Romance in Hard Times is a musical with music, lyrics, and book by William Finn, set in a Depression-era soup kitchen. An earlier version, America Kicks Up Its Heels, was developed at Playwrights Horizons in the early 1980s before Finn substantially reworked it for Joseph Papp and the Public Theater in 1989.

Playwrights Horizons first developed the material in 1982 under the title America Kicks Up Its Heels, a book musical with music and lyrics by William Finn and a book by Charles Rubin. Following that production's troubled run, discussed below, Finn spent several years reworking the material with Joseph Papp and the Public Theater's New York Shakespeare Festival, eventually retitling it Romance in Hard Times.

The original version, America Kicks Up Its Heels, gave preview performances at Playwrights Horizons from March 3 through March 27, 1983, before its official opening was cancelled; the production played 28 preview performances and never formally opened. Directed by Mary Kyte and Ben Levit and choreographed by Kyte, with musical direction and orchestrations by Michael Starobin, scenic and costume design by Santo Loquasto, and lighting by Frances Aronson, the production was commissioned by Playwrights Horizons with funding from the Nicholas Gagarin Fellowship, under artistic director André Bishop, managing director Paul Daniels, and musical theatre program director Ira Weitzman, and starred Patti LuPone. Stage management was credited to Johnna Murray and Arturo E. Porazzi. According to critic Don Shewey, the production went through three months of rehearsal and three different directors before its opening was scrapped; Variety reported the situation under the headline "Finn Musical Nix Crix." Shewey, while praising LuPone's and Lenora Nemetz's performances, judged the show "truly directionless."

Musical numbers, per Dan Dietz's reference history, reflecting the production's original 1983 program:

During the run, the score was substantially revised: a later program indicates the action was reset to take place only in the present, with "Lullaby," "Papa, You Won," "Daddy and Me," and "All of Us Are Brothers" dropped and "Sex Stories in Hard Times" inserted before "Nobody's Ever Gonna Step on Me."

Following America Kicks Up Its Heels's troubled 1983 run, Joseph Papp and the Public Theater's New York Shakespeare Festival took up the piece, developing it over several years through unstaged readings and, eventually, a staged workshop production. As early as August 1986, Peggy Hewett had been cast in the show, at that point titled Famous Moms of History, as "a tap-dancing Eleanor Roosevelt." The show received a reading under that title at the Public Theater's Studio A on December 12, 1986, with a book credited jointly to Finn and Charles Rubin. A second reading, on November 20, 1987, was held under the alternate titles Topsy-Turvy and A Better World, with the script again co-credited to Rubin and Finn. By a third reading on October 21, 1988, the piece had been retitled Romance in Hard Times; Rubin's credit no longer appears in the archive's description of this or later versions, consistent with Finn's having taken over book-writing duties sometime in the intervening year. The Festival's script archive holds numerous further revisions dated between January and December 1989, spanning both the Anspacher and Newman engagements discussed below, with the latest surviving draft dated December 13, 1989, two weeks before the show's official opening.

Under Papp and the festival's resident musical-theater director Wilford Leach, the show was substantially reworked: unlike America Kicks Up Its Heels, the revised version was set entirely in a Depression-era soup kitchen with no contemporary framing story, and the cast shifted from predominantly white to predominantly Black at Leach's suggestion; David Warren took over as director in the summer of 1988 following Leach's death. Finn told Stasio that he had omitted a parallel story about homeless people in the 1980s that had been part of the earlier version, and shifted the score's sound from a traditional theater idiom toward gospel, jazz, and ragtime as he wrote for the new cast's voices. In a separate account, Finn similarly recalled that the earlier version had combined the Depression-era soup kitchen story with a contemporary narrative before he chose to focus solely on the earlier setting, and said he rewrote most of the earlier score for the new cast with the exception of a handful of numbers originally written for the 1983 production's white characters, among them "All Fall Down."

Of the earlier production's twenty-four musical numbers, three ("Red Faces in the Kremlin," "Eleanor Roosevelt: A Discussion of Soup," and "All Fall Down") were carried over to the Public Theater version under the same titles, though "Red Faces in the Kremlin" was itself cut at some point during the later Newman Theatre run. A fourth melody also carried over under a new title, from "All of Us Are Niggers" to "All of Us Are Losers," though this number was likewise cut during that run. By the time the show closed, only Peggy Hewett and Alix Korey remained as holdover cast members from the 1983 production.