New Faces of 1952, Your Show of Shows, and the end of the Broadway revue

The focus of this article is the relationship between Broadway and television in the early 1950s, a time when most US television production was still based in New York City. To demonstrate how television appropriated the revue format, the article analyses two works: first, Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952, which some historians of the American musical claim to have been the last great Broadway revue. Some of its stars (Robert Clary, Paul Lynde, Alice Ghostley) went on to long, distinguished careers in television. While New Faces of 1952 ran on Broadway, Max Liebman’s Your Show of Shows dominated Saturday night television. Its popularity was one of the causes for the death of the Broadway revue. The article explores two issues, asking what did Your Show of Shows take from the Broadway revue and how did it differ from a show like New Faces of 1952 and why was the television revue, as exemplified by Your Show of Shows such a short-lived phenomenon?