I think Billington is trying to tell to the story of how UK revivals of Rodgers & Hammerstein's musicals at the end of the 20th century began a radical reinterpretation of the musicals on a commercial scale (Ann Bogart's groundbreaking production was largely academic). Radical in the sense that the revivals looked into the roots of the texts as well as their connection to American history. Those revivals began a cross Atlantic dialogue about R&H's body of work as expressive of perhaps a kind of American subconcious, mostly recently expressed by Fish's OKLAHOMA.
