is still its chief stock in trade, both at its midtown Manhattan headquarters and its many branches country-wide.

	Joan Marcus Laura Bell Bundy as Elle in "Legally Blonde," the musical. Click photo for larger image.

Which is to say, "The Coast of Utopia" may be an epic wonder, "Frost/Nixon" an intense crowd-pleaser and "Radio Golf" the essential final word of a great playwright, but none of them will sustain the Broadway Series in Your Town, U.S.A.

Among this past season's musicals, the artful "Grey Gardens" won't, either. The youthfully dynamic "Spring Awakening" just might, with its expected Tony Award to compensate for what some might think risque subject matter -- it's definitely the best of the new musicals, as I hope I had the foresight to say when I reviewed it in February. And "Legally Blonde" certainly should -- for all its commercial obviousness, it's the most broadly appealing, instantly knowable of the new crop.

My personal favorite of the just-under-the-Tony-deadline openings, however -- although I haven't yet seen the Kurt Weill-Lotte Lenya "LoveMusik" -- is Kander and Ebb's charming backstage musical comedy whodunit, "Curtains." But as to the season's most expensive big show, "The Pirate Queen," I was generally as bored as the young grandchild I took with me.

Reviews of these last three follow. (You'll find more supportive detail online.)

'Legally Blonde'

"Legally Blonde" benefits, in my case, from low expectations. I was imagining a movie adaptation more like the mediocre "The Wedding Singer" than "The Producers" or "Spamalot," both of which had world-class comics in charge. But it transcends expectation with an absolute explosion of Pink Power.

You're inundated in it from the moment the perfectly named Elle appears, framed in pink like a special-edition Barbie. "All that pink you're wearing," she's later asked: "is that legal?" But more than just visually pink, "Legally Blonde" also feels, sounds and maybe even smells and tastes pink, a pinkness so intense it becomes a kind of metaphoric blondeness squared. Elle and "Legally Blonde" are so at home in their overstated silliness that they disarm criticism.

Then, having cotton-candied you into submission, the lyrics are so sneakily self-deprecating and witty that you start to lap up the fountain of pink. There's skill in its construction, as in providing Elle with her own Greek (sorority girl) chorus, which pops up regularly with fresh infusions of Pink Power.

OK, it goes overboard at times, like the pink Playboy Bunny suit. And I don't see why many of the caricatures and plot twists have to be so simplistic. But just as your gorge starts to rise, there's a delicious surprise like an Irish fantasy (for no apparent reason) or a Gilbert & Sullivan patter debate on whether a witness is gay ("or European").

As Elle, Laura Bell Bundy keeps her head above the pink flood with sassy self-assurance, but Orfeh (as pal Paulette) and Nikki Snelson (as defendant Brooke) get to show more idiosyncrasy. Fox Chapel's Christian Borle has the juicy role of Emmett, the ugly duckling who gets to metamorphose from comic pal into leading man. Michael Rupert, who just directed "Ragtime" at Point Park, plays the handsome overbearing professor.

As you probably know, Elle is a Valley Girl with a 4.0 in fashion merchandising who heads east for Harvard Law School. Disclaimer: Not only am I a Harvard grad, but the show lampoons the Harvard Law dean of admissions, who in real life is a relative of mine -- but I didn't mind seeing Harvard made fun of at all.

Heather Hach's book has a pitch-perfect ear, or at least stereotype-perfect.

Joan Marcus David Hyde Pierce in "Curtains." Click photo for larger image.

Laurence O'Keefe's and Nell Benjamin's score isn't especially memorable but it is pinkly catchy enough, with sufficient bounce to propel the many dance numbers invented by director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell.

This is a show that is going to run and run. I hope it doesn't prove infectious for young girls, but the rest of us can enjoy it in perfect safety, without fear of afterthought.

Palace Theatre, Broadway and 47th; 1-800-755-4000.

'Curtains'

Here, we have more traditional musical comedy skills: a clever plot, stock characters that develop personality, witty choreography that also dazzles, some solid songs and, in the person of David Hyde Pierce, a great leading man.

