THE BEST THEATER OF 1997

1 RAGTIME The musical version of E.L. Doctorow's best-selling novel could have been a high-minded bore, a musical for people who hate musicals. Or, given all the promotional hype (the show has been trumpeted seemingly since the Ice Age), another mega-disappointment. In fact, it turns out to be a landmark American musical. Doctorow's turn-of-the-century tapestry, mixing fact and fiction, has been expertly refashioned for the stage by playwright Terrence McNally; director Frank Galati has showcased it in a crisp and beautiful production; the score by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty gets better with each hearing. And how many musicals have the audience fighting off tears before the end of the first act? The show doesn't arrive on Broadway until January, but it's hard to see how the Los Angeles production--which opened in June and will travel to Vancouver and Chicago in 1998--could be improved on.

2 The Lion King Disney's justly celebrated stage version of the hit movie has given Broadway an electric shock of excitement. Julie Taymor's design wizardry accomplished the difficult task of satisfying everyone: adults as well as kids, tourists looking for a reason to come to New York City, and serious theatergoers looking for a reason to believe in Broadway again. It may not be the Second Coming, but there's nothing else like it on God's earth. Don't be surprised if it runs forever.

3 A Doll's House Just when you thought Ibsen's war-horse had breathed its last, director Anthony Page, translator Frank McGuinness and galvanizing star Janet McTeer brought it back to life in a brilliant Broadway production imported from London. Their triumph was to make us feel the wrenching human underpinnings of drama's most famous feminist battle cry.

4 Space A psychiatrist's comfortable world is shaken when he encounters several patients with similar tales of alien visitation. Writer-director Tina Landau's wondrous production for Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre is a magical mystery tour, packed with inventive sound and lighting effects, that explores cosmic questions of mankind's place in the universe while staying grounded in the spiritual quest of one vulnerable man, played marvelously by Tom Irwin.

5 The Life Last season was a dismal one for Broadway musicals--the off year between Rent and The Lion King--but it did produce one underrated gem, this tale of seedy Times Square before it got Disneyfied. Complain about the cliched book if you must, but few musicals are this hard-edged and slam-bang entertaining at the same time. And few songwriters can still turn out showstoppers like Cy Coleman.

6 Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde Using court records, newspaper accounts, diaries and other historical documents, writer-director Moises Kaufman re-creates the courtroom battles that destroyed the career (and ultimately the life) of the late-Victorian playwright, wit and homosexual bon vivant. The cleverly stylized history lesson, playing off-Broadway and in San Francisco, is also a poignant study of an artist brought down as much by his own hubris as an intolerant society.

7 The Diary of Anne Frank The hit play from the 1950s by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett is back on Broadway, fresher and more moving than one might ever have expected. Credit goes largely to adapter Wendy Kesselman, who has removed some of the sentimental uplift and restored a firm sense of time and place, and to director James Lapine, who keeps the tension high and emotions real.

8 The Last Night of Ballyhoo Alfred Uhry's comedy-drama could have been written in the 1950s, but that doesn't make its old-fashioned virtues any less appealing. The story of a Jewish family in Atlanta in 1939 has a keen sense of its milieu, raises tough issues of Jewish anti-Semitism and goes for honest sentiment, not sentimentality.

9 How I Learned to Drive Paula Vogel's brief, intense play explores the complex relationship between a young girl and the uncle who sexually abused her. Unsettling and unsparing in facing up to a difficult subject, this off-Broadway play is an actors' showcase (originally starring David Morse and Mary-Louise Parker) that will surely become a staple in regional theaters for years.

10 Les Miserables After 10 years on Broadway, the Alain Boublil-Claude-Michel Schonberg musical had fallen into serious disrepair. So directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird became their own show doctors, replacing much of the cast and giving the production a thorough overhaul. Mon Dieu! Les Miz is back and as rousing as ever. Now, about Miss Saigon...