If Broadway no longer seems behind the times or ahead of the times, it may be because there are no 'times' anymore, no prevailing Zeitgeist that sets the fashion, pace, and prevailing look.

'Hairspray' was a movie turned Broadway musical turned Hollywood remake, and that is the 'Lion King' circle of life as we know it in Times Square, the creative loop that swings for the stars and sometimes crashes into the upper deck.

Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

What a turnaround in sentiment 'Glee' exemplifies. It was only a few years ago that pursuing the dream of a Broadway career or cabaret stardom relegated some poor yearning dope to a lavender ghetto of losers, self-deluders, and social rejects.

It's not going to matter anymore because they gave the go-ahead on all the others. We've already been invaded.