They Wokeified ‘Damn Yankees’

Of course they had to make it about race. Race is their entire world—the prism through which everything must be viewed.

Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., has revived the classic musical Damn Yankees. The play tells the story of a man who trades his soul to the devil so that he might become a powerhouse young baseball player. His motivation is that he so desires his beloved team, the Washington Senators, to win the pennant that he feels driven to sacrifice himself.

However, this version is different. According to the Washington City Paper,director and choreographer Sergio Trujillo: 

has called this production a “revisal,” rather than a revival, and the adapters have focused primarily on the book while dutifully leaving the highly underrated score intact (with some sensible lyric changes by Lynn Ahrens of Ragtime and more). Aside from pushing the timeline forward 45 years to 2000 and swapping in the Orioles for the then-defunct Washington Senators—a choice that avoids an anachronism but steals a little soul from this town’s devoted Nats fans—perhaps the most consequential change is the introduction of a new motivation for Joe’s ultimate deal with the devil: The desire to make his father, a minor league baseball player who was kept out of the major leagues because he was Black, proud of him.