A corollary to just how “popular” the songs from WSS are would be the musical “Chicago. The current revival has been running on Broadway for 25 years and still going. The 2002 film was a big hit and won the “Best Picture” Oscar. Yet how many people really know any of the songs? Does an average person in the street know songs like “All That Jazz” or “Cell Block Tango”? That suggests it’s far more niche than people realize.
Yeah but the Chicago movie had Richard Gere, Rene Zellwiger and Catherine Zeta Jones all right around peak popularity. And it didn’t have the baggage WSS had, because it was niche. Everybody conceptually knows WSS. It has name recognition without necessarily having popularity or draw. It’s very much in the “that thing my mom/grandma liked”. While Chicago got to come in fresh really. It had never been the cultural landmark WSS was. I doubt more than a dozen people who saw the 2002 film had seen the 1927 film, and I doubt most had seen any of the stage versions. So it got to come in as a “new” movie. WSS can never do that. Any new rendition of WSS, even the various Broadway revivals, has to drag the past with it, and is automatically limited to a largely nostalgic audience.