Musicals category: 260 books

The world of musicals is beautiful, complex, hilarious, hard-headed, and improbable. It is as hard to make a great musical as it is to fly a spaceship to the moon and there are at least as many moving parts. Why is a great musical as significant a theatrical achievement as, say, King Lear?In this...

That Was Entertainment: The Golden Age of the MGM Musical traces the development of the MGM musical from The Broadway Melody (1929) through its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s and its decline in the 1960s, culminating in the notorious 1970 MGM auction when Judy Garland's ruby slippers from The Wizard...

Broadway musicals are one of America’s most beloved art forms and play to millions of people each year. But what do these shows, which are often thought to be just frothy entertainment, really have to say about our country and who we are as a nation? The Great White Way is the first book...

For Broadway audiences of the 1980s, the decade was perhaps most notable for the so-called “British invasion.” While concept musicals such as Nine and Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George continued to be produced, several London hits came to New York. In addition to shows like Chess,...

The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic...

For the past several years, the American musical has continued to thrive by reflecting and shaping cultural values and social norms, and even commenting on politics, whether directly and on a national scale (Hamilton) or somewhat more obliquely and on a more intimate scale (Fun Home). New stage musicals,...

The Broadway musical came of age in the 1950s, a period in which some of the greatest productions made their debuts. Shows produced on Broadway during this decade include such classics as Damn Yankees, Fiorello!, Guys and Dolls, The King and I, Kismet, The Most Happy Fella, My Fair Lady, The Pajama...

This new second edition of Enchanted Evenings offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America's best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals. Readers will find such all-time favorites as Show Boat, Carousel, Kiss Me, Kate, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, West...

In the golden years of cinema, Hollywood's Christmas present to ardent movie fans was almost always a brace of spectacular musicals. In those days, musicals easily rated as the most popular genre of movies. They were eagerly anticipated not only by the carriage trade but working-class audiences as...

Complete Piano Player: Musicals contains 15 songs from top stage musicals, with explanations for fingering and chords, that will feel familiar to those who have previously used the Complete Piano Player teaching books. This is an ideal companion songbook to the best-selling tuition series which will...

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Sondheim's brilliant array of work,...

The American musical is a paradox. On stage or screen, musicals at once hold a dominant and a contested place in the worlds of entertainment, art, and scholarship. Born from a mélange of performance forms that included opera and operetta, vaudeville and burlesque, minstrelsy and jazz, musicals have...

This Musical Showstoppers edition of the brilliant Piano Playbook series offers excellent new arrangements of 35 of the greatest, most enduring showstoppers from the biggest musicals of all time. All tunes are arranged for solo Piano, including vocal melody and chord symbols so you can stop your very...

Twenty-First Century Musicals stakes a place for the musical in today’s cinematic landscape, taking a look at leading contemporary shows from their stage origins to their big-screen adaptations. Each chapter offers a new perspective on a single musical, challenging populist narratives and exploring...