Best of Theater 2011 | Revival of the Fittest: Great Shows Roar Back

WSJ.com: How often do you get to see "Follies" three times in one year? In May I went to Washington for the Kennedy Center's revival of the 1971 Stephen Sondheim-James Goldman musical, in which Danny Burstein and Jan Maxwell outdid themselves. Four months later I saw the show a second time when it moved to Broadway—after which I saw Chicago Shakespeare's more intimate version, directed by Gary Griffin on the company's Elizabethan-style thrust stage. Only the very best musicals repay such intensive immersion, and seeing "Follies" in back-to-back stagings of such quality led me to wonder whether it might just be Mr. Sondheim's masterpiece.