Broadway’s “New” Gershwin Musicals: Romance, Jazz, and the Ghost of Fred Astaire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beginning in the mid-1980s, musicals with Gershwin scores returned to Broadway for the first time in half a century. Four “new” Gershwin musicals – widely distributed across almost a quarter century with none created or produced by the same individuals or organizations – put Gershwin songs (and sometimes his concert music) into brand new or greatly revised narratives. These shows effectively sidestepped the prohibitive commercial challenge of reviving Gershwin’s musical comedies and operettas of the 1920s and 1930s in their original form. No other songwriter of Gershwin’s era has enjoyed a similar pattern of book-show reinvention on the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Broadway stage. The “new” Gershwin musical begins with My One and Only (1983, 767 performances), a tap dance-laden show set in the 1920s starring Tommy Tune (who directed and choreographed with Thommie Walsh) and Twiggy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".