It began as an artist's desperate desire to express himself inside a worldwide pandemic, but in one year's time it has grown into a theater industry and country-wide outlet for healing, grief, justice, and hope in the theater community. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed what a world without live performance looks and feels like. This book captures a small fraction of the powerful and transcendent internal heartbeat that never went away within the theater community. When the Lights Are Bright Again immortalizes the stories, struggles, and successes of an industry that was the first to be shut down and one of the last to return. Andrew Norlen weaves more than 200 letters from Broadway theater veterans, devout theatergoers, teenage dreamers aching for their day in the spotlight, long-time ushers, designers, creatives, and countless other arts workers with a brand-new, breathtaking photo series by Broadway photographer Matthew Murphy. Not only has the creation of this book allowed the theater community to grieve and express themselves in a new way, but for every copy purchased, a portion of the profits will directly benefit The Actors Fund. This book will continue to help support arts workers to thrive and receive financial stability for decades to come with every copy sold. When The Lights Are Bright Again is a love letter to the arts community and every theatergoer, but, above all else, it is a meditation on the human experience. There is something for every broken, tired, and angry soul inside this book: hope. There is light in all of us-there always has been!

In his nearly half-century long career, Alan Jay Lerner wrote the lyrics for some of the most beloved musicals in Broadway and Hollywood history. Most notably, with composer Frederick Loewe he worked on the record-breaking My Fair Lady, which won numerous Tony Awards and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. In The Complete Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner, editors and annotators Dominic McHugh and Amy Asch weave together dozens of archival collections to form an invaluable resource. Alongside classic works from My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Gigi, numerous discoveries are published here for the first time, including Lerner's unproduced MGM movie Huckleberry Finn, selections from his college shows, and lyrics from three different versions of Paint Your Wagon. This collection also includes many surviving songs from Lerner's two most ambitious musicals: Love Life, to music by Kurt Weill, and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which Lerner wrote with Leonard Bernstein. Through expert commentary, McHugh and Asch bring to life the stories behind much of Lerner's oeuvre, while also providing alternative or draft versions of his work. For the theater lover and scholar alike, this book sheds new light on one of the Golden Age's defining figures.

In The Mikado to Matilda: British Musicals on the New York Stage, Thomas Hischak provides an overview of British musicals that made their way to Broadway, covering their entire history up to the present day. This is the first book to look at the British musical theatre with reference to those London musicals that were also produced in New York City. The book covers 110 British musicals, ranging from 1750 to the present day, including the popular Gilbert and Sullivan comic operettas during the Victorian era, the Andrew Lloyd Webber mega-musicals of the late twentieth century, and today's biggest hits such as Matilda. Each London musical is discussed first as a success in England and then how it fared in America. The plots, songs, songwriters, performers, and producers for both the West End and the Broadway (or Off Broadway) production are identified and described. The discussion is sometimes critical, evaluating the musicals and why they were or were not a success in New York.

Musicals are the most popular form of stage entertainment today, with the West End and Broadway dominated by numerous long-running hits. But for every Wicked or Phantom of the Opera, there are dozens of casualties that didn't fare quite so well. In this book, Julian Woolford explores the musical-theatre canon to explain why and how some musicals work, why some don't, and what you should (and shouldn't) do if you're thinking of writing your own. Drawing on his experience as a successful writer and director of musicals, and as a lecturer in writing musicals at the University of London, Woolford outlines every step of the creative process, from hatching the initial idea and developing a structure for the work, through creating the book, the music and the lyrics, and on to the crucial process of rewriting. He then guides the reader through getting a musical produced, with invaluable advice about generating future productions and sustaining a career. The book includes dozens of exercises to assist the novice writer in developing their craft, and detailed case studies of well-known musicals such as Les Miserables, The Sound of Music, Miss Saigon, Little Shop of Horrors, Godspell and Evita. An essential guide for any writers (or would-be writers) of musicals, How Musicals Work is a fascinating insight for anyone interested in the art form or who has ever wondered what it takes to get from first idea to first night. 'A comprehensive and thoughtful guide to everything one must consider in order to write a successful musical. It would take at least a decade to learn all of this on one's own. Invaluable.' David Zippel (lyricist of City of Angels and The Woman in White) 'If anyone knows how musicals work (I'm not sure I do), this highly entertaining dissection of every aspect of that bewildering art form reveals that Julian Woolford does.' Tim Rice

When Lady in the Dark opened on January 23, 1941, its many firsts immediately distinguished it as a new and unusual work. The curious directive to playwright Moss Hart to complete a play about psychoanalysis came from his own Freudian psychiatrist. For the first time since his brother George's death, Ira Gershwin returned to writing lyrics for the theater. And for emigre composer Kurt Weill, it was a crack at an opulent first-class production. Together Hart, Gershwin, and Weill (with a little help from the psychiatrist) produced one of the most innovative works in Broadway history.
Though Lady in the Dark was a smash-hit, it has never enjoyed a Broadway revival, and a certain mystique has grown up around its legendary original production. In this ground-breaking biography, bruce mcclung pieces together the musical's life story from sketches and drafts, production scripts, correspondence, photographs, costume and set designs, and thousands of clippings from the star's personal scrapbooks. He has interviewed eleven members of the original company to provide a one-of-a-kind glimpse into the backstage story.

