NEW YORK -- Broadway took a walk on the wild side this season.

Last season, The Producers may have signaled the return of the old-fashioned musical comedy, but this season several shows signaled the arrival of the new and different, the bizarre and avant-garde.

Three of the top contenders for Tony Awards at tonight's ceremony -- Urinetown: The Musical, Topdog / Underdog and Metamorphoses -- are shows so far from the Broadway mainstream that any one of them might seem an anomaly. Looked at together, they suggest a trend toward the adventuresome.

And though the simultaneous appearance of these three is largely a matter of coincidence, it's difficult not to be encouraged by the approbation and awards they have already received.

Topdog / Underdog won this year's Pulitzer Prize, which could give it a leg up on the Tony. Urinetown took top musical honors from the Outer Critics Circle. And the Drama Desk Award for best new play was a tie between Metamorphoses and Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (an odd offering in its own right since it concerns a love affair between a man and a goat; but then, odd is almost routine for Albee, whose last Broadway play was The Man Who Had Three Arms).

After Sept. 11, New York theatergoers and tourists might have been expected to gravitate toward Broadway shows that offered escape, familiarity or comic relief. And many did, judging from the continuing sold-out status of The Producers and The Lion King.

But others clearly embraced the challenge of the unsettling and unknown. And though Urinetown, Topdog / Underdog and Metamorphoses all got their start in considerably more modest venues, with no expectation of landing on Broadway, the fact that they ended up there bodes well for the future of the commercial American theater.

Here's a look at each of the three and their far-flung origins.

'Urinetown'

After being rejected by scores of theaters and agents, Urinetown debuted at the 1999 New York International Fringe Festival. From there it proceeded to off-Broadway before making the leap to Broadway.

The show's title alone indicates we're not in Oklahoma! anymore. Then there's the plot. At some unspecified time in the not-so-distant future, a drought has made water so precious that private toilets are banned and people have to pay to urinate.

Created by two University of Chicago alums, Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis, the musical is a political satire, taking broad shots at corrupt big business, represented by the Urine Good Company, the corporation that has a monopoly on public toilets.

John Cullum plays Caldwell B. Cladwell, the delightfully dastardly head of Urine Good. His nemesis, an ex-employee named Bobby (Hunter Foster), falls in love with Cladwell's wide-eyed daughter (Jennifer Laura Thompson) and leads a revolt against the company that has made it, to quote a lyric: "a privilege to pee."

But Urinetown isn't just an urban fable about the little guy bucking the system or a fat cat getting his comeuppance. It's also a parody of everything from Bertolt Brecht (The Three Penny Opera) to Broadway musicals (West Side Story, Les Miserables, Guys and Dolls, etc.) -- itself included.

A policeman (Jeff McCarthy) whose job it is to make sure the citizens use the public facilities -- and to cart off those who don't -- doubles as the show's narrator. Partly in response to questions raised by a waif named Little Sally (Spencer Kayden), he peppers his narrative with self-conscious remarks about the show. "You're too young to understand it now, but nothing can kill a show like too much exposition," he tells Sally at one point.

When it's clear that things aren't going to end happily ever after, Little Sally says, "I don't think too many people are going to come and see this musical." How wrong she is. Not only have New York critics and audiences taken to its bathroom humor and anarchistic spirit, but the producers have announced a year-long national tour.

'Topdog / Underdog'

Topdog / Underdog's history is also something of a Cinderella story. The play premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival in March 2001 and transferred to Broadway a year later. The day after it opened on Broadway (to glowing reviews), its author, Suzan-Lori Parks, became the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Parks' two-man drama focuses on a power struggle between a pair of African-American brothers whose father named them "Lincoln" and "Booth" as a joke. Plays about sibling rivalry may be nothing new, but Parks' down-and-out, profanity-spewing, street-smart, inextricably interdependent characters are highly original creations -- and hardly standard Broadway fare.

The first time we see Jeffrey Wright's Lincoln, he's decked out as the 16th president: stovepipe hat, fake beard -- and whiteface. Having forsaken his $1,000-per-day profession as a three-card monte hustler, he now makes a meager living impersonating Abraham Lincoln at an arcade, where patrons pay to shoot him with a cap gun. (The scenes in which Wright rehearses his arcade act are some of the funniest and most chilling in director George C. Wolfe's edgy production.)

Lincoln's younger brother, Booth (intensely played by rapper Mos Def), is a petty thief who's sure that he and Lincoln can make a bundle as a three-card monte team. Both brothers have dreams, but, like President Lincoln himself, their dreams keep getting shot down. And, with one brother named "Booth" and the other "Lincoln," the ending isn't difficult to guess.

The muscular writing, powerfully realized by Wright and Def, makes the production as riveting as the plot is inevitable. And what Parks has to say about the dangerous patterns that threaten the American dream makes this raw, urgent work an important addition to modern American literature.

'Metamorphoses'

Metamorphoses is the show with the humblest origins. Its writer and director, Mary Zimmerman, is a Northwestern University professor who created a smaller, student version of the piece in 1996. A full-scale production opened in Chicago in 1998, then traveled to the West Coast before arriving off-Broadway in October 2001. Five months later it transferred to the deep thrust stage at Broadway's Circle in the Square.

Adapted from Ovid's mythology, the show might sound as conventional as classical tragedy. But Zimmerman stages these stories of change and transformation in and around a swimming pool. The result, which also incorporates such influences as Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and Rainer Maria Rilke, is a work of haunting beauty, as ethereal as Topdog / Underdog is earthy. The fact that it's an adaptation, however, may hamper its Tony chances (a situation that could also affect the fourth nominee for best new play, Mike Poulton's Turgenev adaptation, Fortune's Fool).

Zimmerman's method of storytelling is rich visually as well as aurally. Appropriately for a work about transformation, her actors assume multiple roles -- from Bacchus to Orpheus, from Aphrodite to Eurydice -- and the pool of water serves as another symbol of mutability.

Some characters have been updated: King Midas (Raymond Fox) is a greedy, self-important businessman, and Phaeton (Doug Hara), son of Apollo, is a spoiled rich kid, floating on a rubber raft during a therapy session.

In other cases, simplicity is the key. For the tale of Narcissus, Zimmerman forsakes words entirely.

Staring at his reflection in the water, Hara's Narcissus becomes so transfixed, he's carted out like a mannequin and replaced at poolside by a potted flowering narcissus plant.

"It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days," the character of the Therapist says in the scene with Phaeton. Zimmerman brings the public and private together with simplicity and splendor.

The 2002 Tony Awards will be broadcast tonight from 8 to 9 on PBS (MPT, Channels 22-and 67) and from 9 to 11 on CBS (WJZ, Channel 13). A full list of the nominees can be found at www.sunspot.net / features.