But with The Look of Love , the Burt Bacharach musical compilation of 29 of his songs, with lyrics by Hal David, you know . And what you know, you knew already. That is, once you've heard one Burt Bacharach song, you've more or less heard them all.

"You'll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart)"; "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head"; "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?"; "Wishin' and Hopin'"; "Trains and Boats and Planes"; "Anyone Who Had a Heart"; "What the World Needs Now Is Love"; "What's It All About, Alfie?"; "Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa"- stop !!

It was like being trapped in an elevator (without Dionne Warwick). But not by Muzak alone. The production itself, sort of directed by Scott Ellis and sort of choreographed by Ann Reinking, has left almost all my colleagues unable to believe their eyes. Unless paying good money to watch The Lawrence Welk Show on Broadway, with mild titillation for tourists from Ms. Reinking's ludicrous leftovers from Chicago , is your idea of a great night out, I'm afraid there can be no doubt that Look of Love sinks to a nadir.

But I've no wish to dwell further on the show itself. A bad commercial idea-and a bad commercial production-are nothing new on Broadway, and they're easy to forgive (and forget). What is unforgivable here is that the folks behind the show aren't commercial producers hoping for a nice profit by pandering to the bottom line. The producer is Todd Haimes' nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, whose very existence and raison d'être is meant to be a radical alternative to commercial Broadway.

The real nadir isn't the Burt Bacharach show, but why Mr. Haimes produced it in the first place. And I would be asking exactly the same urgent question had the show proved a resounding success. Why this latest sellout? Or, put another uncomfortable way, what's the excuse this time?

I've argued passionately before in this column that nothing could be more crucial to the future health of the American theater than the integrity of its nonprofit theaters. Despite all the pressures on them caused by dips in public funding, the beleaguered, grudging help from the National Endowment for the Arts or the battle to maintain endowments, the nonprofit theaters alone are the protectors of artistic independence and excellence. They alone are responsible for the best the American imagination can offer. They alone hold their theaters in public trust.

And what are they doing but betraying that trust by capitulating to Broadway values? Functioning like any other commercial producer, Roundabout's Bacharach songbook is at the Brooks Atkinson on 47th Street. (The company's actual home is the American Airlines Theater on 42nd Street.) But when was the last time Mr. Haimes truly risked anything dangerous and new? The Roundabout's current revival of Peter Nichols' 1968 Joe Egg is an import from the West End; there was the earlier revival of The Boys from Syracuse ; and there's the forthcoming revival of Athol Fugard's 1982 Master Harold … and the Boys .

Mr. Haimes is far from alone. The last five plays at Lincoln Center have all been revivals and imports. When I recently pointed that out, I was immediately informed of Jules Feiffer's forthcoming new play, A Bad Friend , at Lincoln Center. No one welcomes back to the theater a warrior like Mr. Feiffer more than I do. But one new play doesn't make a summer. No, the truth is that the cop-out of revivals and imports is the safest bet of all. But the outcome is an alarming loss of individuality and choice. We're reaching the point where we can no longer tell one theater's policy from another.

The Broadway-itis of our leading nonprofit theaters only makes the standardization worse. Lincoln Center's main house, the Vivian Beaumont, has long since ranked as a Broadway theater, of course ( Contact ran there for two and a half years). Now the Manhattan Theatre Club is joining the Roundabout on Broadway with its new outlet at the Biltmore Theatre. What's going on?

I still haven't recovered from a Times Arts and Leisure piece that ran last September, "For Profit or Not? It's All Showbiz"-a title that says it all. "The fact is," wrote John Rockwell with a jaded sigh, "distinctions between art and commerce-if they ever had much merit-have broken down today." In response, a friend of mine wrote a letter to Arts and Leisure suggesting they rename the section "Commerce and Leisure." But they didn't run it. God forbid The Times should have a sense of humor about itself.

I think the cheerless, drably defeatist Mr. Rockwell is wrong to give up the ghost so easily and claim that distinctions between art and commerce probably never had much merit in the first place. There's a difference between the highest values we can aspire to and bottom-line commercial crap, don't you agree? Or am I going nuts?

On the other hand, he appears to be troublingly right in claiming those distinctions have broken down today. My question is this: Do we embrace it as inevitable, like Mr. Rockwell, or do we try to preserve what's left of our very lifeblood?

Artistic idealism and pragmatism are eternally at war. But who today is fighting the war? Who's on the side of the angels? Even "art" has become such a dirty word that no one mentions it any more. "Producing is the intelligent expression of one's own taste," André Bishop of Lincoln Center told The Times . "But you can't be too hoity-toity: your taste has to translate into something that others will like."

Not to be too hoity-toity, but public taste is also created , and the shock and inspiring pleasure of the adventurous can translate into something that others will follow.

It has always been so. Given luck, the theater that dares to fail the most succeeds the most. Yet the colonizing leaders of our nonprofit institutions aspire to Broadway, of all sweet, desperate bordellos. They would even have us believe, like smiling politicians, that they're saving Broadway from itself. And to that I reply: Do you know the way to San Jose? (It's 24 hours from Tulsa.)

