How do you solve a problem like an outdated play or musical?

What to do with old shows?

While newly created works keep the performing arts alive, productions of existing material are the bread and butter of many theatrical institutions. But in our age of heightened awareness around representation of gender, race and ability, some plays show their age in ways that risk offending contemporary sensibilities.

So do we just present them as is and damn the torpedoes? Or do we try to bring them up to date?

These questions — never far from my consciousness as someone who regularly reviews productions at the Stratford and Shaw festivals, and elsewhere — were front and centre on a recent trip to New York, where I saw Broadway productions that came at the to-update-or-not-to-update question in a variety of ways and with wildly varying levels of success.

For a master class in how to get updating just right, look no further than “Some Like It Hot,” a new musical version by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman of the classic Billy Wilder movie starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. The premise of the film — after witnessing a mob hit in Prohibition-era Chicago, two male musicians pretend to be women and join an all-female band — initially sounds dated given that it uses cross-dressing as comic fodder (recent musical versions of “Tootsie” and “Mrs. Doubtfire,” successful comedy films about men in dresses, did not take off with Broadway audiences).

The creators of the “Some Like It Hot” musical have deeply considered how to make the material work for today while also prioritizing entertainment value. Crucially, they’ve leaned into something hinted at in the film: that Jerry, one of the musicians (J. Harrison Ghee), discovers their true self by dressing up as Daphne and will continue to live as a woman.

Jerry/Daphne and several other central characters are Black, and book writers Matthew López and Amber Ruffin acknowledge the effect this has on their lives: Christian Borle’s Joe/Josephine, who is white, moves through spaces more easily than Jerry/Daphne, and the girl band tours to California rather than (as in the movie) Florida because it would be implausible to represent an act led by a Black woman — the magnificent NaTasha Yvette Williams as Sweet Sue — playing in the Jim Crow South. Making the starlet Sugar Kane Black and leaning into Adrianna Hicks’ fabulous vocal abilities help Hicks own the role on her own terms rather than emulating Monroe’s famously sexed-up, ukulele-playing Sugar.

Director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw has deeply knit dancing and movement into the show’s storytelling — so many tap numbers! — and keeps things pacy throughout. Spectacular costumes by Gregg Barnes glisten under Natasha Katz’s lighting and lavish sets by Scott Pask whisk the action across country and even south of the border in a sequence that significantly fleshes out the character of Daphne’s suitor Osgood (Kevin Del Aguila). It all froths up to a farcical 11th-hour chase sequence that is one of the most delightful things I’ve seen in years.

Ghee gives a triumphant performance as Daphne that seems likely to challenge the Tony Awards when nominations are announced in early May. The Tony performance categories are still split into male and female, and Ghee is non-binary (Toronto’s Dora Awards adopted gender-neutral performance categories in 2019).

I’m not the only critic who’s raving about “Some Like It Hot,” but it’s not a runaway hit — the week I visited it played to 75 per cent capacity. It’s a revival of “Funny Girl” that’s currently dominating Broadway buzz, but I came away from it disappointed. The star miscasting of Lea Michele highlights the datedness of the material and Michael Mayer’s production looks flimsy compared to the skilful, gleeful glitz of “Some Like It Hot.”

“Funny Girl” is based on the real-life story of Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice, and was famously a stage and screen vehicle for Barbra Streisand. Producers of this revival struggled for years to find a Fanny for today and thought they had one in Beanie Feldstein, but the show got tepid reviews when it opened last spring. In particular, critics noted that Feldstein’s voice wasn’t strong enough to deliver Jule Styne’s and Bob Merrill’s show-stopping numbers including “People,” “Don’t Rain on my Parade” and “I’m the Greatest Star” and, by the end of July, she had left the show.

In a meta-televisual-theatrical twist, her replacement was Michele, who became famous on TV’s “Glee” as a character obsessed with “Funny Girl.”

Michele can absolutely sing the role — her vocal performance is tremendous — but she tries too hard to deliver Fanny’s scrappiness and insecurity, and I struggled to fully believe her characterization.

As written, the character uses comedic ability and charisma to compensate for the fact she isn’t beautiful. Michele’s conventional attractiveness presents a hurdle that she doesn’t fully overcome. And while playwright Harvey Fierstein has done some surface updating to the book originally written by Isobel Lennart, this remains a dated melodrama about a talented career woman whose sense of self-worth is tragically tied up in her devotion to a suave, undeserving man (Canadian Ramin Karimloo does his estimable best with the thankless role of gambler Nick Arnstein).

