​It's opening this fall in London, and you can bet it will head to NYC stages too--especially since it's a veritable jukebox show into which they've crammed tons of Whitney Houston's hits, fewer than half of which were actually used in The Boydguard movie.

Here are the songs included in the show for maximum box office appeal:

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Newsies the Musical -- coming to Broadway in a matter of moments -- is the well-received show based on the so-so 1992 film about "urchin peddlers" striking (and being striking).

At a press event yesterday, we were told that book writer Harvey Fierstein was brought in to turn the movie into a stage show, complete with two acts, added characters, and a love story.

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No, he's not just walking up and down the street.

He's actually in a show.

His own show, called Shatner's World: We Just Live In It.

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Broadway.com

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Gore Vidal's The Best Man is the chestnut about the power machinations of various presidential candidates, some of whom are willing to go further than others when it comes to negative campaigning.

(Sound familiar, news followers?)

Well, the imminent Broadway revival is campaigning to sell tickets -- starting with a promo event yesterday where the big-name-filled cast spoke to us as if at a White House press conference.

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Here's my new column, in which I dramatically go through the reasons I absolutely loathe any kind of theater!

Some of the radically repellent trends that come to mind:

*The jukebox shows that leave you with a gleeful medley that makes your forget how bad it all was

*The dumbing down of choreography to accommodate big names who are spastic

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Jacques Brel was a Belgian singer-songwriter whose ambient chansons caught the attention of Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Nina Simone, not to mention theater producers who've long crafted his work into popular revues.

A late-'60s Brel revue grabbed the public and stayed there, his story songs with ironic twists and shrieking climaxes gaining popularity along with fondue, haiku, and drizzly afternoons at outdoor cafés with floral-printed umbrellas.

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Margaret Edson's Pulitzer-winning 1995 play Wit finally makes it to Broadway in a Lynne Meadow-directed production starring Cynthia Nixon as a poetry professor named Vivian Bearing who's bearing a lot, actually.

Vivian has been diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer, and as she embarks on eight rounds of chemo, she's drolly noticing that her medical helpers are a little chilly and clinical, much as she's been in her entire teaching career (though at least she knows what "soporific" means).

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Darren Criss is attracting screaming Gleeks to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and they're filling the seats once occupied by screaming Potterphiles.

Which brings to mind the topic of Broadway replacements and how they fare in light of all the hoopla generated by the original stars.

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I arrived at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre last night for the promised taste of Ghost The Musical -- based on the hit 1990 movie about the potter, the potted plant, and the pot smoker -- and immediately scooped up a pretty blue drink sitting on a tray.

"That's the Unchained Melody," explained the bartender.

Ooh!

"It's made with Ghost vodka," he added.

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You might know her as the old lady in the Spider-Man movies, but theater aficionados have long treasured Rosemary Harris as the Tony-winning presence from The Lion in Winter, Heartbreak House, two productions of The Royal Family, and too many other classics to mention.

At 84, she's at the top of her game in the revival of Athol Fugard's 1984 play The Road to Mecca, about an eccentric widow who lives among her concrete statues in a South African village where she's been self-exiled and misunderstood, an iconoclast whose work is her supreme validation.

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