NEW YORK — Just weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, his grieving widow Jackie Kennedy quoted her late husband’s favorite Broadway musical in an interview in Life magazine: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”
This was an act of brilliant mythologizing, and it stuck: JFK’s short, tragically curtailed administration became cemented in the American mind with Arthurian legend and thus with justice, kindness, chivalry, eloquence and romance.
Had Jackie Kennedy seen the revival of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s “Camelot” now at Lincoln Center — with book by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Bartlett Sher, with Andrew Burnap as King Arthur, Phillipa Soo as Guenevere and Jordan Donica as Lancelot — she’d hardly have chosen such a connection. This 2023 “Camelot” has more the nihilistic ambiance of “Game of Thrones” than a White House filled with art. It’s the chilliest “Camelot” you ever did see, and it embodies so many of the current neuroses surrounding revivals of classic American musicals.
