The 1974 production opened to mostly negative reviews. Some critics had begun to consider Rigby's revivals formulaic; Clive Barnes of "The New York Times" derisively pronounced "Good News", and shows like it, "prefabricated...nostalgia", and Martin Gottfried of the "New York Post" deemed it "a joyless, mechanical reproduction". The book was harshly criticized; Barnes pronounced it "a terrible book" with "jokes obvious enough to give banana skins a bad name", and "Time" referred to it as an "ancient flapdoodle of a plot". Critics also questioned the practice of interpolating songs from other shows. Walter Kerr opined that preserving the original score was vital to the character of a revival, stating, "the only reason for remounting vehicles that have half-vanished...is to get beyond all that is dated into the specific textures of the scores that haven't...there's no point for enduring banality in a book if all you're going to get in return is a random rummage through an attic that produces a perhaps bountiful but essentially characterless heap".