Life With Father is one of those plays that depends in large part for its effectiveness on the audience's personal nostalgia for the time period of the play. It's set in the 1890s, and in the 1930s and '40s Broadway audiences were full of people for whom the 1890s represented their dearly beloved and fondly remembered childhood. Clarence Day's father, as depicted in the play, was their father. When decades pass and audiences no longer recall the time period personally, the play loses a lot of its emotional pull.
It's similar to the reason why revivals of Fiorello! never seem to work any more. In 1959, when the musical was first produced, everybody in the Broadway audience remembered Fiorello fondly, and nostalgically, as an icon of their youth. Now the audience who personally remember Fiorello is mostly gone, and younger people barely recognize the name, or don't recognize it at all. |
