TLC Musical, New Adaptations of DAMN YANKEES and PAL JOEY Will Play Arena Stage — Page 3

Updating this to the 00s feels like a really risky choice. I just don't know how you bring a score like this into that era, musically.

Kad said: "Updating this to the 00s feels like a really risky choice. I just don't know how you bring a score like this into that era, musically."

Especially since this revival's music team is known for a "classic" Broadway sound. David Chase ("score supervisor"), Greg Anthony Rassen (music supervisor and arranger), Doug Besterman (orchestrator), and Adam Rothenberg (music director).

Crusty Bagel said: "I guess Robyn Hurder is sad she didn’t get cast. She always said Lola was a dream role for her."

You know what the optics would be on THAT one!

Even with the initial joke/implication that the "exotic" Lola is really just a white New York Jewish-American everywoman, there's not much of a way to cast that role as it's currently written without either losing the optics or losing the joke.

There's a fair amount of mostly-forgotten east side meets west side humor in the show as it is; even the language joke of "Who's got the pain when they do the mambo" blends a common New York Jewish-ism "to have the pain" with the notion of the very foreign, very gentile and very non-uptight Latin dance craze.

Pal Joey is being renamed.

Due to extensive rewrites of the book and heavy changes made to the score, the Rodgers and Hart estates are not allowing the Arena Stage production to use the title "Pal Joey" as this updated version is too different from how it was written and intended to be performed. It has been renamed "Chez Joey". This change will be announced next week.

I'm as big of a Yankees fan as they come (although their present incarnation is testing my patience) and the "core four" was a big part of my formative years but enough. Besides, Take Me Out already exists.

Took a quick glance at the TodayTix app yesterday, and there are discounts there for approximately the first half of Damn Yankees performance dates.

Updated On: 8/12/25 at 09:39 AM

TheGingerBreadMan said: "Pal Joey is being renamed.

Due to extensive rewrites of the book and heavy changes made to the score, the Rodgers and Hart estates are not allowing the Arena Stage production to usethe title "Pal Joey" as this updated version is too different from how it was written and intended to be performed. It has been renamed "Chez Joey". This change will be announced next week."

New title of CHEZ JOEY confirmed; rhe show will have a completely new book from Richard LaGravenese.

I’m glad they gave it a new title instead of pretending they’re performing Pal Joey.

I never thought I’d see the day that in the year 2025 producers would be afraid to do musicals written in 1940 and 1955 as they were originally intended.

Updated On: 8/21/25 at 10:27 PM

After a lot of curtting and pasting from Apple News, this is the full WaPo article:

This reimagined ‘Damn Yankees’ confronts baseball’s racist past

A Broadway-aimed revival updates the musical for the 2000 Baltimore Orioles, while the protagonist is now living out the dreams of his father, a Negro Leagues star.

Old and new go hand in hand — or back to back, to be more accurate — on this mid-August afternoon at Arena Stage, where rehearsals are underway for a Broadway-aimed revival of “Damn Yankees.”

Strutting though the seductive number “Two Lost Souls,” stars Jordan Donica and Ana Villafañe are bending their knees, bridging their backs together and marching in hypnotic unison. It’s a deft movement Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon performed in 1958’s “Damn Yankees” film adaptation, during the tune “Who’s Got the Pain,” and one of many homages director-choreographer Sergio Trujillo has dropped into this carefully calibrated musical reinvention.

Yes, freedom of interpretation is paramount for a production Trujillo calls less a revival than a “revisal” — but he doesn’t want anyone to take too big a swing and whiff, either. As the cast later launches into the jaunty romp “Shoeless Joe From Hannibal, Mo.,” and Donica steps up to the plate, his power-hitting character taking one strike and swinging past another before belting a homer, Trujillo reminds his actors not to overreact to the at-bat. At one point, he offers advice that may as well be this production’s thesis.

“I think subtlety,” he says, “will tell the story.”

Starring Donica as a fan turned slugger who makes a deal with the devil, this version of “Damn Yankees” tosses its first pitch Tuesday at Arena Stage, where Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’s iconic songs will remain in the lineup. But this production, featuring a revised book by Doug Wright and Will Power and additional lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, updates the tale by swapping the 1950s (and their postwar buoyancy) for 2000 (and its pre-9/11 optimism). Our hero’s team has changed, too, with the Baltimore Orioles pinch-hitting for the Washington Senators. And Donica’s Joe Hardy has been reimagined as a Black character driven to live out the big league dream his father, a Negro Leagues standout, never could.

As drastic as those adjustments may seem, the mission statement is clear: to refresh the show, not lose its soul.

