Take careful note of the quotation marks, because the headline above doesn’t nod to theatre tickets or the wholesale embrace of casual fornication. The reference, sorry to disappoint you, relates instead to the titles of two stage works created in 1926, which as of January 1, 2022 should be entering the public domain.

As a result of changes in copyright law over the years, very little entered the public domain for an extended period which ended in 2019, once again starting the annual roll of works ceasing to be under the control of the estates of those who created them. Last year’s big entry into the field was The Great Gatsby. This year, when it comes to theatre, George Abbott and Philip Dunning’s Broadway and Mae West’s Sex are leading the pack of influential works now free to those who wish to produce, alter or adapt these pieces. 

Obviously what was popular and even topical 95 years ago may not hold up now, but for those whose art may emerge from transforming vintage work, public domain material certainly beats negotiating with attorneys and studios. To be clear, this applies to all copyrighted work, including novels, films and recordings, so the tranche coming available every year is quite vast.

For those who like the saga of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat but find the musical (in its many iterations) a slog for some reason, the novel enters the public domain in 2022 while the musical has at least two years to go. The same is true for Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which appeared as both a novel and, co-authored with John Emerson, a play in 1926, so the adventures of Lorelei Lee are now fair game for new iterations. But keep clear of the musical Blondes, because anything newly created by Loos and her collaborators Joseph Fields, Jule Styne and Leo Robin are protected for over two more decades.

While the play Chicago, by Maurine Dallas Watkins, basis for the Kander and Ebb musical, also launched on Broadway in 1926, its first performance was on December 20, so it’s highly likely that its copyright wasn’t registered until 1927, meaning you can’t take the story for all your own jazz for another year. It’s a good example of why every literary work herein should be triple checked before you have at them: while copyright likely began the same year they premiered, you don’t want to get caught up by an exception, so as with all adapted works, a good legal check is in order.

On stage, Broadway brought plays by writers who were better known for other works, before or after their 1926 contributions. They include The Great God Brown by Eugene O’Neill, The Play’s The Thing by Ferenc Molnar in a version by P.G. Wodehouse (later adapted by Tom Stoppard as Rough Crossing), The Silver Cord by Sidney Howard (who won the Pulitzer for 1925’s They Knew What They Wanted), Saturday’s Children by Maxwell Anderson, The Constant Wife by W. Somerset Maugham, The Road to Rome by Robert E. Sherwood, Daisy Mayme by George Kelly, What Every Woman Knows by J.M. Barrie, and In Abraham’s Bosom by Paul Green.

While the writers getting produced in 1926 were predominantly male and white, it’s worth noting that West, Loos and Watkins led the field of women writers, which also included less remembered authors such as Glady B. Unger, whose Two Girls Wanted ran 324 performances and Margaret Vernon, whose Yellow lasted for 124, in an era when a twelve-week run could be considered a hit. There is markedly little diversity, sad to say, however the Spanish natives Gregorio and Maria Martinez Sierra had a hit with The Cradle Song.

Looking to novels which are now up for grabs, the list includes Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, and P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste. Perhaps buried in this recounting, but no doubt in need of particularly careful parsing, especially as UK and US copyright terms vary and there are Disney encumbrances to dodge as well, is A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, who emerged in the Hundred Acre Wood in 1926.

Why promote these old works coming out of copyright and into the public domain at a time when stages (and TV, film radio, podcast and so on) are increasingly making space for new and diverse voices? It’s not to try to elevate these works above what’s new or make any claims for their value today. However, there’s often something to be learned from the past, whether by being faithful or through radical transformation.In recent weeks, since the passing of Stephen Sondheim, we have been reminded of how Oscar Hammerstein II assigned the young artist the task of writing four original musicals as training, including a good play, a bad play and a non-play. Aspiring writers might well look to public domaterial as sources for such work because should they happen to be particularly inspired and successful in their efforts, they could, with little to no fuss, actually get the show(s) produced.

The 30th anniversary of The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

By celebrating its 30th anniversary on Broadway last week, The Phantom of the Opera marked what now seems a never-ending series of milestones, having run longer than any show in Broadway history.

The seeming permanence of Phantom may mask its achievement, though it has an eight-year lead on the revival of Chicago and nine years on The Lion King. Even if it were to close tomorrow – and that’s not about to happen – it would take the better part of a decade before either of those surpassed it, if they could.

Congratulations are due, of course, to Andrew Lloyd Webber, but also to Richard Stilgoe, Charles Hart, Harold Prince, Gillian Lynne, Cameron Mackintosh and so many others.

There is a certain irony to Phantom’s stupendous run on Broadway, in the West End and around the world – as pointed out in Harold Prince’s autobiography Contradictions, recently revised and expanded as Sense of Occasion.

In the original 1974 book, Prince predicted that no show would ever run as long as Fiddler on the Roof, which he produced. In Sense of Occasion, he allows that he was wrong, with many shows having surpassed Fiddler – A Chorus Line, Rent, Les Misérables, Wicked and the aforementioned productions to name a few.

