Follow The Leader / Theatre

• Rodgers and Hammerstein's success with Oklahoma! and Carousel led to a wave of musical period-piece Americana which included the Broadway musicals Annie Get Your Gun (which Rodgers and Hammerstein produced but did not write), Bloomer Girl, Up in Central Park and adaptations of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Booth Tarkington's Seventeen, as well as the movie musicals Meet Me in St. Louis (which was at one time to have included a Cut Song from Oklahoma!), Centennial Summer and Summer Holiday (which had the same director as Oklahoma!).
• Disney's 1994 stage adaptation of their animated film Beauty and the Beast was successful enough to lead to a whole line of Screen To Stage Adaptations of their animated and live-action musicals: The Lion King, Mary Poppins, The Little Mermaid, High School Musical, even Newsies. From there, other producers (often in association with film companies) sought out more family-friendly properties to bring to the stage in Spectacle-laden productions, resulting in such Broadway and/or West End musicals as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Doctor Dolittle, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Seussical, Shrek, Elf, Matilda, A Christmas Story, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Anastasia.
• The Las Vegas casino show scene has been and is prone to this:
  • The French showgirl revue was introduced to Las Vegas in the 1950s with Lido de Paris, and the style became the default setting for Vegas for years afterward with such shows as Folies Bergere, Hallelujah Hollywood!, and Jubilee!, the Last of Its Kind.
  • Siegfried and Roy got their start in Vegas performing between showgirl acts in revues, but were so popular they became headliners in the late '70s and proved a magic show format could work. Especially after they opened a gigantic production at the Mirage hotel in 1989, many casinos created their own magic-themed productions, making it the go-to genre of the '90s. Nowadays, it's fading as older productions close and newer ones fail to bring anything new to the table (Criss Angel BeLIEve, a Cirque du Soleil produced effort, was the most infamous show in the company's first Audience-Alienating Era). Tellingly, the shows of this sort that still draw audiences are more likely to be comedy-heavy and find new twists on the familiar, i.e. Penn & Teller, Mac King, and Mat Franco (who won America's Got Talent) while David Copperfield has endured thanks to an ability to keep his traditional act fresh.
  • 1983's Legends in Concert was the first all-celebrity impersonator show; the format remains popular whether it's a revue tackling many performers or one performer/group representing one act. The original is still running, and has launched several other companies elsewhere.
  • Danny Gans' success in the late 1990s spawned a wave of shows based around one performer delivering a bunch of celebrity impressions. A common complaint about the impressionists that are still around is that they never update their acts to include any post-Turn of the Millennium reference points. The key exception is Terry Fator, who succeeded Gans at the Mirage's celebrity showroom and also has the novelty of being a ventriloquist who does impressions.
  • The country music boom spearheaded by Garth Brooks inspired several revues in the mid-1990s.
  • Any dirty ventriloquist act (such as Jeff Dunham) is heavily influenced or sometimes downright copying an act called Otto and George. Otto and George never hit the mainstream, but his limited fanbase includes Penn & Teller, Howard Stern, Opie and Anthony, and back when they were still alive, George Carlin and John Lennon.
  • Cirque du Soleil was likely the inspiration for the importing of dubious foreign variety revues at the turn of the millennium, as well as mostly unsuccessful direct imitators (Imagine, Storm). Ultimately Cirque mounting as many as eight different ongoing productions in the city at once broke the trend, especially after the nasty reception Le Reve, mounted by a former Cirque director, received upon opening in 2005. (Said director also mounted Celine Dion's first Vegas show.) At this point, many are fervently hoping for a new megahit show that will break Cirque's dominance, but the ongoing economic downturn has left rival producers without the means to create worthy competitors.
  • Mamma Mia! was a substantial hit when it opened at Mandalay Bay in 2003, inspiring the following legit musicals to mount Vegas productions — Saturday Night Fever, We Will Rock You, Hairspray, Avenue Q, The Phantom of the Opera, Spamalot, The Producers, Jersey Boys, and The Lion King. Only Jersey Boys had staying power; The Lion King managed 2 1/2 years before being forced out to be replaced by Cirque's Michael Jackson: ONE, Phantom ran for six years but ultimately was the only production of the show to lose money, and the others all ran less than two years apiece.
• Mamma Mia! kickstarted the Jukebox Musical trend at the Turn of the Millennium and several new examples of the form try their luck on Broadway and the West End every year in The New '10s. We Will Rock You and Jersey Boys are the most successful of the successors.
• The runaway success of Irene in 1919 launched a wave of musical Cinderella stories over the next half decade. Two of the more successful ones, the Ziegfeld production Sally and the George M. Cohan production Mary, helped inspire a show titled Sally, Irene and Mary.
• It was arguably the popularity of the Andrew Lloyd Webber take on The Phantom of the Opera (itself inspired by a campier version by Ken Hill) that spurred the unsuccessful vampire musicals trend, and gave a boost to Jekyll and Hyde. In fact, since the novel is public domain, quite a few musical adaptations sprung up in the 1990s for community theatres and whatnot, as well a new lease on life for Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston's Phantom, which was actually developed around the same time as Webber's take but got lost in the shuffle.

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