But while Wall Street investors hedged and corporations trimmed their payrolls, Broadway producers reached out to their shell-shocked audience. Theatergoers responded positively to discounted ticket prices last winter -- and to a bumper crop of imaginative new musicals this fall.

We weren't immune to layoffs down here in Charlotte. Undaunted, most of our performing arts companies weren't clinging to a bunker mentality. Without jubilant fanfare, the Arts & Science Council slightly surpassed their 2001 fundraising exploits. The philistinism of Charlotte's infamous Gang of Five receded further into the past.

Grabbing an eager audience's attention, two established pillars in the local theater firmament made bold moves. Children's Theatre elevated our own Alan Poindexter to the position of artistic director after a prolonged nationwide search. As the groundbreaking ceremonies marked the future spot where a pioneering partnership will blossom between Children's Theatre and our award-winning library, the right leadership was newly planted at the Morehead Street fantasy palace.

Then the board at Charlotte Rep, in a more markedly bizarre ceremony, discharged the company's founder, Steve Umberger. In his stead, in a newly created position of producing artistic director, Michael Bush came back to his hometown after nearly two decades with the prestigious Manhattan Theatre Club.

The switch was radical. New leader, new logo, new production philosophy. Greater expectations.

Suddenly there were more familiar Broadway names in Rep's season brochure -- and dramatically fewer shows in the annual subscription. Presumably, larger budgets for each show -- and longer runs -- would pay off in better quality and attendance.

But not instantly. Penny Fuller's presence didn't instantly elevate The Glass Menagerie above all that Rep had achieved in the previous 25 years. Nor did the fine revival of M. Butterfly relieve the suspicion, among local theater pros, that Charlotte had been kicked out of the Rep along with Umberger. The first Bush season at Rep, like the current Bush presidency, has had an awkward transition and some wobbly first steps. At one point, two Rep productions were running at two different venues, a dubious first.

Already this year, Rep has stopped stumbling over itself, and Charlotte is reaping the benefits of the company's new mission. Onstage, the end of the Umberger Era was no shabby spectacle, either. His valedictory effort, Proof, was a gem, preceded by our Show of the Year: Moliere's The Misanthrope hilariously updated and reimagined. Before we knew it, Umberger was back with a spanking new company and a dusted-off reprise of Shirley Valentine starring his wife, Rebecca Koon.

Meanwhile, Charlotte's new off-Broadway coalition kept chugging along into its second season, enfolding Tiny Ninja Shakespeare -- and skimpy negligee Shakespeare -- into the funky scene up in NoDa. What galvanized the season was the nifty confluence of all the coalition members last January, the Chickspeare/BareBones co-production of Paula Vogel's Desdemona at the Off-Tryon Theatre Company. Houses were packed and audiences were pumped.

So was Charlotte's burgeoning fringe theater movement. The young visionaries of The Farm kicked off the summer season with a brief homegrown production staged inside a barbed-wire enclosure. By fall, Michael Simmons' Victory Theatre enterprise had returned from its dalliance in Matthews, joining Farm in forming the core of the new Warehouse Theatre scene uptown at the Hart-Witzen Gallery. Carver Johns branched away from Off-Tryon and, together with fiancee Serena Ruden and Alan Nelson, formed innerVisions on 25th Street. And BareBones Theatre Group, after years of time-sharing at Off-Tryon and the Afro-Am Cultural Center, set its sights on SouthEnd. During December, they marched across the tracks of Tremont Avenue and transformed Carolina Cutlery into the SouthEnd Performing Arts Center.

Desdemona, and the all-woman staged reading of Othello that accompanied it, underscored the growing prominence of women on the local scene. Look around on your Google search engine, and not much turns up outside New York for "women's theater groups" -- just 45 hits. So our Chickspeare is something of a rare bird in this hemisphere, and the grassroots V-Day presentation of The Vagina Monologues last February affirmed that there's plentiful talent to sustain an all-female troupe. With an enthusiastic audience to boot.

Look around some more. Three women prowl the theater beat at the Observer. Another jumped off the sinking Leader newspaper to form the struggling new Charlotte Theatre monthly magazine. They're crawling all over the Artsavant website. It's an estrogen conspiracy!