Last summer, Prince was quick to contradict a question I asked him about whether shows were being engineered for longer runs. He cited the international market for musicals, and for tourism, as the engine behind the longest-running shows.

What was happening wasn’t a creative decision, but rather a product of changing and expanding opportunities. Shows were running longer because ever more people wanted to see them, the new modes of marketing and because there were successive generations of new audiences.

Certainly long-running shows existed before Phantom and its brethren, but they weren’t in theatres as large, they didn’t play in as many cities, and they didn’t necessarily tour as extensively.

In the West End, The Mousetrap has run for longer, but it is a play, not a musical. In Paris, a revival of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano has been running at the tiny Theatre de la Huchette for some 60 years. In the late 1980s, I saw a production of The Three Sisters at Moscow Art Theatre that had been in the repertory since the 1940s. It may yet still be there for all I know. The Fantasticks ran for 42 years Off-Broadway at the Sullivan Street Playhouse.

Coming back to Broadway, the expanding list of long runs is something to marvel at, especially if you are among the fortunate who invested in the shows.

But just as the growing markets, according to Prince, expanded the sense of what a Broadway show could achieve, they have also fundamentally changed Broadway itself. I have heard more than a few people remark that they have been in the Majestic Theatre, home to Phantom, only once – or not at all – in their lifetimes.

That is obviously due to the Majestic having had only one show playing for 30 years; the previous tenant, 42nd Street, ran for six years before that.

I should note that Phantom has been around long enough that I saw it on a discounted student ticket. (Though it opened a while after I graduated from university, the friend who bought the seats was only six months past graduation.)

It is possible to applaud Phantom, Chicago and The Lion King and all of those who have made them possible and bask in their success, but also temper that appreciation with caution.

While only a handful of shows each decade will even approach Phantom’s phenomenal run – Hamilton seems poised to be the latest to join that esteemed pantheon – and maybe some will run for only a decade, the impact has already fundamentally changed Broadway.

With a finite number of theatres, hovering at about 40 despite the openings and closings, these hits end up restricting the opportunities for new Broadway work. It’s great news for theatre owners, but limiting for works that might truly benefit from the awareness and opportunity that Broadway affords as a result of its legacy.

Unlike some countries, where we read about purpose-built theatres for each new extravaganza, Manhattan affords little space for new venues, especially in the theatre district.

The Shubert Organization announced, not so long ago, that it would not pursue a new theatre in the area because the costs were prohibitive. Meanwhile, the new venues coming to Manhattan are performing arts centres, designed to house a variety of work.

Only if works can set up in other cities with populations and tourism that approach those of New York, and only if the media affords comparable attention to that devoted to Broadway, might we see an expansion of large-scale work.

Perhaps Chicago, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia, to name but four, could become home to long-term work that doesn’t need to play Broadway to ultimately reach vast audiences.

We must accept that the model has changed, as Prince noted, and so change the opportunities for production accordingly. Even leaving aside significant concerns about pricing and accessibility, Broadway’s own success may be limiting new Broadway-scale work.

Andy Huntington Jones in Cats (Photo by Matthew Murphy)

In hindsight, the slogan ‘now and forever’ looks a bit less like marketing and a bit more like hubris. While it didn’t run forever, on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, the musical Cats maintains a formidable place in the annals of longest-running Broadway shows, surpassed only by The Lion King, the revival of Chicago and The Phantom of the Opera. While those latter three shows are all still chugging along, meaning they’re widening their lead over Cats, it’s going to take another four years or so before Wicked takes over the number four slot on the list – though that looks to be an increasingly likely achievement.

When the revival of Cats opens on Broadway on Sunday, in an open-ended run (in contrast to its recent limited-run engagements in the West End), it finds itself in a very different marketplace to the Broadway of the early 1980s, one that it helped to create through its success. The 1980s were a period when Broadway was in a slump, with theatres being demolished to make way for more lucrative real estate, and one even sold to a church. Now, musicals that run for fewer than five years can in some cases be seen as disappointments; 10-year runs are increasingly commonplace, if not exactly run of the mill.

The arrival of Cats, riding on a crest of acclaim from London back in 1982, was a big cultural event. Tickets for it in its first years were as dear as Hamilton tickets today, even if the secondary market was invisible to the average theatregoer in those pre-internet days. It’s important to remember how celebrated Cats was in its day, because as its 18 year run wore on, the show began to be perceived as a bit less groundbreaking and perhaps somewhat timeworn. For all of its enormous commercial success, its penetration into the popular consciousness and successful tapping of both the family and tourist markets, its then unprecedented run ultimately yielded jokes about the show having outlived its nine lives. The parade of animals that opened Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King for Disney became the new standard for anthropomorphised animals on Broadway; the two shows overlapped for almost three years in New York.

While Chicago returned to Broadway in a production that echoed the Bob Fosse-directed original, it isn’t the same staging; no doubt the show benefited from a hiatus of some 20 years. Conversely, Les Misérables came back to Broadway for the first time only three years after the original run closed, in the same production, and lasted just 15 months. The Cats revival has the benefit of being gone from Broadway for almost 16 years, but it’s largely the same show (save for some new choreography and lighting). It remains to be seen whether ticket buyers embrace the show that may well have been their very first time at the theatre, seizing an opportunity to take their children to an experience they once loved as children, or whether the iconic production might have needed a full rethink for the digital era, for a generation raised on The Lion King and Wicked.

