Perhaps it's just too much to put on a brand new production of a show while "Follies" is casting, rehearsing, opening, and running out on the West Coast. I imagine the Kennedy Center will be supervising that production.
Or...maybe...they had a star lined up and then that star fell through?
Is Pal Joey turning into one of those great, classic shows that people never seem to be able to make work in their revivals? (OK I admit, at the top of my head I can't think of other examples though I feel like their are many--On the Town might be one).
Lorenz Hart's work is very much "of a certain period", and I imagine it's tough, if not impossible now, to recapture the sheer crystalline wit of his lyrics. We're all a little too jaded, I think.
I imagine star is most likely i know they really wanted either Audra or Christine Baranski for Vera and without a star in a show that would probably be very expensive for them to mount...
The other problem is that the best song in the show, "Zip!" is a song built entirely around cultural references that were entirely "of the moment," like the countless songs in Gilbert and Sullivan that most productions update.
However, Pal Joey is so distinctly of its time that you can't simply update the lyric and have it fly, so the song depends on the performance much more than the recognizable wit of the lyrics now.