“It was never my goal to throw it upside down and change it,” says Trujillo, whose career as a dancer began with a 1988 revival of the show in Toronto. “It feels like ‘Damn Yankees.’ It looks like ‘Damn Yankees.’ The spirit of it is there.”

The original “Damn Yankees” retold the Faust legend through the eyes of Joe Boyd, a long-suffering Senators fan who accepts the devilish Applegate’s offer to turn into Joe Hardy, a 22-year-old superstar capable of toppling the vaunted New York Yankees and propelling Washington to the pennant. First staged on Broadway in 1955, the show returned to the Great White Way in 1994 for a revival with its own revised book by Jack O’Brien.

“The Faust legend is eternal,” Wright says, adding that “two of [America’s] greatest and most enduring contributions have been baseball and the musical, and this brings both of those together in a really dynamic and lasting way.”

When the show’s producers approached Wright about reworking George Abbott and Douglass Wallop’s book, he embraced the opportunity to work on a show he grew up on. (His mother played the cast album on repeat, and his father saw the original Verdon-starring production more than 20 times. “He had a serious crush on Miss Verdon,” Wright recalls.)

But Wright — a Pulitzer and Tony winner for 2003’s “I Am My Own Wife” — also recognized that the sports world wasn’t his arena. An admirer of “Fetch Clay, Make Man,” Power’s 2010 play about boxing icon Muhammad Ali, Wright recruited the playwright as his collaborator. Over the past five years, Wright and Power have traded thoughts, notes and rewrites while taking drafts to many a reading of the modernized musical.

“It didn’t always work,” Donica says. “It was fun to be in the reading in May and feel it finally click, after all of these years of working on it — because it didn’t, it didn’t, it didn’t, and then all of a sudden it did.”

In transporting the show forward in time, Wright and Power sought not just to open the door for color-blind or color-conscious casting but to entrench modern baseball’s diversity in the text. As they pondered the possibility of a Black actor playing Joe, the playwrights committed to reshaping the protagonist accordingly.

“To pretend that his experience would be the same as the White Joe in the original text would be disingenuous,” Wright says. “So I think it was an effort to substantiate the character as a Black American, and not just do a bit of creative casting.”

Power adds: “This idea particularly of the African American athlete within sports exploitation, being in the spotlight and public sphere, that was really interesting to me.”

Wright and Power landed on the conceit that Joe’s father was a baseball pro in the Negro Leagues and the minors in the 1950s, when only the best of the best Black players got a shot at the majors. By striking a bargain with Rob McClure’s Applegate, Joe isn’t just lifting his favorite team — he’s rectifying an injustice that’s loomed over his family.

“It inherently changes the piece, Joe being Black,” Donica says. “Joe being connected to his father is part of the reason why he makes this decision for himself. It’s not just because, ‘Oh, man, I really want a shot at playing in the big leagues.’ It’s a deeper connection.”

Timing-wise, this meant shifting the story to the turn of the century. At that point, the Senators were long gone from Washington and the Nationals had not yet arrived. When the Nats did launch in 2005, they did so in the National League — keeping them away from the American League’s Yankees anyway. So Wright and Power pivoted to the Orioles, the Yankees’ beleaguered AL East foe. The year 2000 worked particularly well for the show’s David vs. Goliath framing: The Yankees won the World Series in real life, and the Orioles were in the midst of 14 straight losing seasons. And they felt blue-collar Baltimore better served the underdog narrative than modern D.C. did.

The writers also sought to add depth to the primary female characters, Villafañe’s femme fatale Lola and Bryonha Marie’s housewife Meg. Although aspects of the score dwelled on outdated gender conventions — particularly the brazenly objectifying song “The Game” — “Ragtime” composer Ahrens came in to excise the problematic passages and provide fresh lyrics.

“The original is unreproducible, with all due respect to the original creators,” Trujillo says. “It’s sexist. It’s misogynist. But that’s just how the shows were made — it’s not them. So we have to be able to take all of that into account and be respectful of it.”

Following its Arena Stage stint, “Damn Yankees” is tentatively eyeing a fall 2026 bow on Broadway. (One reason for the wait: Donica, a newly promoted series regular on HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” is set to start shooting Season 4 in February.) For all of Wright and Power’s rewrites, and all the ones to come after this out-of-town tryout, the goal remains the same: to get a fresh but familiar spin across home plate.

“We’ve done a lot of work on it,” Power says. “But it’s still ‘Damn Yankees.’”

Oh god this sounds miserable. Oh please let Josh Bergasse and Robyn Hurder do Damn Yankees the right way PLEASE