Derek Teague wrote to ask…
It's wonderful that you are championing the merits of the rarely revived Broadway show, Li'l Abner. However, I'd like to posit this query: do you honestly think that it would ever be deigned to be Broadway revivable given today's political climate?
Once all of today's social critics do some digging and learn that Abner's creator Al Capp was a right-wing crank, during a late-1960s zeitgeist when it was not politically expedient to be such, there would be nary a chance that a "new Li'l Abner for the twenty-first century" might survive out-of-town try-outs. At least, Mr. Capp was a wooden-legged amputee — that might count for something.
Answer me that, Mister Green Lantern.
Here's an absolutely accurate answer to your question: I don't know. My first thought is just that "today's political climate" (to use your term) is just "today's political climate." It might not be tomorrow's or that of the year after. I wouldn't bet money on anyone's ability to predict that. I would also think that since he personally was not going to profit from a revival — him being dead and all — Capp's personal politics and misdeeds wouldn't be a factor…only what was on the stage.
When I was briefly involved in discussions of revising its book for a new production, no one was thinking of setting the show in the present day. It had to be period, had to be set back in the fifties with a looming Red Scare. Maybe being period and so gosh-darned cartoony would give it some insulation. Current events might well render it more or less relevant to our time.
I find the issue of What Offends People to be very inconsistent and unpredictable. For a long period of what some would call "wokeness," the news that Bill Cosby was probably raping women didn't seem to arouse a lot of outrage. Then one day, it suddenly did. I look at routines by guys like Dave Chappelle or Jim Jefferies or any wildly-successful comic in their category and I don't get why people are upset about these four jokes and not hundreds of others told from the same stages by the same performers.
But I'll stick with my answer: I don't know. At the moment, I would think the foremost obstacle to a revival of Li'l Abner is financial. No one is coming forth to put up the millions of dollars it would take to do it for the same reasons no one did it in the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, etc. It just didn't seem like as sound an investment opportunity as the three-hundredth Broadway revival of Gypsy or the six-thousandth Fiddler on the Roof.
One of these years (decades?) when there's someone with the interest and power to put together the deal to remount Li'l Abner, we can take a look and see what the political climate is then. If you and I had gone to see an early preview of The Book of Mormon, we might have worried about protests at the depiction of black people and the ridiculing of an entire, not-insignificant religion. And that show could not have been a much bigger hit than it was and still is.
