Three shows well known to theater audiences have undergone radical Broadway makeovers this fall at the hands of directors who recognize that plays and musicals must be in dialogue with their times. Not everyone is on board with this premise. There are theater lovers, purists you might call them, who would prefer to see a work as its author intended it to be seen.
The job of the director, in this view, is to fulfill the playwright’s vision. But an artist’s vision is subject to interpretation, which is to say reinterpretation. Art leaves gaps that invite collaborative dreaming.
That is one way Shakespeare manages to keep holding the mirror up to nature. There are limits, some would argue, to how far a work can be remade in the image of its interpreter. But as director Peter Brook reminds us in “The Empty Space,” “If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound.
If what you want is for the play to be heard, then you must conjure the sound from it.” Jamie Lloyd, Sam Gold and Kenny Leon, three directors who don’t have all that much in common, conjure unexpected sounds from revivals that upend audience expectations. Newness is found in some very familiar places.
Lloyd has brought his sensational (and sensationalizing) production of “Sunset Blvd.,” starring a nuclear Nicole Scherzinger, to Broadway after its triumph in London’s West End. Gold, who has been deconstructing his way through the Shakespeare canon, has delivered a “Romeo + Juliet” in the form.
