A piece in the Wall Street Journal brings up the interesting case of the “revisal,” ie an old show that gets revived with extra songs and/or book changes. I’m neither for nor against the practice, preferring to judge on a case-by-case basis. Overall: why not? It’s the same approach as the “director’s cut” in film, an occasion to revisit something. Sondheim famously tweaked his shows, adding and subtracting numbers. And then there’s “Candide,” in which every revival is a revisal.
But director’s cuts and Sondheim’s interventions are done by the creators — and clearly Lorenz Hart or George Gershwin can’t have input input in revisals of their shows. The tricky question is, how far can we go?
Then there’s Encores!: the City Center series has been praised for the way it restores original orchestrations and performs scores faithfully. But then almost every book has been tweaked, usually by David Ives. Part of me thinks, If you’re going to do an obscure show for only five performances, you might as well do it as close to the original version as possible, creaky writing be damned. After all, it’s not often we can feel as if we’re at an opening in 1937. But then sanity catches up: Some of these old shows had great music and unbearable books, and there’s only so many corny, dated topical jokes we can take now.
Unlike film, theater is an ephemeral medium. You can’t exactly reproduce performances from one night to the next, so recapturing something “as was” in a revival years later seems like a pipe dream anyway.