• Yankee damns Yankees

10/12/25 (Sun)

It seems that the 1955 musical Damn Yankees is set to be the next sacrifice on the altar of woke. I was excited to hear that a revival of the show, one of the best of the Golden Age musicals, will be moving to Broadway after an apparently successful run in Washington DC. I saw the last revival twice in 1994 with a pitch-perfect Victor Garber as the devil, and it was a joy. I remember in previews when 104-year-old George Abbott, the original director four decades earlier, showed up in the audience to a standing ovation.

The show is about a middle-aged baseball fan who sells (or, as it turns out, lends) his soul to the devil in order to transform to a young slugger who can save his flailing team and knock the hated Yankees off their perennial perch. After numerous twists and turns, including the machinations of the devil’s top temptress, the devil does not get his due, and, naturally for a 1950s musical, all ends happily for Joe and the team and us.

In addition to a strong book, the show boasts a delightful score by the young team of Adler and Ross, still the only songwriters to create Tony-winning musicals in successive years (after the previous year’s smash The Pajama Game). Their promise was sadly cut off by the latter’s untimely death shortly thereafter at age 29, but both their shows remain popular favorites. They also have fairly faithful film versions with the original stars.

The rejuvenated baseball batter this time around will be played by Jordan Donica, a young hunk with one of the best voices on Broadway. He was far and away the best thing in the Lincoln Center revival of Camelot two years ago (he won a Tony), and a clip of him from the earlier My Fair Lady makes me wish I had seen that as well. It’s about time he got a starring role.

As it happens, Donica is a black actor, which normally wouldn’t be worth mentioning in a show mixing baseball with the Faust legend. But the creative forces of this production, including the granddaughter of former Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, have decided that this Joe Hardy, being black, will be “motivated in his quest by the racial discrimination that limited his father’s baseball career”.

Here we go again. As with the flop musicalization of Some Like It Hot a few years back, the producers have decided to take a light-hearted piece of entertainment and make some sort of finger-wagging classroom lesson out of it. The urge to regain one’s youth and become a virile superstar who singlehandedly saves the day – that’s a fantasy that people of any race or creed should understand. It wouldn’t matter a whit if either the character or actor were white or black; the story speaks to human nature. Sticking a racial theme in the mix drastically limits its focus.

I wonder if the producers think that blacks will only go see shows that deal with their own suffering. Seems pretty racist to me. They’ve declared that the show will make the baseball team more racially diverse, which presumably (hopefully) means just the casting. Is that supposed to be brave? Have they looked at sports teams these days? They also want to give the female characters “more depth”, including the sexpot who uses all the means at her disposal to keep Joe in line – I wonder how deep they’ll go with that. They did some tinkering with the female roles in the last revival (when the husband refers to his wife in song as “old girl”, she newly responded “old boy”), but I don’t recall anything too drastic. Also, performance-enhancing drugs supposedly make an appearance this time. Ugh.

Critics in DC reportedly loved this production, and it appears to have been a commercial success. But they were drawing from a largely local audience. Broadway is a whole different ball game (so to speak) since its cost structure will demand a longer run, meaning inevitably a heavy reliance on tourists and non-NY audiences who may not want to be lectured on how racist they are. Since the production doesn’t have big star power behind it, it had better be pretty special to find its way in Broadway’s current environment. I doubt I’ll be there, but I wish them luck.