Poised to light up Theatreland and London's West End are three big musical productions. But given a limp summer season, which has been staggering through saturation and failure, are they more likely to face slow handclaps than receive standing ovations?

The overall state of play in the London theatre is the usual patchwork of Kipling's twin impostors, triumph and disaster. We have a buoyant National Theatre, a busy fringe, a couple of blockbuster hits - Mamma Mia! and The Lion King (not to mention Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera) - and a new play by Michael Frayn.

Frayn's Democracy, which amazingly puts zip and life into the social-democratic workings of German Ostpolitik in Willy Brandt's chancellorship of the early 1970s, is a play fit to grace any West End season. Naturally, it originated in the subsidised sector, at the National, where Alan Bennett's The History Boys is this year's must-see for intelligent playgoers and where that scatological chat-show exercise in musical mock baroque, Jerry Springer: the opera, was launched for West End consumption.

And yet there is a feeling of calamity in the air, as various new plays of merit, or at least of some interest - Edward Albee's The Goat, starring Jonathan Pryce; the Tricycle transfer of the Guantanamo Bay tribunal staging (all seats £20: good move!) - struggle to find an audience, and others starring unknown Hollywood "stars" (Aaron Eckhart and Julia Stiles in David Mamet's Oleanna is the latest casualty) fall by the wayside. Even the golden boy Sam Mendes has come a cropper with his new theatre company's production of Fuddy Meers at the Arts, which closed after two weeks. This was not just because of bad reviews, as a few critics really raved about it.

Perhaps the fabled activity of the London theatre is at last catching up with the reality of a saturated, and diminishing, market. The congestion charge cannot help, as it deters customers from driving into the West End. Besides, tourists who flood London theatres in the summer months, far fewer post-9/11, are sufficiently diverted by the National and Mark Rylance's fizzing open-air Globe near Tate Modern, on the river, not to bother with Shaftesbury Avenue. Thoroughly Modern Millie has bitten the dust after a loss-making eight months, and the glorious Anything Goes at Drury Lane goes on only to the end of August.

Musical theatre is the big business that sustains the West End. So, just when the new musical seems to exist only in the back catalogues of Abba, Queen and Rod Stewart, here come - like three big red buses - three big new shows, with so much riding on them that a crash-and-burn scenario is a consummation devoutly not to be wished for, and preferably to be avoided at all costs.

Opening for its first preview on the very night Anything Goes closes is Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest epic, The Woman in White. This is adapted by Charlotte (Humble Boy) Jones from Wilkie Collins's Victorian thriller, with lyrics by David (City of Angels) Zippel. Lloyd Webber's score is certainly his lushest since Phantom, so maybe it is more than coincidence that Michael Crawford, who built a whole new Las Vegas career on the back of his appearance in Phantom 18 years ago, is returning to the fold as the wicked Count Fosco.

Crawford is one of those genuine star personalities the West End needs. His worryingly brilliant Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em - was this suburban clown amusingly stupid or offensively "simple"? - was based on a farcical performance in No Sex Please,We're British, where Crawford entered, horizontally, through a doorway like a flying fish. Nowadays London audiences are starting to stand and applaud in that tiresome knee-jerk fashion that has characterised Broadway audiences for about 20 years. However, I am reminded of Crawford's first night in Barnum at the London Palladium in 1981, when the ovation was so spontaneous that even the late Robert Morley (and that's a lot of human flesh) leapt to his feet like a salmon rising in the spume.

The combination of Crawford and Lloyd Webber - anathema to the snobs - is a proven attraction to the coachloads, and without that element in your audience, you are sunk. It is worth remembering that we know about The Woman in White only because the novel, on publication in 1860, became an instant hit, with a spin-off souvenir trade in waltzes, bonnets and perfumes. Roll up to the palace for your souvenir mugs, CDs and T-shirts.

Next off, at the end of October, is The Producers, adapted from his own 1968 cult movie by Mel Brooks, who proudly claims to be the only Jew to have made a buck off Hitler. "Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party" is the sick slogan of a bad-taste musical, designed by two failed producers to lose a fortune for their investors, while they make off with the capital outlay. But the plans for a flop misfire and give them a hit. Which is what Brooks found he had on his hands three years ago on Broadway.

The Producers is at Drury Lane and stars Richard Dreyfuss and Lee Evans in the film roles of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder; the risk is immense because neither is obviously "right". Dreyfuss was curiously lacklustre in his previous London appearance in a Neil Simon comedy, and Evans - though a brilliant zany - is possibly short on the silly sweetness of Wilder in the movie and Matthew Broderick on Broadway. Still, you can imagine people who claim to dislike musicals wanting to see this one, though the London management will be lucky to open with anything approaching the huge advance ($17m) that the New York box office took before the first rave review.

With these two shows up and running (as opposed to down and failing), enter stage left, flying over the London rooftops, Mary Poppins. This is a co-production by Cameron Mackintosh and Disney of the children's movie. It is written by Julian (Gosford Park, Snobs) Fellowes, directed by Richard Eyre and stars Laura-Michelle Kelly, London's latest Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (incidentally, Trevor Nunn, My Fair Lady's director, wanted to cast her in The Woman in White).

This, like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which continues at the Palladium, is appealing to a preconditioned audience while making various publicity noises about returning to the P L Travers stories and creating a darker, less saccharine mood. This always strikes me as an argument of big-budget self-justification, rather than the more honest one of: "We are doing this not because we believe in it necessarily, but because we think it will appeal to millions of people."

One of the endearing things - and there are several - about Andrew Lloyd Webber, who remains the one true hope of British musical theatre, is that he has written some of his best stuff for shows (Aspects of Love, Whistle Down the Wind, The Beautiful Game) that were complete commercial non-starters in London. The truth is that you simply cannot legislate for box-office success. The Producers and Mary Poppins cry out to be popular, and the London theatre needs them to succeed. But the really unknown quantity, The Woman in White, with a headlining star name, is the dark horse. And remember, no one gave Cats a cat in hell's chance of survival way back in 1981.

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