Why Remakes Will Be 2021's Most Exciting Cultural Moments

Photo credit: Angus Young
Photo credit: Angus Young

From Town & Country

In the spring of 1941 Noël Coward fled London to write, in less than a week, his spectral comedy Blithe Spirit. The play centers on Charles, a writer who accidentally conjures the ghost of his dead wife, Elvira. The titular phantom wreaks playful havoc on Charles and his current wife, Ruth, as they attempt to return her troublesome presence to the afterlife.

Director Edward Hall recently adapted the Coward classic for the screen, with Dan Stevens, Isla Fisher, and Leslie Mann as the principal pas de trois, and Judi Dench as the frustrated spiritualist Madame Arcati. “Coward understood what it was like to live with pain, that you have to laugh at difficult moments,” Hall says. “For me, the piece allows us to laugh at loss, and I would like to think that it might lift us away from our current darkness, if only for a brief moment.”

Photo credit: Rob Youngson, Courtesy IFC Films
Photo credit: Rob Youngson, Courtesy IFC Films

You don’t need a séance to decipher the piece’s aptness. A formidable crop of remakes and revivals due in the coming months reminds us that what is old isn’t always necessarily new again, but it does often bear repeating.

Over the course of 2021, Steven Spielberg will give us a new West Side Story, and Eddie Murphy returns to Queens after 30 years in Coming 2 America. On the small screen, familiar characters from Sex and the City and Dexter will be back, and the charmingly murderous Tom Ripley is set to make his TV debut. Even Brideshead Revisited is being, well, revisited.

Photo credit: Jan Versweyveld
Photo credit: Jan Versweyveld

On Broadway, directors Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page are taking on the more earthly drama of the Founding Fathers in a revival of 1776, which focuses on the months leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Originally set to arrive on Broadway this spring, the production is on hold until theaters open; the show will feature a cast of all women and nonbinary actors of diverse races.

The new 1776 hinges on the losing struggle to include an anti-slavery passage in the document; thus was the original sin of the nation ignored at the founding. To Paulus, history is dilemma. “Here we have the accomplishment but also the predicament, the aspiration, and this compromise,” she says of the central lesson of the piece. “We look at this story as a fable,” Page adds, “the point of which is to learn something so you can better exist inside the present moment.” Expect the likes of Jefferson and Adams not to be knocked off their pedestals but to be examined at eye level.

Photo credit: Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin - Getty Images
Photo credit: Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin - Getty Images

Away from Independence Hall, other revivals set for Broadway are The Music Man, with Hugh Jackman, and a musical adaptation of the screwball classic Some Like It Hot by Matthew López, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman. Or perhaps you’d rather rendezvous on the Met steps for the Gossip Girl reboot coming to HBO Max, and then step inside for the “New Look at Old Masters” exhibit.

With welcome timeliness, this year’s adaptations tell us about who we are right now as if they had just been written. As our sense of time became muddled this past year, the lessons of these classics are clear as ever.

This story appears in the March 2021 issue of Town & Country.
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