"Green Acres The Musical is a fast-paced, contemporary story that features the best in comedy, music and dance. This is the spirited musical comedy love story of Oliver and Lisa Douglas."

"He is a high-powered, Manhattan attorney and she is an aspiring fashion designer and, together, they are living ‘the good life’ in New York City. Faced with the overwhelming pressure to run his family’s law firm and live up to his father’s reputation, Oliver longs for the simple life, but New York and all that it has to offer is Lisa’s perfect world. What happens when two people in love find themselves wanting opposite lives sends us on a journey that is both hilarious and filled with heart."

That's the press release — published in Entertainment Weekly — for a "Broadway-bound" musical. I guess there's no limit to how stupid and touristy theater in New York City can become.

When "Green Acres" was on TV in the 1960s, it was one of many sitcoms set in rural America. From the Wikipedia article on the "rural purge" — the systematic cancellation of all that stuff:

Starting with The Real McCoys, a 1957 ABC program, U.S. television had undergone a "rural revolution", a shift towards situation comedies featuring "naïve but noble 'rubes' from deep in the American heartland". CBS was the network most associated with the trend, with series such as The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Mister Ed, Lassie, Petticoat Junction, and Hee Haw....

Mayberry's total isolation from contemporary problems was part of its appeal, but more than a decade of media coverage of the civil rights movement had brought about a change in the popular image of the small Southern town. Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., was set on a U.S. Marine base between 1964 and 1969, but neither Gomer nor any of his fellow marines ever mentioned the war in Vietnam. CBS executives, afraid of losing the lucrative youth demographic, purged their schedule of hit shows that were drawing huge but older-skewing audiences....

The numerous cancellations [at the end of the 1970-71 season] prompted Pat Buttram ("Mr. Haney" on one of the canceled shows, Green Acres) to make the observation: "It was the year CBS canceled everything with a tree—including Lassie"....

Several conservative members of Congress,[who?] as well as President Richard Nixon and members of his administration, expressed displeasure at some of the replacement shows, many of which (especially the more socially conscious shows such as All in the Family) were not particularly "family-friendly"...

It was decided that those rural shows — a refuge from the social and political upheaval of the 60s — were too damned unsophisticated and irrelevant for 1970s America. I don't know if the long arc of history bends toward sophistication, but it makes me sad to see that one of the shows that were seen — half a century ago — as too naive and out of it for television is now the basis for a Broadway show. What is happening to us?

Is Donald Trump part of the answer? Here he is performing at the Emmys in 2006:



I'm reading the lyrics to the theme song at the website Genius, where there are annotations:

Green acres is the place for me
Farm livin' is the life for me
Land spreadin' out so far and wide
Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside

New York is where I'd rather stay
I get allergic smelling hay
I just adore a penthouse view
Dah-ling I love you but give me Park Avenue

...The chores
...The stores
...Fresh air
...Times Square

You are my wife
Good bye, city life
Green Acres we are there

There's only one annotation. It's on the last 3 lines: "This might seem sexist to younger generations."

ADDED: The Wikipedia article mentions that one of the shows brought in to replace the rural sitcoms was "The Sonny & Cher Show," and that reminds me that I never wrote about the "Broadway-bound" show I saw in Chicago a couple weeks ago. "The Cher Show" is a bio-musical like "Jersey Boys" (the big Broadway hit that tells the story of The 4 Seasons). I guess I was too bored to put my thoughts into writing, but the show was completely unsophisticated. It assumes everyone in the audience just loves Cher, knows her songs and her costumes and will be delighted to witness a live parade of all that familiar stuff. There was no edge, no challenge, no acknowledgment that the audience members had any intelligence or critical eye at all. I was left cold (even though I loved Sonny & Cher from the moment I heard "I Got You Babe" on the radio in 1965). But so many other old women in the audience were whooping at every damned thing. Especially the lady sitting next to me. It was like watching a show in an insane asylum. Which reminds me: When I was a teenager in the 1960s, I saw the Broadway play "Marat/Sade" — "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade." That's where it looked as though Broadway would go. Into immense creativity and sophistication. It's so sad what happened instead.