The Prescription
Why the Revue Answers It
Murray diagnosed the disease. The Tyranny of the Through-Line — the idea that everything on a stage must mean something before it's allowed to be something. The theater has a surplus of meaning and a deficit of wonder. He's right. I dressed that disease for forty years, and I can tell you exactly what it looks like from the wings: it looks like a beautiful costume nobody remembers, because it was in service to a story the audience was admiring instead of feeling.
Now here's the prescription. And it's not nostalgia. It's not "bring back the old days." It's a practical answer to a practical problem, and the problem is this: the modern audience is dying of choice.
The Disease the Audience Brings In
The audience doesn't just encounter the Tyranny of the Through-Line when they sit down. They arrive already sick with something else — something they caught outside the theater, in the rest of their lives.
Call it Option Paralysis.
They've spent all day choosing. What to watch. What to scroll past. What to click. What to skip. Seven hundred scripted television shows. Infinite feeds. Algorithmic recommendations that give them more of what they already like, which is another way of saying: nothing they don't expect. By eight o'clock in the evening they are exhausted from choosing, and they haven't chosen anything that mattered.
They walk into the theater carrying that exhaustion. And the theater — infected with its own disease — offers them one more choice to admire. One more important story. One more evening that must be about something.
The revue says something different. The revue says: sit down. I chose for you. And I chose well.
What the Revue Actually Is
Let me be precise, because the word conjures sequins and top hats and people think I'm talking about nostalgia. I'm not. I'm talking about a function.
A book musical is built around a story. A concert is built around a performer. A revue is built around a taste — someone's idea of what belongs together in a room for two hours.
That's all. That's the whole form. And that simplicity is its power, because it means the revue is the only theatrical form where the evening itself is the composition. Not the book. Not the score. Not the arc. The sequence. The order in which things happen in the room.
I learned this dressing forty-eight shows. A red dress in the first act makes a white dress in the second act mean something it couldn't mean alone. A quiet ballad after a showstopper doesn't kill the energy — it deepens it. A comedian following a torch singer doesn't break the mood — it breaks the mood open, and what pours in is the kind of feeling that a unified tone could never produce.
The audience doesn't know why they're moved. They just know that the evening worked — that something happened in the space between the numbers that none of the numbers could have done alone. The designer knows. The director knows. The person who programmed the evening knows. The sequence is the art.
Murray killed the through-line. I'm telling you what replaces it: the curated evening. Not a story, but a rhythm. Not a theme, but a taste. Not a moral, but a sequence so carefully constructed that the audience finds their own meaning in the juxtapositions — and the meaning they find is more powerful than anything you could have told them, because they found it themselves.
What Curation Does That Algorithms Cannot
Here's the part nobody is saying, and somebody needs to say it.
The algorithm gives you more of what you already like. That's its job. It studies your behavior, maps your preferences, and delivers a feed that confirms your taste back to you. It's a mirror. And mirrors are comforting, but they never show you anything new.
The revue gives you what you didn't know you liked. Because someone with an eye and an ear put a torch song next to a comedy number next to a dance break, and the sequence created something none of them could do alone. The audience came in thinking they liked ballads. They leave understanding that they like ballads followed by slapstick followed by a woman with a chair and a voice that could strip paint. They didn't know that about themselves. The curator knew it for them.
This is the opposite of the algorithm. The algorithm eliminates surprise. The revue manufactures it — not through randomness, not through chaos, but through the particular intelligence of someone who understands what contrast does to a room.
I designed the Ziegfeld Follies. I designed No, No, Nanette. I designed Sugar Babies. In every one of those shows, the most powerful moment was a transition — the space between two numbers that had no business being next to each other, except that someone decided they belonged together, and the audience's gasp proved them right.
In an age of infinite choice, the most radical act is to offer no choice at all. I chose for you. Sit down. Trust me. That's not authoritarian. That's what every great host has always done. It's a dinner party. The revue is a dinner party, and the host has taste.
The Theater Is Already Doing This
Here's what proves the prescription is right: the commercial theater is already filling it, without saying the word.
Six is a revue. It's a concert. Six women, six songs, no story anyone believes, no through-line anyone follows — the audience comes to hear the music and watch the performers and feel the sequence. They call it a musical. It's a revue in concert drag.
& Juliet is a revue. A jukebox catalog wrapped in a story so thin you can see the songs through it. Nobody in that theater is following the plot. They're riding the sequence. They just don't have a word for it.
The immersive shows — Sleep No More, the whole downtown scene — are revues with a haunted house wrapper. You wander through a curated environment encountering moments in a sequence determined partly by design and partly by chance. That's a revue. Ziegfeld would have recognized it instantly.
The cabaret renaissance. The drag show renaissance. The comedy-and-music variety nights filling every bar with a back room in every city in the country. These are revues. They are programmed evenings. They are someone saying: these acts, in this order, in this room. They sell out every night, and Broadway pretends they don't exist because they don't have a through-line.
The form is everywhere. It just doesn't have a name, because the name we have for it — revue — sounds like something your grandmother saw. It's not. It's what your city is already doing, in every room that isn't a Broadway house.
The Practical Truth
And here is the part that should matter to anyone who produces, directs, or funds the American theater.
A revue is cheap. Not cheap in quality — cheap in infrastructure. No multi-million-dollar set. No six-month rehearsal period for a two-hour book. No script development hell. You need a stage, a lighting rig, a band, and performers who can hold a room. You need a curator — a director, a designer, someone with taste — who can program an evening. The material already exists. The performers already exist. The rooms already exist.
A revue is local. You build it for your city, your audience, your moment. A revue in New Orleans is not a revue in Chicago is not a revue in Tulsa. That's not a limitation — that's the point. The specificity is the power. The audience comes because the show could only happen HERE, TONIGHT. Try saying that about the touring production of a jukebox musical.
A revue is repeatable. You can swap numbers. Rotate performers. Update the program for the season, the holiday, the mood of the city. It's a living form. A book musical is a book — written, bound, fixed. A revue is a conversation between the stage and the room, and it changes every time the room does.
A revue is democratic. It makes room for the singer who can't act, the comedian who can't dance, the aerialist, the poet, the magician, the local legend who packs the bar every Tuesday but has no Broadway credits and never will. These artists have audiences. They have power. The revue gives them a stage and asks only that they be extraordinary for six minutes.
The Prescription
The American theater is suffering from a surplus of meaning and a deficit of wonder. Murray said it. I'm saying what to do about it.
Build revues. Not as tributes to the past. Not as variety shows with an ironic wink. Build them as the form they always were — the curated evening, the programmed night, the theatrical experience that trusts the sequence and trusts the audience and trusts the room.
Build them local. Build them cheap. Build them with the talent your city already has and the music your city already loves. Build them in bars and theaters and churches and parking lots. Build them for the audience that is DESPERATE — and they are desperate, whether they know it or not — for someone to say: I know what comes next, and it's going to be beautiful.
The through-line is not the lifeline. The sequence is.
Trust the sequence. The audience will follow.
Raoul Pène du Bois designed costumes and scenery for forty-eight Broadway productions, including the Ziegfeld Follies, Wonderful Town, The Music Man, Gypsy, No No Nanette, and Sugar Babies. He won Tony Awards for Wonderful Town (scenic design, 1953) and No No Nanette (costume design, 1971). He started at fourteen. He is still going.