Yesterday's Broadway Warhorses, Saddles with Today's Concerns

Revivals of “Romeo and Juliet,” “Our Town,” “Gypsy” and “Sunset Boulevard” aim to show that rethinking for the present is what makes classics classic.

By Julie Benbassat for The New York Times

By JESSE GREEN September 10, 2024 reprinted from The New York Times.

Two cheers for new voices! Of the 16 productions scheduled to open on Broadway between now and the end of the year, 12 are new to the Boulevard of Broken Budgets.

But I’d like to reserve a third cheer for the fall’s four revivals, which may get less attention, having been this way before, but are likely to earn their keep if history holds true. Old voices are, after all, where new voices come from. And though 240 years separate the Broadway debuts of “Romeo and Juliet” and “Sunset Boulevard,” with “Our Town” and “Gypsy” in between, they all have much in common, at least in their continued haunting of theatergoers’ imaginations.

That haunting arises, in part, from our memories of past stars who hover alongside the new ones. In “Our Town,” Henry Fonda and Paul Newman will be whispering the Stage Manager’s lines to Jim Parsons. Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury and Patti LuPone will no doubt watch over Audra McDonald as she takes on the role of Rose in “Gypsy.” LuPone will also be looking over Nicole Scherzinger’s shoulder in “Sunset Boulevard”; presumably keeping a safe distance, so will Glenn Close. And though few are likely to remember Robert Goffe, the original Juliet, he too will be felt on Broadway this fall. However long ago, the part was built on him.

But revivals of shows like these have more to offer than ghosts. There’s a reason, aside from name recognition, that they keep coming back. Though products of vastly different times and cultures, they dig so deep into their specific truths that they reach a common, eternal one, from which many others may spring.

Perhaps that’s most evident in “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play about two families whose ordinary life events, from birth to death, are consecrated by a kind of communal love. The director Kenny Leon said that in his production, “1936 runs into 2024,” allowing the story to serve “as a metaphor for our world, for our country, even our time.”

Two families are also at the center of “Romeo and Juliet,” but Shakespeare’s central theme is less love than hate, or love that is bound to hate by impetuousness, another human perennial. In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” based on the 1950 Billy Wilder film, it’s the love of self, deformed by delusion, that’s under the microscope. And in “Gypsy,” by Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, a similar self-love, masquerading as maternal, devolves into an almost “Lear”-like madness.

George C. Wolfe, who is directing that 1959 musical, sees classics as works that, paradoxically, are always new. “I think they answer a fundamental need to see ourselves in the mirror,” he said. “Not calcified as cultural memories — not how my parents looked — but how do I look now?”

So in exploring a Rose for today with McDonald, he sees more than a frantic single mother grooming her daughters to fulfill her own fantasies by performing in vaudeville and, when that fails, stripping in burlesque.

“I am fascinated by the use of the word ‘monster’ in the show,” Wolfe said. “Do we call this woman a monster or do we see her as a woman who says, ‘I ain’t doing wife, I ain’t doing mother’? And what does that say about the shifting definition of ambitious women?”

With McDonald in the role — and Kamala Harris running for president — it seems inevitable and timely to specify Wolfe’s phrase as “ambitious Black women.” Reports that Rose’s daughters would be cast and portrayed as Black or biracial have led to advance criticism from those who think such choices undermine the story. “In 1920s America, when the show is set,” John McWhorter wrote in The Times, “racism and segregation remained implacable forces in popular culture, and the only stardom a Black Rose would have realistically sought for her kids would have been among Black audiences.”

Wolfe declined to address the issue directly, saying he doesn’t yet know what he and the cast will discover in rehearsal: “If we already know what we’re going to find, let’s all go home and take a nap.” But he points out that the show’s subtitle is “An American Fable.”

In a way, all warhorses are fables, stories that are roomy enough to let artists of any era maneuver among their archetypes. Today, that often means a wider diversity than the playwrights imagined; what Leon calls identity-conscious casting is taken for granted in all of the fall’s revivals. If the actor playing Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard” is Filipino-Russian-Hawaiian, like Scherzinger, then so is Norma. And if, in “Our Town,” one of the two main families is white (Richard Thomas, Katie Holmes and Zoey Deutch play the Webbs) and the other is Black (Ephraim Sykes, Michelle Wilson and Billy Eugene Jones play the Gibbses) then the play will necessarily consider what it means — to the parents and their children — when the children intermarry.

“I wanted the older generation to learn from the younger generation,” Leon said.

He might also be speaking for Sam Gold’s production of “Romeo and Juliet,” starring the “Heartstopper” heartthrob Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler, who as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story” played a Juliet descendant. Though it’s unclear which other aspects of their identities will be emphasized — Connor came out as bisexual in 2022; Zegler is of Colombian and Polish heritage — their youth surely will: He’s 20 and she’s 23.

That’s older than as written, but who today wants to see a 16-year-old Romeo woo a 13-year-old Juliet?

Still, the actors’ relative youth is useful to Gold’s exploration of young people’s anger at the world left to them by their elders. His production, he said, is thus set in “a Gen Z world with elements drawn from club culture and basement hangouts” — a vibe that the pop hitmaker Jack Antonoff no doubt intends to accentuate with the one or two songs and underscoring he is providing. Also suitable for Gen Z: the running time. Gold has made cuts, he said, to approximate the “two hours’ traffic” of the stage described in the play’s prologue (yet rarely achieved).

If we have finally reached the point, at least with Shakespeare, where diversity’s the norm, not a trick or a self-conscious concept, the question remains: Are we there yet with musicals?

Though purists might raise the same questions about “Sunset Boulevard” that McWhorter raised about “Gypsy” — Norma Desmond is, after all, a Hollywood star in the silent-movie era — no one seemed upset about Scherzinger’s background when the production, directed by Jamie Lloyd, opened last year in London. Perhaps that’s because it was secondary to Lloyd’s larger innovation: downsizing the show’s camp factor by upsizing the performers’ faces. At key moments, the audience sees the performers on a giant screen that, as Matt Wolf wrote in his New York Times review, “broadcasts every emotion (and facial pore).”

That’s a literal version of the double vision all artistically successful revivals must aim for. They must find the micro of today in the macro of forever. Handled boldly but thoughtfully, warhorses can do that. They got to be warhorses for a reason: They are the works that keep on working.