Again, for the First Time
By BEN BRANTLEY
WHEN your high school English teachers talked about the rewards of revisiting the classics, they probably didn’t mean musicals. Most likely they were referring to fat, dense novels (“Middlemarch,” “Anna Karenina”) and long, lofty plays (“Hamlet,” “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”): works of weight, they liked to tell us, dragging out a favorite dog-eared phrase, with “universal human truth.”



Weighty is not an adjective commonly attached to musicals, which were born to divert, to tickle. They came into existence as the paler, thinner cousins of light operas, for heaven’s sake. Yet after experiencing, in recent weeks, the Tony-nominated Broadway revivals of “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific,” “Gypsy” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” I’m carving out new space for these shows on my list of all-time favorite literary masterpieces, right near the top.

Granted, on the page the lyrics and librettos may not parse neatly enough to satisfy Miss Kapp, the woman who taught me to diagram sentences. But as seen in the remarkable productions that opened this year, these shows from different decades of the last half-century easily meet my checklist for great narrative art: complex and constantly evolving characters, a sense that what happens is both spontaneous and inevitable, and a sustained perspective that finds poetic patterns in our daily muddles.

Heck, I’ll even throw in those Aristotelian prerequisites about self-knowledge and catharsis. These beauties have it all. Not to mention the sensual appeal that comes from feeling the quickening warmth of real life given stirring artistic form.

It’s rare that the race for best revival of a musical is the sexiest category at the Tony Awards, which will be bestowed this year on June 15 at Radio City Music Hall. But what’s most striking about “South Pacific” (first staged on Broadway in 1949) “Gypsy” (1959) and “Sunday in the Park With George” (1984) is how much fuller and juicier they feel than any of the newer musical fare this season. (Yes, there is a fourth contender for best revival of a musical: “Grease,” which cast its leads via reality television. Enough said.)

I much enjoyed three of the nominees for best new musical: “In the Heights,” “Passing Strange” and “Xanadu.” (The fourth is “Cry-Baby.” Enough said.) But it was on the diverting level that my parents might have enjoyed, say, “Wonderful Town” or a “New Faces” revue in the 1950s, or “The Fantasticks” a few years later.

Though they embrace musical forms unknown to Comden and Green (like hip-hop and rap) and a Latino and African-American perspective rarely evident in Broadway musicals until the 1960s, “In the Heights” and “Passing Strange” are also throwbacks to a more overtly sentimental era of entertainment, with hymns to Mother (and Grandmother) of which George M. Cohan might have approved.

Their characters — even the self-portraits of the talented Stew, the creator and star of “Passing Strange” — are largely drawn in bright comic shorthand. “Xanadu,” a droll reworking of a notorious cinematic flop from the disco era, doesn’t have a thought in its fluffy head beyond wanting us to feel good.

That’s fine. Broadway needs its fluff, especially the kind that doesn’t go limp under a tonnage of special effects. (I’ll take “Mamma Mia!” over “The Little Mermaid” any day.) What makes you want to keep going back to the most recent versions of “South Pacific,” “Gypsy” and “Sunday,” though, isn’t the need for a cotton-candy fix. It’s that you sense there’s always something more to be gleaned from them. And that — and this is the special dividend of live theater — the shows might have grown even more since you last saw them.

What sets these productions apart from other fine revivals of recent years is how true they remain to the spirit of the originals while exuding a new-born freshness. The hit reincarnations of “Carousel” (1994), “Cabaret” (1998) and “Sweeney Todd” (2005) were all, in different ways, dazzlers. But each was shaped, first and foremost, by an intellectual concept imposed by a director (each, coincidentally, a Briton). The implicit message, at least with “Carousel” and “Cabaret,” was that in the late 20th century it was possible to be perfectly frank, to make dark subtext the main text.

The difference with “Gypsy,” “Sunday” and “South Pacific” is that they work entirely from within. There’s no postmodern distance about them, no we-know-better-now wink. The directors Arthur Laurents (“Gypsy”), Sam Buntrock (“Sunday”) and Bartlett Sher (“South Pacific”) instead have demanded that their performers dig like archaeologists into the existing libretto, lyrics and music. And what treasures they have found.