I have to confess that I am rather uniquely unqualified to hazard a guess as to what the fate of the Cats revival may be. Why? Are you sitting down? Because I’ve never seen it. Despite avid theatregoing that began in the late 1970s, I never did manage to see Cats on Broadway, on tour or even in a high school auditorium. I was already a collegiate theatre snob when the show opened, and, without children of my own nagging me to take them as the run continued, I never felt the feline lure of T.S. Eliot or Andrew Lloyd Webber during the ensuing two decades. When I worked on the US premiere of By Jeeves in the mid-1990s, I always feared Lloyd Webber turning to me and saying, “Do you remember that moment in Cats when…?” I would have been left sputtering for a response.

That’s not to say I don’t have a strong impression of the show, since numbers were performed in full on television back in the day, excerpted for Broadway histories and television ads alike, parodied frequently, and so on. The TV sitcom Caroline in the City featured an actor character who was – fictionally – a member of the Cats menagerie. It was such a cultural touchstone that I remember The New York Times critic Frank Rich panning a show I did press for, about illegal dog fighting (no animals were harmed), with a withering, “Anyone for Cats?”

Come next week at this time, I will no longer be a Cats virgin. Whatever I make of it, inevitably my response cannot be one of youthful wonder nor middle-aged nostalgia. The question for the producers is whether there are enough people out there who want to evoke one or the other of those sentiments, among the already initiated or those born too late to experience the original run. As much as I plan to watch the show at long last, I’ll be keeping an eye on the audience as well, to see who turns out for the reconstituted Cats, if not now and forever, than at least once and again.

A star being replaced early in a Broadway show’s run is usually a sign of trouble. They’re unhappy with their role, perhaps, and getting out at the earliest opportunity. Maybe they’ve been offered a better paying gig, and it’s worth it to them to buy out their contract and move onto greener pastures. So what does it mean when even before a show opens, the star’s replacement has already been announced?

In the case of the recently opened revue After Midnight (which boasts renowned trumpeter Wynton Marsalis as artistic director), it means the producers have deployed a whole new strategy, in which the show is designed to accommodate a rotating roster of headliners. While Fantasia Barrino, an American Idol runner up who has gone on to a successful recording career and who previously appeared on Broadway in The Color Purple, will steer the show through its first four months, she’ll be succeeded in February by KD Lang, who, after one month will in turn yield the stage to Babyface and Toni Braxton who will appear for just two weeks.

The producers have given Barrino top billing as ‘special guest star’ to indicate the transient status of the position, and she performs only four numbers in the show, which like most revues is essentially modular. It will be fascinating to learn what the producers have in store for those who follow in her footsteps, since their individual style may not naturally mesh with the same material.

Obviously, for people who enjoy the show, return visits will yield partially different rewards, since a handful of numbers in the 90-minute piece will at least vary in style and might, perhaps, be swapped for different songs. For members of the public less engaged with Broadway, they may be lured in by these pop performers appearing in an intimate venue. Without any pejorative connotation, After Midnight – modeled on revues at legendary nightspots like The Cotton Club – even evokes memories of vaudeville. If you don’t like this week’s bill, come back in two weeks.

This approach is a logical progression from similar efforts on the Great White Way. The producers of the long running production of Chicago have made a specialty of rotating stars of varying fame in and out on a regular basis, generating new waves of press every time a ‘bold-faced name’ steps in as Roxie, Velma, or Billy Flynn. Once again, the vaudeville style of the show itself ends itself to easy transitions; it’s not as if a new Lear was joining an acting troupe every four weeks. The Play What I Wrote also employed weekly mystery guest stars, and, as an aside, it’s worth noting that this Morecambe and Wise-derived show marks the only time Kenneth Branagh has performed on stage in the US to date.

Another precursor to this format was the series of post-show guests employed by Million Dollar Quartet, a largely fictionalised retelling of the one-time recording session of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. To bolster its sales, the show began offering two or three song mini-concerts after the final curtain to add to its marketing draw. Though I’d seen the show early in its run, I arranged to sneak in at the tail-end one night to see the real Jerry Lee Lewis duet at the piano with his Tony-winning doppelgänger Levi Kreis. It was, I have to say, a thrill.

I’m not advocating a parade of stunt casting. The risk is too great, even if, upon seeing stage novice Melanie Griffith in Chicago, New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote: “Ms Griffith has only minimal command of the skills traditionally associated with musical comedy. She dances very little, and her well-known baby-doll voice has only a casual relationship with melody. Yet she is a sensational Roxie.” But that rave shocked even the show’s producers.

In this era of star appearances in theatre that run for only 12 to 16 weeks, perhaps this is a new paradigm which recognises that many stars can’t commit for long runs, and creates a way to deploy their drawing power in a manner totally organic to the show, for the benefit of audiences and investors. I for one can’t wait to see Madonna in After Midnight in 2017.