Best Best Revival of the Decade

Once On This Island, Color Purple, and Hedwig were what I needed at those points in my life. Spent my time at all three crying and they all made me feel like I was soaring after they were over. They get my vote. :)

The interesting thing about Best Revival is that not all revivals are the same. Some are just well-thought out productions, while others are total re-envisions of the material. I find the latter to be much, much more impressive than the former. Casting a great revival or coming up with a cool neat idea for a revival is awesome, but doing what John Doyle and Michael Arden have done with The Color Purple and Once on this Island is beyond awesome.

With that in mind, here are my rankings.

1. Once on this Island

2. The Color Purple

3. Pippin

4. Hedwig and the Angry Inch

5. Porgy and Bess

6. Anything Goes

7. The King and I

8. La Cage aux Folles

9. Hello, Dolly!

Alright, now hit me with your best shot.

This is my personal opinion, I saw Bette in Hello, Dolly! and hated it, I saw it with Bernadette and loved it.

1. The Color Purple
2. Once on This Island
3. Hello, Dolly! (With Bernadette)
4. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
5. Anything Goes
6. Porgy and Bess
7. Pippin
8. La Cage
9. The King and I
10. Hello, Dolly (with Bette)

Updated On: 6/11/18 at 09:30 PM

Jessetenny said: "This is my personal opinion, I saw Bette in Hello, Dolly! and hated it, I saw it with Bernadette and loved it.

1. The Color Purple
2. Once on This Island
3. Hello, Dolly! (With Bernadette)
4. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
5. Anything Goes
6. Porgy and Bess
7. Pippin
8. La Cage
9. The King and I
10. Hello, Dolly (with Bette)"

Did you only see 10 revivals this decade if the one you hated still made the list?

haterobics said: "Jessetenny said: "This is my personal opinion, I saw Bette in Hello, Dolly! and hated it, I saw it with Bernadette and loved it.

1. The Color Purple
2. Once on This Island
3. Hello, Dolly! (With Bernadette)
4. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
5. Anything Goes
6. Porgy and Bess
7. Pippin
8. La Cage
9. The King and I
10. Hello, Dolly (with Bette)"

Did you only see 10 revivals this decade if the one you hated still made the list?"

This isn't based on all revivals this decade, only the ones that won the Best Revival Tony.

ScottyDoesn'tKnow2 said: "This award may turn into the "Most Improved" award (thanks for being only ok-to-good the first time around). I think executing a great classic production is underrated and underappreciated because people think it's easy to do when it's quite the opposite."

I do think it is quite difficult to do either. Most of the 9 productions that have received this honor this decade, regardless of whether or not it is a "revival" or a "revisal", are extraordinary and were not easy to put together. With that being said, I tend to be more impressed by the "revisals" because they are so unexpected. While the 2011 production of Anything Goes was magnificent top to bottom and I will argue that it is Roundabout's best production altogether this decade, I don't really think it was as good as the true re-envisioning that we saw with a few productions like The Color Purple and Once on this Island. A lot of my issues with straight up reviving a classic production is that you'll end up with situations like Hello, Dolly!, where the theatre community fangirled to the Nth degree. They had dream-casted Bette in that role for years, and they finally got to live their dream. Everyone was so bewildered by this casting that nobody even stopped to think about whether or not the rest of the production was any good. The production was not re-envisioned in any way. There weren't really any new layers added that we hadn't seen before (although I will give them credit for the way they have used Charlie Stemp in the Bernadette version). Therefore, in my opinion, all revivals are tough, but it's much tougher to completely re-imagine the material than it is to simply bring it back to life.

It's funny how much I disagree with your post willrolandsframes, especially with Hello Dolly! And I saw it with Donna Murphy, not Bette Midler, and it reminded me of exactly what theatre should do and it's been so long since I saw such a perfectly executed and well produced, directed, acted, and choreographed evening. And it was not just a copy and paste job like Cabaret intentionally was when it was brought back for a spell.

The hard part about doing classics is that there are heightened expectations, preconceived notions, AND it's hard to make it fresh for people and not think they were just going to see another of the same production that they already expect. Some of the best classic revivals succeeded despite having all of that against them. Sometimes having those restrictions is much harder to pull off than taking a so-so show with a so-so original response and then being given leeway to go crazy with it. Especially if those so-so shows were recent and fit in with modern audiences' tastes and emotions that the more classic shows do not because they are many decades old and modern audiences don't appreciate those aesthetics.

Updated On: 6/11/18 at 10:40 PM

Updated On: 6/11/18 at 11:43 PM

Great revivals lately. Many could have won but from the winners I saw:

1. Hedwig

2. Hello Dolly

3. Pippin

4. Once on this Island

5. The Color Purple

6. The King and I

7. Porgy and Bess

Since you didn't specify, and no one else has done this yet:



1. A View From the Bridge

2. Angels in America

3. Death of a Salesman

4. Jitney

5. The Normal Heart

6. Skylight



Didn't see the rest.



As for musicals, my ranking would be:



1. Hello, Dolly!

2. The King and I

3. Once on This Island

4. Porgy and Bess

5. Pippin

6. Anything Goes

7. The Color Purple

8. Hedwig



Didn't see La Cage.