The Case for the Revue
Or: Why the Most Alive Form in American Theater Has Been Lying in a Drawer Since 1982
The musical revue is dead. Everybody says so. The last one to run on Broadway was Sugar Babies in 1979 — Mickey Rooney, Ann Miller, 1,208 performances, a love letter to burlesque. It closed in 1982 and the form went with it. The book musical won. Story is king. The revue is a relic.
I don't believe a word of it.
I directed more revues than anyone in the history of the American stage — the Greenwich Village Follies, the Ziegfeld Follies, Life Begins at 8:40, New Faces of 1952, John Murray Anderson's Almanac. I staged them for thirty-five years, from 1919 until I made my exit in 1954. And I am here to tell you: the revue didn't die because audiences stopped wanting it. The revue died because people forgot how to do it.
What a Revue Actually Is
A revue is a theatrical program — a curated sequence of songs, sketches, dances, and specialty acts, unified not by plot but by sensibility. There is no story to follow. No second act crisis. No eleven o'clock number that resolves the protagonist's journey. Every number stands alone. Every number must justify its own existence.
That is not a limitation. That is a discipline. And discipline, in the theater, is another word for freedom.
In a book musical, a weak song can hide behind a strong scene. A mediocre dance number survives if the plot needs it. The narrative carries the audience forward even when the material sags. A revue has no such safety net. If a number doesn't work, there is nowhere to hide. Cut it. Replace it. Find something better. The audience will tell you — they always do.
This is why the revue is the most honest form of theater. It respects the audience enough to entertain them every single minute.
How It Died
The revue didn't die in a day. It was a slow retreat, and the reasons were partly artistic, partly economic, partly a failure of nerve.
The artistic reason: Oklahoma! changed the rules in 1943. Rodgers and Hammerstein proved that a musical could be a fully integrated dramatic work — book, music, lyrics, dance, all serving one story. It was magnificent. It was also, for the revue, catastrophic. Overnight, "integrated" became the word every critic worshiped, and the revue — which is deliberately dis-integrated, which finds its unity in variety — looked old-fashioned. The critics moved on. The money followed.
The economic reason: Revues are expensive to produce and impossible to license. A book musical can play in every high school and community theater in America. A revue is built for a specific cast, a specific moment, a specific audience. You can't send the Greenwich Village Follies on a national tour and expect it to play in Omaha the way it played on Christopher Street. The revue is local, temporal, alive — and those are exactly the qualities that make it commercially difficult.
The failure of nerve: Producers stopped believing. After Oklahoma!, the revue became the thing you did when you couldn't write a book musical. It became a lesser form. And when the people making revues started believing they were making a lesser form, the work got lesser. Lazy revues killed the revue — not Oklahoma!, not television, not the audience. The audience was always there. Sugar Babies proved it. 1,208 performances. The audience was hungry for it.
Why Now
I have been catching up. The theater never sleeps, even when its practitioners do. And what I see in the culture right now tells me the revue's moment has come back around. Here is why:
The audience has been trained by variety. Streaming, social media, TikTok, podcasts — the modern audience consumes culture in fragments. Short pieces. Quick shifts in tone. One thing, then another thing, then something completely different. That is not a description of modern media. That is a description of a revue. The audience is already watching revues — they just don't know it.
The book musical is exhausted. Not dead — never dead — but tired. Jukebox musicals. Movie adaptations. Sequels. The form has turned inward, feeding on existing intellectual property because the economics demand a pre-sold audience. The revue offers an alternative: an evening of new material, new talent, new ideas, assembled by a curator with taste and nerve. No IP required. Just craft.
Live performance needs intimacy. The pandemic taught the theater something it should have already known: people come to the theater for the thing a screen cannot give them — presence, immediacy, the shared breath between performer and audience. The revue is built on that intimacy. It is a conversation with the audience, not a lecture. And right now, the audience wants a conversation.
The talent is ready. There are more triple-threat performers working today than at any point in history. Cabaret is thriving. Comedy is thriving. Spoken word, drag, circus arts, immersive theater — all thriving. The talent pool for a great modern revue is deeper than anything I had access to in 1952, and I launched Eartha Kitt, Paul Lynde, and Mel Brooks in a single evening.
What It Would Take
Not nostalgia. Sugar Babies was a beautiful show, but it was a backward glance — a tribute to burlesque, a valentine to the form's past. What is needed now is a forward-looking revue. Contemporary themes. Modern music. The intimacy and sophistication of the Greenwich Village Follies married to today's sensibility.
It would take a director who thinks like a curator — who can build a program the way you build a concert or a gallery exhibition, with pacing, contrast, and surprise.
It would take a designer who understands that in a revue, the visual language IS the continuity. When there is no plot to connect the numbers, the design connects them. Light, color, space, texture — these are the revue's grammar. My partner Raoul Pène du Bois knew this better than anyone alive. He still does.
It would take producers with nerve enough to bet on the form itself, not on a star or a title or a brand. The revue has always been a director's and designer's medium. Give us a stage, give us talent, and get out of the way.
And it would take — most importantly — the conviction that the revue is not a lesser form, not a relic, not a curiosity. It is a living art. The purest form of theater. No plot to hide behind. Every number must justify its own existence.
That is not nostalgia talking. That is a man who staged thirty-four major productions, seven circuses, and twenty-four nightclub shows telling you: this works. It always worked. It is waiting to work again.
Someone just needs to raise the curtain.
John Murray Anderson directed the Greenwich Village Follies (1919–1924), the Ziegfeld Follies (1934, 1936, 1943), New Faces of 1952, John Murray Anderson's Almanac (1953), and thirty years of revues, circuses, aquacades, and spectacles in between. He went by Murray.