Bit by bit, compromise by compromise, little by not so little, the Broadway infiltration is selling out everything the nonprofits are supposed to stand for in the expansionist cause of this new art form named commerce. These are hard times for every cultural institution in New York. All the more urgent reason for our nonprofit theaters to renew public trust, rekindle their original proud artistic purpose and reject the values of Broadway.

My love for Rocco will doubtless surprise some people, including Rocco himself. He is, after all, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, whom I once challenged to sit in one of his own awesomely cramped Broadway houses and swear to the theatergoing world that there was enough legroom for even a severely depressed dwarf. He did not rise to the challenge. Not only is our Rocco well over six feet tall on a good day, he would have had to sit through his own production of The Sound of Music one more time. He's no fool! To the contrary, this leading commercial producer (and former professor at the Yale School of Drama) turns out to be trouble with a capital T, which rhymes with "we"-and we are delighted.

In a stunning attack on nonprofit theaters-stunning because it came from so unexpected a source-he accused the nonprofit movement of selling out by modeling itself on-of all low things-the commercial theater! Now that must surely be a first. In effect, a Broadway producer is saying to the nonprofit opposition: Don't be like us. Writing in the June 4 Arts & Leisure Section of The New York Times , Rocco took particularly lethal aim at the Roundabout Theatre's artistic director, Todd Haimes, for playing it safe with star-driven, mediocre subscription fare and for selling the name and dignity of his theater to American Airlines for a few more pieces of silver.

"It would, I suppose, be hyperbolic to say that Todd Haimes has had a more pernicious influence on English-speaking theater than anyone since Oliver Cromwell (and it wouldn't be nice, either, since Mr. Haimes is a personable and honorable man)," Rocco wrote in his best I-come-not-to-bury-Caesar style. "But it can be reasonably argued that the forces of the marketplace through the years have been just as effective a censor as government edicts."

He was boldly arguing that subsidized theaters like the Roundabout have lost their way by pandering to sleepy subscribers and Broadway values, or that they function increasingly in open, unembarrassed alliance with the commercial producers themselves. In other, bitter words: There no longer exists a clear difference between the commercial and the nonprofit, between the bottom line and the artistically independent-and for some of us, the lifeblood of American theater is at stake.

When Lincoln Center jumped into bed with the Broadway producer Garth Drabinsky in 1998 to co-produce an expensive new musical, Parade , my strong objection was that the independence of our nonprofit theaters ought to be sacrosanct. What do we see all around us but more compromise, more and more conformity-a diminishment, if you will, of individualism and freedom of choice. I look to our nonprofit theaters not to compromise more, but less . I look to them as the last stronghold where certain stories may be told in liberty. The enduring strength of nonprofit theater-of the very identity which accounts for its unique contribution and artistic vision-resides in the rejection of Broadway values.

It's argued that without Broadway investors and their "enhancement money," nonprofit theaters like Lincoln Center, the Public Theater and the Manhattan Theatre Club wouldn't be able to produce big musicals. My answer to that is: Then produce small musicals. And let the theaters that are held in public trust remain proudly independent-producing musicals and plays that Broadway daren't risk, which is why they're in business in the first place.

Why, then, do commercial producers make alliances with nonprofit theaters? Not for art's sake, surely. There's only one reason: It's a safer and cheaper way of producing. From New York to Los Angeles to Seattle to San Francisco to San Diego, the nonprofit theaters of America are being used simply as try-out houses for Broadway. A musical version of The Full Monty is currently in production at the nonprofit Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, where it's partly financed by Fox Searchlight, the producers of the 1997 hit movie. The show, once tested in the less pressurized regional marketplace, is heading for Broadway (where it's due to open at one of Rocco's Jujamcyn Theaters!). But the question of whether the Old Globe should function as a try-out house-or whether The Full Monty , the musical, is a particularly thrilling idea-has been lost in the typical commercial opportunism of it all.

Then again, the nonprofit artistic directors argue back with their glib mantra of righteous defensiveness that their artistic integrity is always maintained and that their theaters share in the Broadway profits that help to subsidize their "real" work. They never mention that they also share in the losses and could lose their shirts-thereby jeopardizing everything else they do. Nor is their artistic independence truly maintained, any more than one can become a little bit pregnant. When the Public Theater's recent Wild Party opened on Broadway to a thumbs-down Times review, one of its principal co-producers, Scott Rudin, wanted to close the show immediately. The idea of nurturing a show or an artist through rough times is itself uncommercial.

The "right to fail" is a more typically English concept. That hallowed right-created by the legendary George Devine at the nonprofit powerhouse Royal Court Theatre-is the bedrock of government-subsidized theater in England. "Failing," like not making a profit, is an un-American activity. Yet this country's own subsidized theaters-supported primarily by endowments, corporations and philanthropy-were actually created in the 1960's as a daring alternative to commercial theater. They created their own "right to fail," or the nerve to take uncommercial artistic risks. But today, the line has become so blurred that Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the immensely powerful Shubert Organization on Broadway, can claim that the differences between profit and nonprofit are essentially obsolete. There are differences, even so. When was the last time the Shubert independently produced an unknown dramatist on Broadway? But when the Roundabout produces such hackneyed, sure-fire commercial crap as Neil Simon's Hotel Suite -a collection of one-acts taken from Mr. Simon's well-known Plaza Suite , California Suite and London Suite -we're entitled to ask whether this is the most adventurous work a nonprofit theater can offer us.

