There’s a story of a Sound of Music production-meeting where someone nervously wondered whether the show wasn’t just a teensy bit controversial. “You mean,” said Richard Rodgers, “it might upset people who like Nazis?”

Upsetting people who like Nazis is something even the New York theater’s prepared to do, as witness the current crop of ostentatiously swastikaed revivals: The Diary of Anne Frank (at the Music Box), Cabaret (at the Kit Kat Klub), and The Sound of Music itself (at the Martin Beck). But even the one corner of our recent past on which an apparent consensus holds is not an impregnable fortress: the sturdiest play is no more than tempting Lebensraum for the more ambitious theatrical imagination. Even something as apparently straightforward as Anne Frank’s diary has passed through, among other hands, the Stalinist palms of Lillian Hellman.

The three revivals con ...

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