ABSTRACT
Hammerstein’s comment reveals an exploitation of nostalgia, which was not a common element in American musical comedies of the 1920s and 1930s. Nostalgia is nearly always for something ephemeral, which is subsequently remembered but intangible. The musical theater historian Ethan Mordden aptly described the revival as “a fresh antique”: an up-to-date production that did not want to be taken seriously as a contemporary musical but as “something of the 1920s for the 1970s.” The tradition of revivals, in all their current forms and probably some new ones to come, remains a strong element of the contemporary musical theater. As the 1970s grew increasingly dark and troubled due to the ongoing war in Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, and other social, political, and economic calamities, the taste for nostalgic revivals increased. The performance re-creations within the biographical musical are sentimental and often highly entertaining revivals of pop music performances, but they are nonetheless only slightly related to the book.
