Neil Patrick Harris will lead a Broadway revival of Damn Yankees in spring 2027, with Julianne Hough and Austin Scott also announced among its stars. For movie lovers, the news offers a compelling reason to revisit the 1958 screen adaptation: beneath its baseball fantasy sits a surprisingly uncomfortable story about a man who wants a second life while expecting his first one to wait. [Casting announcement](https://www.broadway.com/buzz/207160/neil-patrick-harris-julianne-hough-and-austin-scott-to-star-in-broadway-revival-of-damn-yankees/).
The forthcoming production must establish its own dramatic identity. The film, however, already supplies a useful question for any return to this material: can the excitement of getting everything you wanted survive a clear look at who pays for it?
Spoiler warning: The following review discusses the 1958 film’s central relationships and resolution. It is a retrospective assessment of that movie, not a review of the forthcoming Broadway production.
The 1958 film makes wish fulfillment a domestic problem
Directed by George Abbott and Stanley Donen, Damn Yankees stars Tab Hunter as the youthful Joe Hardy, Gwen Verdon as Lola, and Ray Walston as Applegate. Its musical roots remain central to its appeal: characters make their desires legible through songs, comic timing, and physical performance. [Film credits](https://wwws.loc.gov/rr/mopic/findaid/BASEBALL.pdf).
The premise is beautifully economical. Middle-aged Washington Senators fan Joe Boyd accepts a bargain with the devilish Applegate, becoming a young baseball phenomenon. He negotiates an escape clause, believing that a carefully worded arrangement can contain an irrational desire. His wife, Meg, remains outside the negotiation.
That omission gives the fantasy its sting. Joe sees the transaction as an extraordinary opportunity with manageable consequences. From Meg’s perspective, it is abandonment. The film becomes more interesting whenever those two understandings occupy the same scene, even though Joe alone knows the supernatural explanation.
Joe wants youth without surrendering familiarity
Joe’s declaration, “I’d sell my soul for one long ball hitter,” sounds like the sort of exaggeration a frustrated fan might throw at a television. Applegate’s intervention exposes how much personal longing hides inside the complaint. Joe wants his team to win, but he also wants to become the reason it wins. [Film dialogue](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=damn-yankees).
Hunter’s straightforward screen presence suits that contradiction. His Joe Hardy can look like an uncomplicated athletic ideal while behaving like someone who has misplaced his own life. The appeal lies in the mismatch: a spectacular new body does not produce a spectacularly different emotional appetite.
Joe’s return to Meg’s home as a boarder makes that mismatch concrete. He has escaped ordinary existence only to seek accommodation inside it. Being near his wife matters more than the freedom his transformation supposedly grants him. Yet he still enjoys an advantage she does not: he understands why their familiarity feels so immediate.
My reservation is that the film’s affection for Joe sometimes softens the selfishness of his original decision. His homesickness is touching, but it is not the same as accountability. A viewer can root for his return while wishing the story gave greater weight to what Meg has endured.
Meg gives the fantasy its emotional scale
Shannon Bolin’s Meg makes the cost of Joe’s adventure visible through ordinary attachment. She does not need an elaborate counterplot. An absent husband and a home that no longer feels complete are enough.
The empty-chair imagery associated with her loneliness works because it reduces the film’s enormous supernatural proposition to a recognizable absence. Stadium applause is abstract beside the place where someone used to sit. The domestic setting gives the audience a measure of loss that athletic achievement cannot cancel.
There is also a limitation worth acknowledging. Meg’s steadfastness can make her seem more like the guarantee of a happy ending than a person entitled to change. The film asks us to admire her faith; a contemporary viewer may also want to hear her anger.
That tension connects with the question of private fulfillment explored in our analysis of heroic duty and ordinary life in Avengers: Endgame. Here, the smaller story is the essential one: victory matters less if the person returning home has learned nothing about sharing a life.
Lola’s confidence conceals a life controlled by someone else
Verdon gives Lola the film’s most arresting combination of assurance and vulnerability. Her seduction routine promises total command of the encounter. Yet her assignment comes from Applegate, and its success is judged by him. The apparent controller is also an employee under pressure.
Her movement makes confidence feel like practiced work. A pause, an angle of the body, or a change of expression becomes part of a strategy. The pleasure of watching Verdon is that the performance can advertise effortless attraction while allowing us to sense the effort beneath it.
Joe’s response unsettles that arrangement. “But I’m only one,” he tells her, before affirming that he is married. The line punctures his own fantasy as much as it resists hers: he cannot indefinitely divide himself into the man who pursues every possibility and the husband who keeps his promises.
Lola becomes more affecting when she recognizes a loyalty that her professional routine cannot simply redirect. Her sympathy for Joe gives her a desire beyond satisfying Applegate. To my eye, that change supplies more dramatic energy than the basic contest between temptation and virtue.
Applegate sells the fantasy, then resents its limits
Walston’s Applegate is funny because supernatural power has not spared him the irritations of dealing with people. He approaches desire as a transaction, then finds that affection makes his customer unreliable.
The performance benefits from that pettiness. An entirely majestic devil would belong to a different movie. This one needs a salesman who considers himself the smartest person present and becomes increasingly offended when his calculations fail.
His relationship with Joe also recalls the exchanges of dependence and self-deception examined in our character analysis of Sunset Boulevard. The films differ sharply in tone, but both understand that accepting a seductive arrangement can gradually surrender control over the life it was supposed to improve.
What the ending means for a new revival
The film ultimately restores Joe to Meg and his ordinary identity. Its deeper proposition is that a better body and public acclaim cannot automatically produce a better life. Joe must recover the ability to value what familiarity had made easy to overlook. [Film synopsis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Yankees_(1958_film)).
As a musical comedy, Damn Yankees remains most persuasive when Verdon’s electricity and Walston’s exasperation rub against that modest emotional conclusion. Its weakness is the ease with which Joe’s adventure can resolve around a wife who has done much of the waiting.
That is the dramatic opportunity surrounding Harris’s Broadway return. Whatever choices the revival makes, the material has room for both exuberance and a sharper understanding of the bargain. Joe’s dream deserves its excitement; Meg’s experience deserves equal attention. The most satisfying version of this story makes coming home feel like a changed relationship, rather than merely the end of a successful detour.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: September 27, 2026 at 23:58:52 PDT (Los Angeles time)
