All of this makes a grand total of 14 non-musicals against 23 musicals. True, these figures do not include subsidized houses like the National Theatre, the Royal Court, the Donmar Warehouse or the London fringe, where plays, old as well as new, still thrive. But on the commercial boulevards, it's a different and depressing story, especially when so little there is actually worth seeing and much of it is actively worth avoiding.

But let's deal with the good news first. Broadway has also led in bequeathing to London two of the best commercially produced shows in town. Strindberg's Dance of Death (at Shaftesbury Avenue's Lyric Theatre) reunites director Sean Mathias and star Ian McKellen in the play they first did in New York in the fall of 2001, but this time -- with a new set by Robert Jones and a new female star in the glorious Frances de la Tour, replacing Broadway's Helen Mirren -- this brittle, brilliant play of marital distress emerges as both darker and funnier than it was before. So, too, I found Susan Stroman's triple dance bill Contact even more resonant at the Queen's Theatre than in New York. Played on a proscenium stage here, it feels more tightly focused and is extraordinarily well performed by a local company that includes Leigh Zimmerman -- a dazzling American performer now resident in London -- as the Girl in the Yellow Dress.

On the native front: Our House (which won the Olivier Award for Best New Musical in February) continues the trend begun by Mamma Mia! of folding an existing pop repertoire into the format of a musical and does so with great ambition and considerable style. This time, it's the songlist of the late '70s-early '80s London pop band Madness around which writer Tim Firth has constructed a fully plot-driven musical that does more than provide a pleasant trip down memory lane.

In a Sliding Doors-meets-Blood Brothers tale, Firth has his lead character Joe (the excellent newcomer Michael Jibson) follow two parallel plots and lives, demonstrating how one fateful decision could lead him in two totally different directions. On a 16th-birthday date with his girlfriend Sarah, Joe breaks into a building site; when the police arrive, Good Joe decides to face the music (and begins a life of punishments) while Bad Joe runs (and begins a life of crime). Though Our House sometimes threatens to sag under the weight of its own bleak portents, its songs (including "Baggy Trousers," "My Girl," and "It Must Be Love") provide the expected release, exploding with vitality thanks to Peter Darling's galvanizing choreography and the boisterous charm of Matthew Warchus's staging as the show slips from earthbound realism to fly -- literally, at one point -- into the realm of fantasy.

Also happily surprising is Pretending to Be Me, a one-man play about the life and work of the late British poet Philip Larkin, artfully constructed and performed by Tom Courtenay at the Comedy Theatre. Larkin's legacy includes such famous poetic pronouncements as "They f*** you up, your mum and dad" and, a little more eloquently, "What will survive of us is love." The play is an Alan Bennett-like monologue of reflection and insight, with Larkin's poems skillfully woven into it so they emerge organically from the life being told without any fanfare or announcement. Pretending to Be Me also precisely captures the sense of a wonderfully understated man carving out what he called "a uniquely dreary life."

No one seems to trust the play, dated though it is, to deliver its comic potential, and so its intricate comic rhythms have not been honored. Without them, it's a lot of exposition and no exhilaration, an unbelievable (and unbelievably long) evening spent with a gallery of eccentrics led by the two spinster aunts who kill out of pity. Their three variously disturbed nephews are a career criminal (the gifted Michael Richards, best known as Kramer from Seinfeld, whose agile physical comedy is about the only funny thing on display here), a nutty fantasist who thinks he's the President of the United States (!!!), and a New York drama critic. As the aunts fret over the latter's career choice, one of them says: "The theater can't last much longer and, in the meantime, it's a living." Watching this production, you realize that they may be right: it's the kind of thing that could be the death knell of commercial theater.

Unlike most of the tribute shows that have cluttered up the West End over the years -- celebrating everyone from Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley to John Lennon, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Patsy Cline -- the subject of Cliff -- The Musical is actually alive, though the show itself is a dead duck. Continuing to indulge the West End's appetite for pop nostalgia, this tacky, tasteless toast to British pop idol Sir Cliff Richard manages to insult both the star himself and his legion of fans. The witless book finds the singer preparing to celebrate his 80th birthday in the year 2020, now a resident of the Keith Richards Health Farm for retired pop stars. "I wish I was in [this show] myself," Richard is quoted on the posters. That's hard to believe, even if Cliff -- The Musical does have a better score than either Time or Heathcliff, the 1986 and 1994 musicals in which he did appear.

Also feeble is Mum's the Word, a new show at the Albery that I wished would live up to its title and keep quiet. Originally assembled in 1993 at Saturday morning coffee gatherings by six Canadian professional actresses turned amateur mothers, the show became a hit from Vancouver to Montreal to Melbourne and now comes to London with only one of those ladies -- Barbara Pollard -- still in it, joined by five locals, among them film actress Cathy Tyson and stage star Imogen Stubbs. This interminable collection of anecdotes about the joys and pains of motherhood is being promoted here as a comedy for anyone who ever had a mom -- but it's strictly for the moms themselves, if it's for anyone. Since the closest I come to being a parent is that I own two lionhead rabbits, I felt seriously out of the picture.

Also currently in the National repertoire, Honour -- an Australian play about the destruction of a 32-year marriage that faded fast on Broadway in 1998 -- has been revealed in a new production as a minutely-observed domestic drama of betrayal. In the National's intimate Cottesloe, with the audience arranged on two sides like eavesdroppers to scenes of emotional upheaval, Honour is acted with surgical precision and wrenching feeling by a cast that features Corin Redgrave as the husband, Eileen Atkins as the wife, and Catherine McCormack as the husband's mistress. Atkins is surely one of the five greatest actresses in the English-speaking theater -- my list also including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Penelope Wilton, and Allison Janney. Hers is, quite simply, the best-acted performance on any London stage right now.

But the funniest performance on any London stage right now is being given in a revival of the Italian political farce Accidental Death of an Anarchist at the Donmar Warehouse. Rhys Ifans, a Welsh actor best known as the man who confronts Julia Roberts in his underwear in the film Notting Hill, this time removes his underwear entirely at one point, foams at the mouth at another and, in sum, does a turn that might best be described as a tour-de-farce.