Revivals

It can be difficult to forget high school musicals, especially if you worked on them enough to have the tunes graved into your brain. Such is the case with Guys and Dolls and Anything Goes. There was an interesting coincidence about them: They build up to a climactic sequence that is in the form of a revival, a prayer meeting. For Guys and Dolls, it’s Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat, held in the Save-a-Soul mission of Miss Sarah Brown. (It is likely no coincidence that one of John Brown’s daughters had the same name.) For Anything Goes (which takes place on a cruise ship crossing the Atlantic) it’s Blow Gabriel Blow, the capper to a revival presided over by Moonface Martin, an escaped criminal hiding out as a preacher. 

One could say that the revivals have in common that they are both fakes: Moonface is trying to keep up his cover, without success. Nathan Detroit has dragged his gambler friends in off the street, and they are there only because they lost a bet. Which suggests that they are re-interpretations of “proper” revivals, ironic counterpoint to an earlier era - like ex-hippies saying grace by thanking Mother Gaea. It’s a given that these are 20th century musicals, so it seems easy to say that they must be post-Progressive Era, and probably later enough for this sort of ironic joke to be appropriate and (presumably) funny.

All of which is a way to consider that they are probably between 1916 (20 years after the Cross of Gold speech and the revivals that would have been appropriate in that era) and 1939 (before World War II, that is, because these are just a little too blasé about the world to have been from wartime). 

Is that correct? Decide on your own: Anything Goes premiered in 1934. While Guys and Dolls started in 1950, it was meant as a period piece, and was based in part on a Damon Runyon story from 1933.