That “Some Like It Hot” was updated so skilfully makes me want to believe that “Funny Girl” could be made palatable for our times; the corrosive effects of unrealistic beauty standards are more topical than ever and surely there’s a way to put a feminist twist on the my-career-or-my-man quandary. This isn’t that production — not that this appeared to matter to the audience at the performance I attended, which gave Michele a massive round of applause in the show’s first minute.

A new-old show that will give “Some Like It Hot” a run for its money in the new musical categories at this year’s Tonys is “Kimberly Akimbo,” a musical version of David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2000 play of the same name with music by Jeanine Tesori and book and lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire.

It’s the touching story of a 16-year-old girl with a rare disorder that makes her age four and a half times faster than is genetically usual; the character is luminously played by Broadway star Victoria Clark, who is in her early 60s. She has a basket-case family of childish adults — hypochondriac mother (Alli Mauzey), alcoholic father (Jim Hogan at the performance reviewed) and hilariously crime-scheme-prone aunt (the show-stopping Bonnie Milligan) — and a budding friendship with smart kid Seth (2021 high school graduate Justin Cooley in a lovely Broadway debut).

This small-scale piece successfully walks the line between quirky and cloying thanks to Tesori’s and Lindsay-Abaire’s songs — which provide access to the characters’ inner lives and aspirations — and Jessica Stone’s sensitive direction. Those who like their Broadway shows spectacular will likely be unsatisfied by “Kimberly Akimbo” — the entertainment in these folks’ lives is a down-at-the-heel roller-skating rink — but if you gravitate toward original, observant writing and are curious how a story like this could possibly have an uplifting ending, it’s more than worth a look.

“Kimberly Akimbo” is set in “1999. Before kids had cellphones.” Another hit show that’s navigating the before-and-after-times of instant communication is “Take Me Out,” a Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s play about a star mixed-race baseball player who comes out as gay (Toronto theatregoers may remember the 2005 Canadian Stage production).

The play’s still set in 2002 and this helps make sense of the relatively slow way that information travels in the plot and how the lives of famous ball players are not framed by social media. It’s therefore ironic that the production involved what was for me a first: audience members must lock their phones in Yondr pouches to stop photos and videos of the show’s several nude shower scenes from circulating on the internet.

Greenberg’s writing is dazzling and Scott Ellis’s production is a wonderful vehicle for star turns from two TV stars named Jesse. Jesse Williams of “Grey’s Anatomy” gives a mesmerizingly laid-back performance as Darren Lemming, the player who comes out; and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, best known for “Modern Family,” won the 2022 Best Featured Actor Tony as the uptight gay money manager who falls in love with baseball after Darren hires him. Bill Heck is equally good as the play’s narrator Kippy, even if that character is implicated in some of the play’s implausible elements.

If this sounds appealing, book your tickets now: winner of the 2022 Tony for Best Revival of a Play, “Take Me Out” completes its limited run at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on Feb. 5.

A very different play than “Take Me Out,” but one that also gave me hope for the future of intelligent writing on Broadway, is Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt.” I’m cheating my “old plays” theme somewhat by including this new piece of writing, but it’s a play that comes from a senior writer (Stoppard is 85), and delivers such gravitas and contemplative wisdom that it feels like an already proven classic.

A semibiographical account of Stoppard’s family history, the play is not as formally inventive as earlier Stoppard plays such as the meta-Shakespearean “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” or the time-jumping “Arcadia.” It rather makes its stately way through 56 years in the lives of a Viennese Jewish family, from turn-of-the-century bourgeois affluence through the ravages of two world wars to a gut-wrenching final scene set in 1955, in which the three surviving family members rake over questions of historical memory, personal responsibility and legacy in the wake of the Holocaust (one of those characters, Leo, is a stand-in for Stoppard himself).

Patrick Marber’s elegant production is of an almost inconceivable scale for a nonmusical Broadway play, involving 26 adult and 12 child actors, including understudies. But it rewards close attention as relationships develop and family ties are affirmed and strained. Over two hours without an intermission, the play came to feel like a shared ritual of witness and contemplation.

Mirvish Productions planned to present the North American premiere of “Leopoldstadt” but cancelled the run during the late 2021 COVID-19 Omicron outbreak. David Mirvish said at the time that he was determined to bring it in Toronto when it was safe to do so (here’s hoping). In the meantime, tickets are on sale for the run at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre through July.

Karen Fricker is a Toronto-based theatre critic. Follow her on Twitter at @KarenFricker2.

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