American musical theater reverberates with both idealized and ironic representations of the past, with complex forms of unthinking, reassuring nostalgia and self-conscious anti-nostalgia. The American past, as the dominant setting for what is often called a uniquely "American" art form, becomes the vehicle whereby individual musicals both glorify and problematize American culture and values. At the same time, musical theater as a whole is riddled with either appreciation for or disaffection with the "golden age" inaugurated by Oklahoma! (1943). Musical theater needs its ghosts—the nostalgic memories of performances, tropes, and past icons—to reconfigure and fill in gaps in communal memory.

Methodologically, this study seeks to unify an archive fragmented between libretti, cast recordings, sporadic records of past performances, and traces of critical responses. One of the reasons for the persistence of nostalgia with American musicals is its fragmentary archive. Musicals perform a narrative through an articulation of prose, verse, music, and dance; none of these elements can be ignored in understanding a particular show. Study of each musical as a performative whole elucidates the contradictory ways in which nostalgia is performed.

This study examines the work of both nostalgia and anti-nostalgia in seven plays. Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! has often been mistaken as a purely nostalgic work, although contemporaries conceived and appreciated it as a modern production redefining "musical theater." David Henry Hwang's 2002 revisal of one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's last musicals, Flower Drum Song, is compared to its original incarnation (1958), revealing two attempts not only to make musical theater relevant in a changing American culture, but also to look back to the musical comedies that Oklahoma! helped to overturn. The non-narrative revue format of Stephen Sondheim's "anti-musical" Assassins (1991) displays the most resistance toward the golden age musical, yet in telling an alternate version of American history it cannot help but long for a reliable past and a time when musicals like Oklahoma! resonated within American popular culture. In Jelly's Last Jam (1992), African-American playwright George C. Wolfe rejected the idea of the golden age and mainstream nostalgia for it; he instead foregrounded the amnesia required by nostalgia by recalling blackface minstrelsy, but again fell prey to the genre's need to glamorize the past. In adapting his 1968 comedy film The Producers into a musical comedy (2001), Mel Brooks rejected the musical play model, and reveled in nostalgia for musical comedies in an attempt to restore a particularly Jewish vision for the American musical. Finally, Hairspray (2002) vacillates between nostalgia for the early 1960s, nostalgia for musical comedies, and worries that it does not live up to the model of Oklahoma! , presenting a narrative of racial integration in the mode of an integrated musical while maintaining many of the attributes of a fragmented musical comedy. The show paradoxically urges its characters to move forward and accept racial integration while simultaneously advocating clinging to the past.