Our theaters are compromised enough. The nonprofit theater is nontaxable. If it can't behave, it should pay tax like the commercial theater. If it sleeps with Broadway producers, it should forfeit its special status. Let our compliant nonprofit theaters wake up from their smug, slumbering capitulation and return to their unique raison d'être , which is their fierce artistic independence, their social contract with the community, their belief in the intelligence of all audiences, their faith in new talent and in our theatrical heritage, and their joy in creating lots and lots of trouble.

"Let's take in a show at the American Airlines Theater" lacks a certain something–call it magic–but let our righteousness pass for the moment. Rumors cannot be confirmed that luxury sleeperettes are to be made available in the boxes for those who wish to bed down during the Roundabout's forthcoming Uncle Vanya . But can the drinks trolley rattling up and down the aisle be far behind? No, siree.

"To be or not to be, that is the question … "

"Two diet Cokes here!"

"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows …"

"Any chance of extra peanuts?"

"Or to take arms against a sea of trouble …"

"There you go, hon! Compliments of American Airlines. Enjoy the show!"

One feels jetlagged already. But the dear old drinks trolley isn't far behind. There's a new phenomenon in theaters outside New York: You can now take popcorn and drinks–and, for all I know, a sushi banquet on a tray–with you into the once hallowed auditorium. "Pass the soy sauce, sweetheart!" And why not?

Why not rename the newly refurbished Selwyn on 42nd Street the American Airlines Theater? After all, the Roundabout Theater Company will receive $850,000 a year for a period of 10 years from the airline. "I think it's wonderful that a major corporation would support the arts and want their name on our theater," Todd Haimes, the artistic director of the Roundabout company told The New York Times . "I don't have a philosophical problem with it."

Oh, Mr. Haimes! Oh dear, Mr. Haimes! We need not be Wittgenstein to see that American Airlines isn't supporting the arts, bless them. They are paying a tax-deductible fee in order to advertise and sell their corporate logo on Broadway. Philanthropy has sweet zilch to do with it.

Then again, Mr. Haimes believes that naming the house the American Airlines Theater is no different from naming it for an individual benefactor. One of the Roundabout's former theaters was named after Laura Pels. What's the difference?

It's this: An arts patron donates millions to a cause; a corporation is in pursuit of name recognition for profit. Zillionaire arts patrons who wish to have a theater, a museum wing or a concert hall named after them are one thing. It isn't too modest, true. But I don't suppose the Lincoln Center people went to Mitzi E. Newhouse and said: "We really appreciate your millions, Mitzi. Would you mind awfully if we named the new theater the William Shakespeare?" On the other hand, there's surely a difference between arts patronage and corporate marketing, between loving the theater and using it.

American Airlines and many other corporations, such as General Motors, now want a commercial alliance with the Disneyfied, family-oriented, boomtown open-air mall that is Broadway. In this corporate takeover of the marquees, the proud heritage of the landmark theaters themselves is irrelevant. The theaters are billboards. Why pretend otherwise?

All the major theater chains on Broadway–the Shuberts, the Nederlanders, Jujamcyn–are now considering corporate alliances. The only corporate name till now has been the Ford Center for the Performing Arts on 42nd Street, when Livent Inc. solemnly rechristened the combined Lyric and Apollo Theaters to house Ragtime . (Livent went bankrupt.) After negotiations with General Motors, the Shubert Organization has reportedly decided against renaming the Winter Garden, home to Cats , the Cadillac Winter Garden. Rocco Landesman, president of Jujamcyn, remains wary, telling The Times that "The Walter Kerr still sounds a lot better to me than 'the AT&T.'"

It certainly does. But for how long? How long before the Richard Rodgers joins the corporate monoculture to be redubbed the Martha Stewart? The Brooks Atkinson the Yahoo? Or the Booth the Trump International Theater (and Family Casino)? Who will protect the dignity of our theaters?

Mr. Haimes of American Airlines is anxious to point out that the Roundabout will maintain complete control over its artistic policy. That's what they always say. But of course it will! American Airlines is confident that Mr. Haimes will not be commissioning Christopher Durang to write a boisterous new satire entitled Leg Room , and Mr. Haimes is confident that a safe diet of Shaw and Chekhov won't offend anyone.

No, the pity is that the Roundabout, a nonprofit theater, leads the way in Broadway's commercial arena by selling out to the highest bidder. We might expect it, perhaps, from the traditional producers in the oldest established, permanent floating crap game in New York. But once again the nonprofit theater has blurred the vital differences with the commercial by compromising its independence and identity. What's in a name?

Everything.

The Roundabout should rethink its new corporate image and cancel American Airlines.