Musicals are having an exceptional moment – but classic plays are vanishing from our stages | Michael Billington

There are invigorating versions of Guys and Dolls, Oklahoma! and Cabaret in London - and some enticing new dramas coming - yet theatre risks being cut off from its past

David Hare has argued this week that musicals are strangling the growth of straight plays in the West End. I have some sympathy with his point, but it is one that could have been made anytime in the past two decades, during which there has never been less than 25 tune-and-toe shows in the commercial sector. What is curious is Hare's timing, since right now three London theatres traditionally associated with straight plays happen to be housing quite exceptional musicals.

Hare seizes on Oklahoma!'s occupation of the beautiful Wyndham's theatre. Director Daniel Fish, however, has done precisely what the best directors of classic plays have been doing for ages: he gives us a fresh perspective on a familiar work without (well, almost without) altering the text. Instead of the usual gung-ho hymn to rural America, we get a dark, disturbing study of the victimisation of the outsider - in this case Jud Fry - by a small, self-regarding community.