As a professional stage director of some success and the artistic director of a D.C. area professional theater dedicated to producing important American stage works that had fallen out of favor, this is a topic that I have both thought about a great deal and also dealt with directly. My primary rule in such matters is “if it works, the show is successful, and the audiences are entertained, then the alteration of a classic show is artistically and ethically defensible.” There are, as always, exceptions. I think the current production of the classic musical “Damn Yankees” at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage may be one of them.

The show is a 1955 musical comedy (that’s the excellent 1958 film version above), with a book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop, based on Wallop’s 1954 novel “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.” The real stars of the show were rising young musical comedy writers Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, twenty-somethings who were boldly invading the domain of Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter with a whole new style of the genre, full of energy and satire. “Damn Yankees” was their second smash collaboration (“Pajama Game” was the first), and the pair looked poised to bring a long string of hit musicals to the Broadway stage. Then, while “Damn Yankees” was still running on the way to 1,019 performances, Ross, just 29-years-old, died. Because the pair wrote both lyrics and music together, Adler never had another success on Broadway after his creative partnership was shattered.

“Damn Yankees” is set during the 1950s in Washington, D.C., when the Yankees had dominated baseball and the World Series since the 1920s and the Washington Senators had been perennial losers for almost as long. The joke was “Washington, D.C.: first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” The novel and the musical took the amusing proposition that only a deal with the Devil could elevate the hapless Senators over the Yankees and get them into the Series….and that’s what happens.

The new production at The Arena couldn’t leave a classic alone, apparently feeling that today’s audiences can’t enjoy looking through a window at a time and a culture long past. D.C.’s baseball team is no longer the Senators (the city lost two of those) and the current team, the Nationals, play in the National League, well removed from the Yankees. The new adapted plot takes place in 1999-2000, the last time the Yankees had a brief dynasty and won two straight World Series. But the team was no longer the presumptive champion year after year, so the whole premise is forced. (The Boston Red Sox have won more World Series than the Yankees in the 21st Century). In 1955, the Yankees were indeed in the Series, facing the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 2025, they were eliminated in the play-offs. Worse still, the desperate losing franchise in the show is no longer the Senators, but the Baltimore Orioles, who, although they have been going through a rough patch lately, have never been perennial cellar dwellers, and they didn’t finish last in 1999 and 2000 either.

Of course, this being the mostly Democrat, of-color District of Columbia and Broadway politics being what it is, the original motivation for Joe Hardy, an elderly fan frustrated at his teams’ yearly failure who makes a deal with the Devil to become a youthful baseball star and win the pennant for his team in exchange for his soul, has been racialized. Now he wants to avenge his father, a minor league baseball player who was kept out of the major leagues because he was black. All of the protagonists—Joe, his wife and Lola, the Devil’s cursed assistant who falls in love with Joe—are played by performers “of color.” The Devil, naturally, is white.

By all accounts, both in the reviews and from audience members (I have chatted with some of them), the show is well-produced, well-sung and and acted, with exciting dance numbers. The production is probably headed to Broadway, where I’m sure a CRT adaptation of “Damn Yankees” will be welcome, and a smash. (I wonder if the actor playing “Mr. Applegate,” the Devil, is doing a Trump impression…) In short, the production “works.” If so, then what’s my beef?

When an old show is revived by fixing aspects of it that literally made the show unworkable, I am all in favor of it. I did a radical re-conceiving of “I Do! I Do!” when I realized that the dated portrayal of marriage was so antiquated that it was a constant irritant, but I got permission from the original authors (eventually) and I believe that I saved the show (and it worked!). In the case of “Damn Yankees,” however, the show itself has no such flaws that have become toxic over time. Every musical doesn’t have to be “relevant;” in fact, the genre was once supposed to be the ultimate in escapism. Modern politics need not be injected into the neck of every entertaining period piece. “Damn Yankees” in its original form, with or without DEI casting, would still be a magnificent piece of entertainment if “well-produced, well-sung and and acted, with exciting dance numbers.”

I feel this way about “Damn Yankees” particularly because it is one of only two shows that stand as the legacy of the doomed creative team of Adler and Ross. Out of respect for their genius and truncated careers, leave their shows alone. If script re-writers Doug Wright (Tony winner for “I Am My Own Wife”) and Will Power (writer of “Fetch Clay, Make Man”) wanted a baseball musical about racial reconciliation at the turn of the 21st Century, let them write their own.

[This post is dedicated to AWOL Ethics Alarms columnist Curmie, in whose wheelhouse the topic dwells. I would have loved to get his assessment of the issue, but, alas, Trump Derangement has driven him away.]