“Damn Yankees,” the 1955 musical about a baseball fan who makes a Faustian deal to bolster his favorite team, will return to Broadway in the spring with Neil Patrick Harris as the Devil.
Harris will star alongside Julianne Hough as Lola, the immortal seductress working with the Devil (known in the show as Applegate), and Austin Scott as a young Joe Hardy, the show’s protagonist.
The revival was announced on Sunday afternoon at a rain-soaked Yankee Stadium, where the actors fielded questions from reporters and social media influencers in the team’s press room.
The production had planned an attention-getting announcement, with Harris, wearing a fiendishly smoke-emitting vest, throwing out the first pitch; Scott singing the national anthem; and Hough seductively dance-delivering a baseball to the pitcher’s mound. But Mother Nature had other ideas, and the game was canceled after a nearly three-hour rain delay. So the actors posed for clubhouse photos with players, including the Yankees superstar Aaron Judge, and the show staged a news conference instead.
“I’ve done things that were more bespoke, and I’ve never ever done the big Broadway musical, with the big ensemble and big dance numbers, and I’ve always wanted to,” Harris said, adding that “playing someone that’s devilish is always good — it’s always fun to be naughty.”
The production has strong ties to the baseball industry: One of the show’s lead producers is Haley Swindal, the eldest grandchild of George Steinbrenner, who not only owned the Yankees but also dabbled in Broadway producing himself (“Applause,” “Seesaw” and other shows). Thanks to Swindal’s involvement, Major League Baseball, with its production arm, MLB Studios, has signed on as a partner.
“Both of my worlds will be colliding,” Swindal said in an interview. “I love that there’s a Broadway musical that has baseball as the heartbeat.”
She said Major League Baseball had already been consulting with the production team, helping to ensure that visual representations of the sport, including the uniform costumes, are authentic. The League is also expected to help promote the production.
The show plans to begin previews on March 24 and to open on April 20 at the Marquis Theater, where the last revival of “Damn Yankees” opened in 1994. This new version had an initial run last year, with a different cast, at Arena Stage in Washington.
The musical, with songs by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, is a classic of Broadway’s golden era. The original production won the Tony Award for best musical in 1956, and a film adaptation was released in 1958. The musical is based on a novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant,” by Douglass Wallop, who wrote the musical’s book with the show’s original director, George Abbott.
Some of the show’s dialogue and lyrics have not aged well — sexism is baked into aspects of the libretto — and this revival is being billed as a new adaptation by the playwrights Will Power and Doug Wright (the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “I Am My Own Wife”). Lynn Ahrens, the storied lyricist of “Ragtime,” “Once on This Island” and other shows, has gently updated the lyrics with the blessing of the original writers’ heirs.
Members of the revival’s creative team have said they hope this latest version, although still quite similar to the original, better reflects professional baseball as it exists in the United States today. The show’s setting has been relocated from midcentury Washington to Baltimore in 2000; Joe, a white Washington Senators fan in the original, is now Black and a Baltimore Orioles fan. (In both versions, the Yankees are the dominant opponents referred to in the title.)
Harris, who is best known for television shows including “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and “How I Met Your Mother,” has won five Emmy Awards. He is a Tony winner for “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and he most recently appeared on Broadway in last year’s revival of “Art.”
Hough, who won an Emmy Award for “Dancing With the Stars,” starred on Broadway in the 2022 play “Potus.”
Scott has starred in three Broadway musicals, including “& Juliet” and “Girl From the North Country.” He played the title role in “Hamilton” in 2019.
“Damn Yankees” will be directed and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo (“Ain’t Too Proud”). The producing team is led by Lia Vollack (“MJ: The Musical”); Julie Boardman, a founder of the Museum of Broadway, and Swindal. The show is being capitalized for $18.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, although the filing also says that the budget could grow as high as $21.5 million.
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