There are a few novels about Chang and Eng--interesting ones (I have a friend who wrote her dissertation about their representation in American popular culture across time). In addition, Alice Dreger's "One of Us" (the reference to the movie "Freaks" is quite intentional) is a thoughtful piece of medical humanities/philosophical writing (and not filled with typical academic jargon, to which I plead guilty in some of my own writing--it's the price of admission, I fear). Katherine Dunn's novel, Geek Love, while not centrally about conjoined twins (it's about a family of "intentional freaks"--their parents do various things while their children are in utero to try to produce anomalously-bodied children who can be part of the "family business," i.e. a traveling freak show), features a really fascinating set of conjoined twins--Electra and Iphigenia.
I do think there's still both a kind of fascinating with conjoined twins in our culture--remember, in as recent a period as the 19th century, in many cultures, conjoined twins were killed at birth, either because they were viewed as evil omens for the community or as manifestations of the sins of their parents (I don't think we are there anymore, but who knows?). I do think the issues of sexuality and privacy are there still--as Dreger argues, of the American ideal of "individuality" as the "right" of every citizen--until, of course, that individuality threatens the social order.
I've only seen a college production of Side Show. It was well-performed and well-staged, but I found the plot rendered in somewhat soapy fashion and the music unmemorable. But that's case of individual taste.
It may be that a revival has to latch into something in the zeitgeist (as I think Chicago did when it started its revival--we were in a more cynical place then than when it opened) or to have a performer people know they want to say (as in the succession of Hedwigs currently moving through the role--even Andrew Rannells, arguably the least well of them to the average non-Broadway baby, is known from Girls and The New Normal and perhaps from The Book of Mormon). Or it may be a perennial made fresh again by staging, concept, or casting. Side Show has some of this, but not names to carry it (with all due respect to the leading ladies, whom I gather are quite excellent).
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