With “South Pacific,” adapted from James Michener’s stories of American military men and women far from home during World War II — which, like the musical, won a Pulitzer Prize — Mr. Sher doesn’t apologize for such potentially dated elements as yesteryear’s progressive political conscience or an unconditional belief in love at first sight. He scales up, though, the always implicit elements of wartime disorientation and of cultures in collision.

Michael Yeargan’s beautiful beachscape of a set appropriately suggests a dreamlike isolation from conventions, a sense of a world in which old rules no longer apply, and only military discipline keeps people from sliding into anomie. But most important is the fear and uncertainty with which the cast members invest their characters, even in their most frivolous moments.

Kelli O’Hara’s plucky ensign from Little Rock, Ark.; Paulo Szot’s self-exiled French plantation owner; Matthew Morrison’s battle-rattled Ivy League lieutenant: they’re all trying to make sense of reactions they never expected to have.

Mr. Sher stages breakout songs, including the love duet “Some Enchanted Evening” and “Bali Ha’i” (performed by Loretta Ables Sayre as the survival-conscious island entrepreneur Bloody Mary), as double-edged studies in seduction, shot through with menace as well as allure. His performers seep emotional anxiety, the awareness that all bets are off in war, from their pores. And the show acquires a timeless visceral charge.

The same commitment to character is what brings such eye-opening vitality to Mr. Buntrock’s interpretation of “Sunday in the Park With George,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s meditation on art according to the pointillist George Seurat. Certainly the digital projections of Seurat’s art coming into being are wonderful.

But they wouldn’t count for nearly as much if they weren’t backed up with the ensemble’s ability to convey the different visions with which different people shape the world. Chief among these, of course, are Daniel Evans’s magnificent double portrait of the obsessive Seurat (in the first act) and his American descendant, a conceptual artist, in the second; and Jenna Russell as Seurat’s pragmatic model and lover (and, in the second act, her daughter).

But every performance in the show is blessed with thought-through detail that defines each character as an individual of conflicting needs and perspectives. When the ensemble sings “Sunday,” one of Mr. Sondheim’s most diversely inflected songs, it’s like hearing a storm of separate thoughts. The harmony — spatial, visual, musical — achieved by the Georges at the end of both acts is thus all the more moving in its transcendence.

If the performances are broader in “Gypsy,” adapted from the memoirs of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and featuring a crackerjack score by Jule Styne (with lyrics by Mr. Sondheim), well, these characters belong to show business, a world in which success is built on the ability to make yourself seen.

This production’s director also happens to be the man who wrote the original book, the 90-year-old Mr. Laurents. And though I saw and admired two earlier Broadway revivals by Mr. Laurents (with Angela Lansbury and Tyne Daly), this one has a singular fierceness and clarity of vision.

It’s not just that Patti LuPone is so commandingly intense in the central role of Momma Rose, the stage mother to end all stage mothers. It’s that every character onstage is so obviously driven by an aching hunger to be noticed. That includes Rose’s daughters, June (Leigh Ann Larkin) and Louise (Laura Benanti), and her lover, Herbie (Boyd Gaines). And for once, none of them easily yields the stage to Rose.

Everyone is fighting for love here. And the genius of this production is how astutely it blends garden-variety inter-family struggles for attention into the look-at-me competitiveness of the theater. Of course these folks sing their thoughts. That’s show biz. And show biz, in this instance, becomes a magnifying mirror for your basic parent-child relationship.

Definitive is a dangerous word in criticism. And I hesitate to call these productions that, even though they’re the best interpretations of these three musicals that I’ve ever seen. Definitive suggests set in stone. These shows all have a fluid, organic life that honors the mutability of great art.

Every time I reread “Anna Karenina” or “King Lear,” they seem different to me, because I keep seeing new things in them. What this season’s triumvirate of great revivals demonstrates is that these shows have the innate richness and substance to sustain repeated interpretations in the years to come. Meanwhile they’re as close to, well, definitive as you’re likely to see in this lifetime.