What in tarnation?

Just got back from a trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and saw, among other things, Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors, set in the Old West. You've never heard Shakespeare until you've heard that Elizabethan English spoken with a Texas twang, along with references to cactus and coyotes and peppered with American colloquialisms like "What in tarnation?".

What struck me while watching, however, was how normal this kind of thing is in the theater world, and how taboo the equivalent would be in the music world. Top-flight theaters routinely update classic plays or perform them in offbeat versions like this (even in Ashland's Globe Theater replica), and yet the "authentic performance" mindset has established a hegemony over music. While we might occasionally perform Bach translated into English, or using English horns in place of oboes da caccia, we do it looking over our shoulder, because it's a given, for some reason, that such things are second-class.

Why is this? I think it's because musicians have somehow been brainwashed into thinking that their primary loyalty should be to the composer, whereas in drama they always know that their principal allegiance is to the audience. While there are plenty of Shakespeare performances in Elizabethan dress and with attention to Elizabethan pronunciation, those aren't considered "better" the way authentic performances of music are. We have legions of ivory-tower musicians telling us that if audiences don't understand authentic performance, it's their own problem. While we're busy fighting off the incursions of popular music into our audiences' brains, we should be focusing more of our attention on meeting them where they are, not insisting that they meet us where Bach is.