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.