Revivals that can't be improved upon...

Sometimes it's just nice to see a show again, without having to rearrange its fundamental elements. Maybe just a new coat of paint, so to speak, so that it doesn't look "old".

Stage musicals (and plays) aren't like movies that you can pop into the DVD player to watch again. Sadly, when they're gone, they're permanently gone until a revival is staged.

Exactly, revivals don't need to be rearranged.

For example, there is a whole new generation that has never seen Miss Saigon. Kids that were about 10 when the show stopped, are now 25.

There was a revival here in Holland last year, but it wasn't a glimpse of the original production. And as expected, that translated to the general public's reaction. Poor sets, the show looked and sounded nothing like the glorious version that our generation knows. So they need to be very careful about changing productions for the worse.

It certainly didn't with the last Guys and Dolls, which was such a shame. I was really pleased with Roundabout's Anything Goes and was initially worried how it would compare to Lincoln Center's. It held up pretty well by comparison in my opinion.

And then there's the Hytner revival of Carousel, which still casts a large shadow over any production even 20 years later. That doesn't mean a great new production can't come along, and I look forward to one.

Most productions of Cabaret pale in the memory of the '98 revival. I mean, consider the fact that in 2014 we're purportedly about to see the first revival of a revival with this show. Doesn't get much more obvious than that.

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I'm pretty sure everyone will agree that the 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls is probably as good as it's gonna get.

We are discussing two different things in this thread- changes to a SHOW and changes to a PRODUCTION.

Maybe I'm being too academic or writer-minded, but I worry that people get those things confused. A show exists as a text, in abstract. Productions can cause changes to the show, but they exist somewhat separately of the show itself.

There is a growing movement that suggests that show and production should be united into a marriage, rather than a series of flings, and that the production designed for the first production of the show is the production that it should have forever, as a unified art form. I find this worrying as a writer and as a director- just because no one has done a better Chorus Line than Michael Bennett yet certainly doesn't mean that no one ever could or will. And while I haven't heard many reviews of the Svenska revival/revision of "West Side Story" using adults in serious gangland conflict rather than teenagers in turf war, just the freshness and vitality that it brought after half a century of replica productions and identical designs made it worth investigating to me.

Great productions should be remembered, and sometimes restaged. But to forever conflate "show" with "production of show" does both sides of the equation a disservice.