1955: Damn Yankees Opens

On This Day in Pop: May 5, 1955

On May 5, 1955, Damn Yankees opened at Broadway’s 46th Street Theatre. Adapted from Douglass Wallop’s novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the musical follows middle-aged Washington Senators fan Joe Boyd, who bargains with the devilish Applegate to become young baseball star Joe Hardy and help his team defeat the dominant New York Yankees. Richard Adler and Jerry Ross wrote the score, Wallop and George Abbott supplied the book, Abbott directed, and Bob Fosse staged the dances. Stephen Douglass played Joe Hardy, Ray Walston appeared as Applegate and Gwen Verdon became the seductive Lola. The production joined a Faust story to a specifically American obsession with baseball, turning frustrated fandom, aging and temptation into the machinery of a musical comedy.

The opening came when the Yankees had won five consecutive World Series championships from 1949 through 1953, giving the title an immediate joke recognizable to theatergoers. Songs including Heart and Whatever Lola Wants carried the plot beyond baseball statistics, while Fosse’s choreography helped establish the turned-in shapes, isolations and controlled sensuality associated with his later work. Verdon’s performance became a central attraction and won her a Tony Award. The show also depended on a fantasy of masculine renewal: Joe’s stronger younger body promises success but threatens his marriage and identity. Modern revivals can expose how its gender roles and assumptions belong to the 1950s even while the bargain, the divided self and the desire to reverse time remain dramatically useful.

Damn Yankees ran for 1,019 performances, won the Tony Award for Best Musical and received a 1958 film adaptation that preserved much of the principal Broadway cast. Its score entered cabaret, jazz and popular recording, and Lola became one of musical theater’s defining dance roles. The production also marked the only major Broadway collaboration by Adler and Ross after their success with The Pajama Game; Ross died later in 1955 at age twenty-nine. May 5 therefore recalls both a durable hit and a partnership cut short. The musical’s continuing revivals show how Broadway can transform a topical joke into a broader story about dissatisfaction and loyalty. Even audiences with little interest in baseball can understand Joe’s temptation to trade an ordinary life for applause—and the cost of discovering that the fantasy does not erase the person who made the bargain. The baseball setting also allowed the production to connect seasonal hope with theatrical repetition: every performance began the pennant race again. That renewable fantasy helped a topical 1955 joke remain playable long after the actual standings had changed.