But the new WSS has Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler! Both at the peak of their...:) Interesting that “Chicago” was nostalgic *by design* when it was written in the ‘70s. WSS was cutting edge as far as Broadway musicals were concerned. It was considered difficult and discordant.
I wouldn’t say the Fosse version was nostalgic, more anti-nostalgic, satirizing nostalgia along with a lot of other stuff.
Then WSS became “the standard”. Then like so many “standards” it became “old people” fair. WSS in a lot of ways is Wizard of Oz. There have been a lot of attempts to do adaptations of that. Either the movie, or going back to the books. And they’ve mostly failed in the market, because you just can’t redo WOO without automatically dragging Judy Garland and those damn red slippers into people’s brains. Wicked is really the only thing to have any success in that, and it cheated by riding the “maybe the bad guy wasn’t bad” wave that had become popular in that time frame. That gave it a lot of separation and really allowed it to stand on its own. Also avoiding having Wizard or Oz in the title probably helped.