Orchestrapeak

Growing up I was taken to Broadway shows a fair amount, starting from the age of seven or eight. These generally would have been matinees, although we went to evening shows as well. Sometimes my sister and I were pulled out of school to see a matinee. Theaters looked almost the same as they do today, but it was a far different atmosphere. In those times one would dress for the occasion, there were bathroom attendants, etc. Of course, the city was different as well. There were the squeegee men in the tunnels, and you would see disturbed people from time to time. But once you were in the theater, the experience was elegant by today’s standards.

The shows were different too. While I am not well versed in Broadway today, my wife is, so I observe it on some level. Many shows today seem to revolve around spectacle, Disney, (explicit) political/social messaging, reboots/franchises, or some combination thereof. The shows I heard in my youth were more directly oriented towards the beautiful, which within the context of theater means story and song, and sometimes dance.

When I was very young, I wasn’t aware that the bulk of said shows were not of that day—later I learned these were revivals. Many of these were golden age revivals; being surrounded by this type of entertainment at that age both in and out of the theater (watching Oliver! for the tenth time on VHS with my sister), I just assumed that that was what musicals were. I remember Cats being different, but not too different from these older-style shows. Later, sometime in high school, I remember being taken to a newer show, its name long forgotten, and my disappointment following. The golden age (revival) was dead.

Revival. There was something about that word, almost like rejuvenation or reaffirmation. Something good had come back, and maybe it was even better this time. In middle school, I read about the revival/camp meeting, from the second great awakening, folks coming together in praise of the almighty.

Being generally curious about what happened to golden age theater, I recently went on a quick data exploration. Using the dataset from Open Broadway Data, I looked at all the shows considered revivals. This data goes back to 1732. The full table of revivals by year of production year is at the end of this essay.

I was more interested in golden age plays, so I made two groupings: Core (1943–1964) and Broad (1937–1969). The chart below shows the trends, with more recent peaks in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. There is a clear downward trend since the early 2000s, and I expect that to continue.

Sometime in late middle school/early high school I discovered symphony music, not that it was completely absent from my life prior, but then it really caught me and my ears opened. Then my interest in Broadway fell rapidly, although I still went to shows with my family. But it was more out of obligation than desire, the latter reserved more for philharmonic concerts. In symphony, there is no real equivalent of revival, though there is a canon, a word likely misused and certainly misunderstood by some. I expect canon concert music to be performed for a long time (as opposed to revival golden age theater, or revivals of any kind), because the funding model of symphony is different (heavier reliance on philanthropy; read: less of a need for spectacle), the music is objectively better (complexity of compositional model; read: you can listen to it more than once, more than a thousand times), and the sound more elevated (explicitly oriented toward/directly conceived with awareness of the almighty).

Full Table of Revivals by Production Year