Revival Meetings: Anything Goes, Hair, and Follies

Viewed as something of a genre unto itself, the Broadway stage, more than most art forms, persists through recycling, especially these days. On a recent August weekend, I set out to sample the purest form of this recycling with what is arguably the purest product of the American stage: revivals of great American musicals, in this instance from three decades: Anything Goes, from the 1930s, Hair, from the 1960s, and Follies, from the 1970s.

On that recent August weekend, there were twenty-four shows on Broadway, and of those, only three were neither revivals nor jukebox musicals based on existing pop songbooks nor adaptations from other genres. Although August once was much more fallow than it is today on Broadway, it bears note in that same August weekend in 1934, the year of Anything Goes, six of the seven Broadway shows playing were original productions. In the same weekend in 1968, the year Hair came to Broadway, eight of sixteen shows were original. And in August 1971, the year of Follies, nine of sixteen were original. Based on these four datapoints, it would seem that the tide of derivativeness has been generally rising for at least the last eighty years.

If Broadway is the pinnacle of American theater, and is a limited resource (forty stages), we are demonstrably devoting the bulk of our efforts at that pinnacle to works that started life in other genres and/or bygone times, and that we are largely crowding out new ones conceived (as my three exemplars once were) directly for the stage.

I come to anatomize this trend, not to praise or dispraise it. And in particular I come to consider issues unique to the quintessential form of recycling, viz. revivals. They do, after all, pose a unique set of challenges to those who stage them, and a unique set of questions to be considered by a contemporary audience. How does a show from one era fare in front of the audiences from a later one? One has to assume that the work is viewed as having something to offer, or it would not be re-presented. Yet audience sensibilities inevitably will have changed. Does the contemporary production team tailor the work to those sensibilities, or does it count on the audience to make allowances and enjoy the work as more or less originally presented?

These are difficult questions. To confront the artifacts of another time can sometimes provoke shock and reflection, at others, ennui. In any event, total re-creation is unachievable. Even a producer who wishes to do so cannot actually provide the exact same experience an audience would have had forty, fifty, or seventy years ago. The performers will be different, the technicalities of stagecraft are not the same, and the business structure of Broadway has markedly changed over the years.

Seeing these three revivals as I did, one on top of the other, emphasized the workings of all these dynamics. Anything Goes took a highly revisionist approach. The other two were far less willing to meddle. They exemplified the strengths and weaknesses of each line of attack.

Anything Goes can only be described as having started life as a rewrite, and then to have become more so over the years. Songwriter Cole Porter began by collaborating with book-writers P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton to do a musical about a shipwrecked ocean liner; then, just before rehearsals, came the Morro Castle disaster, leaving shipwreck no joking matter. Wodehouse and Bolton having become unavailable to do the required salvage, Porter turned to the director Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse to change the script to keep the ship afloat. Their rewrite was in turn rewritten in two movies made of the show, with very different song lineups, characters given different names and different characteristics. And then there was a 1962 off-Broadway revival, which largely nailed down the new list of songs evolved through the movie process and reduced the action to a single set (the original had reportedly ended with a couple of scenes off shipboard). In...