The dawn of what the world has agreed to pretend is “the new millennium” is upon us, and everyone is looking back. My own local TV station is awash in one-minute “Millennium Milestones”—the Kennedy assassination, Elvis’s first number one, etc. The first 950 years of the millennium were apparently one big snoozefest but things really hotted up in the final stretch. Likewise, an ongoing poll I saw for Best Male Vocalist of the Millennium had Snoop Dogg and 2Pac Shakur tussling for the top spot, with Bing Crosby at seventy-three and Enrico Caruso at ninety-eight to add a little perspective to what otherwise would have been Best Muthafucka of the Millennium.

The theater, of course, stands in forlorn contrast to the rest of the arts: instead of nine-and-a-half centuries of cultural torpor followed by a period of unparalleled creative endeavor, the legitimate stage’s greatest hits are mostly pre-Elvis. Its lowly state is ...

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