But Encores! cast a thinner actress. I can think of reasons they might have made that decision, and it might be understandable to a degree, but it dilutes part of the character’s raison d’être and sidesteps one of the issues presented in the original (and might have denied another actress an opportunity to play the part). Why not just revise the script a bit, if needed, but otherwise leave the role intact?Another example is “The Life,” about Times Square sex workers in the 1980s, which had its debut on Broadway in 1997, not all that long ago. Encores! has brought in Billy Porter — of “Pose” and “Kinky Boots” fame — to adapt and direct its revival of “The Life,” which opens next month. Asked about his insistence on having the right, creatively, to rewrite portions of the show’s book and if, specifically, he was “creating radical empathy,” Porter said:Yes. I had to ask myself, “Who is our audience?” They are very often progressive, rich and white. They have empathy, but do they understand the infrastructure that creates pimps, prostitutes and drug addicts? Probably not. But after seeing this show, the smart ones will understand that these characters are trying to get better but they have nowhere to go. Hopefully, that will crack open the space for the audience to have empathy for everybody around them.But why does this show, to be worthy of an Encores! reprise, have to operate on the literary level of David Simon’s HBO series about this setting, “The Deuce”? How would it harm us to see the show staged according to the script that Broadway audiences enjoyed 25 years ago? Why doesn’t it suffice to make clear, perhaps with a disclaimer in the program, that the Encores! team does not endorse certain attitudes of earlier times but still thinks that the revived piece is worthy of a revival that hews as closely as possible to the original?Apparently, that’s not enough anymore. The goal seems to be moving toward tailoring these old shows to connect with the concerns and assumptions of today’s theatergoers. But Encores! should be about actually looking at aspects of the artistic past, including imperfections, regardless of their utility or contemporaneity, and if that mission is jettisoned, I, for one, will regret it.Especially because the guiding light of the revisions, one senses, will be a special commitment to upending dominant narratives — battling size discrimination or highlighting the structural inequalities that can lead someone to become a sex worker. These are important concerns, and New York is bursting with theater that contests dominant narratives, as it should be. But must this also be the mission of one of the rare companies with the resources to annually mount multiple full-scale presentations of older, perhaps forgotten yet valuable works of American musical theater?Jed Perl’s “Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts” is useful in showing the problems with thinking of social justice as inherent to serious art rather than one of many forms it may take. As he explains, artistic works are properly “the products of a process that stands apart from so much of our social, economic and political life” because “they move us and excite us unlike anything else in our lives.” If, he argues, we approach them as conservative, L.G.B.T., Black or feminist, we have “failed to account for their free-standing value.”