Haley Swindal, the eldest grandchild of George Steinbrenner, loves both baseball and Broadway: As a scion of the family that owns the New York Yankees, she wears a World Series pendant around her neck, and as a co-producer of last season’s “Sunset Boulevard,” she has a Tony Award she keeps in her daughter’s room.
This fall, with the Yankees once again in a pennant race, Swindal shuttled between the Bronx and Washington, D.C., simultaneously cheering on her beloved Yankees and the first production of what she hopes will be a Broadway revival of the one major musical with her family’s team in the title: “Damn Yankees.” The show is now running at Arena Stage, a nonprofit theater in southwest Washington, where it opened last month to strong reviews.
Swindal, 39, is spearheading that revival as its lead producer; it would be the first Broadway show with her at the helm. She has raised up to $1.8 million to support the Arena Stage production, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the night before opening she was wooing potential investors at both a preshow reception and a post-show party, seeking their support for a much-bigger Broadway budget.
“If there’s something for me to produce, that I think I can get right, it’s a Broadway and baseball musical,” Swindal said. “It’s really the first time that I’m merging these two things together, and saying: ‘This is me. I’m both of these two things.’”
“Damn Yankees,” which arrived on Broadway in 1955, is a Faust-inspired story about a dejected fan of a local baseball team on a long-term losing streak. The fan, named Joe, makes a deal with the devil, bartering his soul for a transformation into the young slugger his team needs to defeat the seemingly invincible Yankees.
Along the way, the devil, seeking to corrupt Joe, employs a temptress named Lola.
“It’s a story about a man finding his soul again,” said Jordan Donica, who plays young Joe (and who played the devil in a production at his Indiana high school), “and we’re living in a country that is looking for its soul.”
The show has songs by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross and a book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop, who wrote the novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant,” on which the musical is based. In 1956, “Damn Yankees” picked up seven Tony Awards, including one for best musical, and it was revived on Broadway in 1994. (There was a film adaptation in 1958.)
Several dozen amateur and professional productions take the stage each year, but some of the show’s depictions of gender roles have not aged well, and, like many classics, it is produced less frequently than it was a few decades ago, according to Music Theater International, which licenses the title.
Swindal, alongside her co-producer, Julie Boardman, and their creative team (the director Sergio Trujillo and the adapters Will Power, Doug Wright and Lynn Ahrens) have created a new version of the show that Arena Stage is describing as “gently retooled” for a new generation.
“We have to look at it through the lens of today,” said Trujillo, who was an ensemble member in a Canadian production of the show in 1987. Trujillo said he considered it important that a contemporary production have “female characters that have full arcs” and a baseball team “that reflects what America should be.”
“The piece itself was very old-fashioned,” he said, “and some of the things that they talk about are incredibly politically incorrect.” (Trujillo is not the first to reach that conclusion. In 2017, when Kathleen Marshall directed a benefit concert of the show for Roundabout Theater Company, she had women in the ensemble walk across the stage holding signs that read, “These lyrics were written in 1955.”)
Gone, with permission from the heirs of the original writers, are lyrics like “There was that waitress back in Kansas City / Built for comfort, dumb but pretty!” (New lyric: “I’m in this card game back in Kansas City / Got a hand that ain’t too pretty.”) And the main female characters (Joe’s wife, Meg; the devil’s temptress, Lola; and a sportswriter, Gloria) have been deepened in an effort to make them more three-dimensional.
“It’s the best of both worlds — being able to pay homage to the original text, and to the Faust of it all, and also being able to say, ‘How can I speak for modern women,’” said Ana Villafañe, who plays Lola. In the original, she said, Lola was “wielded as an object”; in this version, she said, “She’s become this empowered femme fatale.”
The action has been relocated to Baltimore in 2000 from midcentury Washington. Joe, a white Senators fan in the original, is now an African American Orioles fan, and part of his motivation in this version is that racial discrimination had limited his father’s baseball career.
At the same time — mindful that some potential ticket buyers might be leery of anything that sounds too woke — the show is unmistakably still “Damn Yankees,” with the same earnest characters, the same basic story line, the same classic songs and the same old-fashioned heart.
“We wanted to find some writers who would bring this into a more modern setting without losing the soul of the musical,” said Alyson Adler, a lawyer who represents many of the heirs of the original authors. “We didn’t want this to be some weird modern take.”
Swindal is relatively new to producing, but as an actor she performed in two nonunion tours, got an Equity card and made her Broadway debut as a swing in “Jekyll & Hyde,” and has cycled in and out of the cast of “Chicago,” playing Matron “Mama” Morton at least seven times. (She was also in the ensemble of the Roundabout “Damn Yankees” reading.)
“The first part of my life was very much proving myself, and going away from all of this Yankee stuff — I needed to figure out who I was as an artist in the world,” she said. “That allows me a sensitivity that makes me a better producer.”
She is not the first Steinbrenner to try her hand at producing. Her grandfather co-produced a few Broadway shows, including a Tony-winning musical, “Applause,” and a flop, “Legs Diamond.”
Swindal has been circling “Damn Yankees” since she was 9 and preparing for a talent show. “Somebody thought it was funny to make me sing ‘You gotta have heart,’” she said, quoting a lyric from the show’s signature anthem, “Heart.”
“I was the little girl singing ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ while they were watching the baseball games,” she said of her family. “My whole life and love has been theater. So naturally people would say to me, ‘Do you know “Damn Yankees”?’”
Her involvement in this revival has brought a heightened level of baseball realism. She enlisted Major League Baseball, with the expectation that the league will get more involved if the show transfers to Broadway, and a consultant to work with the actors on their swings and batting stances. She got permission for the cast members to use real uniforms.
She wears her Yankees connections proudly — in addition to the pendant from 1999 around her neck, she also wore a pennant ring from last year on her finger. She also works for the team in its community relations department and at its foundation.
“I’m very proud of where I come from,” she said. “I’m proud of who my grandparents were, and I’m walking into my legacy.”
And how does she feel about the title of the show, “Damn Yankees,” and the fact that her team are the bad guys?
“I’m happy to get behind a show where the Yankees are unbeatable,” she said. “And I tell my parents that too when they’re like, ‘Wait! The Yankees don’t win?’”
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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