An old-fashioned musical comedy, "Robin Hood of the Old West," is rehearsing in Boston. Suddenly the over-the-hill star is killed, but because we heard her sing, we don't mind. Enter Pierce as homicide detective Frank Cioffi. In the traditional manner, he confines everyone to the theater while he detects; as expected, other murders follow; more surprisingly, Lt. Cioffi turns out to be a theater buff who is as good at solving the show's problems as its murders.

The suspects are the usual backstage crowd: domineering producer, her moneybags husband, writer, ingenue, dancer, preening director, even a theater critic. It's a backstage feast, with the title a pun meaning both murder and show biz.

Cioffi is a disarming creation, and Pierce plays him with great charm, from his Boston accent to his tentative dance steps to his funny mix of professional crispness with wide-eyed fandom and delight at finding a girl to love.

Debra Monk plays the brassy producer and Karen Ziemba pours her natural acting and expressive voice into the writer who fills in for the dead star. I was less impressed with Cioffi's love interest, but I greatly enjoyed Point Park grad Megan Sikora as the supporting player with a secret emotional burden and dynamite dance skills.

The latter points to an offstage star, choreographer Rob Ashford, whose many dance numbers range from purposeful blundering in "Robin Hood" to the full range of expression, including a comic Fred & Ginger number, and some unusual tap. It's varied, witty stuff.

So is the score, one of the last written by the great team of John Kander (music) and Fred Ebb (lyrics), with additional lyrics after Ebb's death by Kander and Rupert Holmes, who rewrote the book originally written by Peter Stone, also now dead.

We learn that "It's a Business" (show business, that is). There's a funny dirge, "The Woman's Dead"; an affectionate tribute to "Show People"; and the very touching "I Miss the Music," in which the composer regrets the absence of his lyricist partner, because their collaboration made music possible, privately and professionally. In context, the song feels a tad dragged in, but no matter because it gains in poignancy from being composer Kander's tribute to lyricist Ebb.

"Lunch counter mornings and coffee shop nights," goes one lyric, a line so redolent of stylish mid-century urban anomie that it's practically a parody of itself. So is "Curtains" as a whole, a love-letter to the craft of the musical in both subject and example.

At Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 W. 45th St.; 1-800-432-7250.

'The Pirate Queen'

The title figure is Grace O'Malley, a 16th-century Irish seafarer who resisted the encroachments of the English of Elizabeth I. The musical's plan of attack is to dramatize this quasi-historical conflict with a mix of two strands of epic emotional melodrama: that of writer Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schonberg, who also wrote "Les Miserables" and "Miss Saigon," and the hypnotic Irish dancing and showmanship of producers Moya Doherty and John McColgan, who produced and directed "Riverdance."

"Les Mis" plus "Riverdance" plus Gaelic flamboyance, with the insolent British as the bad guys -- it sounds surefire. But there is no surefire in theater, and the high expectations aroused by "Pirate Queen's" creative genes just make its failure the more marked.

Richard Maltby Jr. helped with the book, as on "Les Mis," and he and John Dempsey helped on lyrics, but the result never frees itself from the flat, bald taste of dutiful translation. Even some robust Irish dance numbers -- step dancing plus oars -- feel like mechanical additions, rather than driven by story-telling inevitability.

The word I'm looking for is synthetic. That certainly applies to the score, which hints at the melodic breadth and earnestness of "Les Mis" without ever soaring free. The director is Frank Galati, who brought in director/choreographer Graciela Danielle late in the game to help. That's the team that triumphed with "Ragtime," but there they had a rich book and score. Here, they try to generate excitement by piling up more and more, such that many numbers go on too long and Stephanie J. Block's Grace is buried alive. The other word is bloated.

Yes, there are attractions. Linda Balgord's gargoyle-like Elizabeth is very theatrical, each time wearing a more elaborate essay in imperial style. Some of the Irish-themed orchestrations have the expected hypnotic pull. And the set by Eugene Lee (also of "Ragtime") has plenty of swashbuckle of its own.

Occasionally "Pirate Queen" achieves a pop operatic melodrama, like a musical version of an old Errol Flynn movie. But not enough.

At Hilton Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St.; 1-800-755-4000.