Paris and the Musical explores how the famous city has been portrayed on stage and screen, investigates why the city has been of such importance to the genre and tracks how it has developed as a trope over the 20th and 21st centuries. From global hits An American in Paris, Gigi, Les Miserables, Moulin Rouge! and The Phantom of the Opera to the less widely-known Bless the Bride, Can-Can, Irma la Douce and Marguerite, the French capital is a central character in an astounding number of Broadway, Hollywood and West End musicals. This collection of 18 essays combines cultural studies, sociology, musicology, art and adaptation theory, and gender studies to examine the envisioning and dramatisation of Paris, and its depiction as a place of romance, hedonism and libertinism or as 'the capital of the arts'. The interdisciplinary nature of this collection renders it as a fascinating resource for a wide range of courses; it will be especially valuable for students and scholars of Musical Theatre and those interested in Theatre and Film History more generally.

In Nothing Like a Dame, theater journalist Eddie Shapiro opens a jewelry box full of glittering surprises, through in-depth conversations with twenty leading women of Broadway. He carefully selected Tony Award-winning stars who have spent the majority of their careers in theater, leaving aside those who have moved on or occasionally drop back in. The women he interviewed spent endless hours with him, discussing their careers, offering insights into the iconic shows, changes on Broadway over the last century, and the art (and thrill) of taking the stage night after night. Chita Rivera describes the experience of starring in musicals in each of the last seven decades; Audra McDonald gives her thoughts on the work that went into the five Tony Awards she won before turning forty-one; and Carol Channing reflects on how she has revisited the same starring role generation after generation, and its effects on her career. Here too is Sutton Foster, who contemplates her breakout success in an age when stars working predominately in theater are increasingly rare. Each of these conversations is guided by Shapiro's expert knowledge of these women's careers, Broadway lore, and the details of famous (and infamous) musicals. He also includes dozens of photographs of these players in their best-known roles. This fascinating collection reveals the artistic genius and human experience of the women who have made Broadway musicals more popular than ever - a must for anyone who loves the theater.

In The Heights is the much anticipated American musical drama film based on the stage musical of the same name by Quiara Alegria Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda. This official, artist approved songbook includes 13 songs from the movie transcribed for piano, voice and guitar, plus original, full-colour photography and artwork. Lin-Manuel Miranda's kinetic music and lyrics capture a world very much of its place, but universal in its experience. The original stage musical was nominated for thirteen Tony Awards and won four, including Best Musical.

From The Lion King to Moose Murders and from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, celebrate the Drama Desk Award-winning artwork of Frank "Fraver" Verlizzo with more than 250 of his theatre poster designs from Broadway, Off-Broadway, and around the globe. For the first time in his five-decade career, this monograph collection will take you behind-the-scenes into the world of theatrical advertising through a rare look at 40 unpublished poster sketches for some of Broadway's favorite shows, hilarious career anecdotes, and commentary from theatre icons, including Bernadette Peters, Dean Pitchford, and Jack Viertel. More than 20 of Fraver's poster designs for the works of Stephen Sondheim are spotlighted, as well as those created for Rodgers & Hammerstein, The Kennedy Center, and New York City Center's Encores! series. This is the perfect collection for students and fans of the theatre, graphic design and advertising, and the arts in general.

Sweeney Todd, the gruesome tale of a murderous barber and his pastry chef accomplice, is unquestionably strange subject matter for the musical theatre - but eight Tony awards and enormous successes on Broadway and the West End testify to its enduring popularity with audiences. Written by Hugh Wheeler, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the musical premiered in 1979 and has seen numerous revivals, including Tim Burton's 2007 film version. Aaron C. Thomas addresses this darkly funny piece with fitting humour, taking on Sweeney Todd's chequered history and genre, its treatment of violence and cannibalism, and its sexual politics.

From his early work as lyricist for West Side Story to acclaimed creations such as A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park with George, and Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim is widely regarded as the most important figure in musical theater since the second half of the 20th century. Who better to discuss this prolific artist's work than the master himself? Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions is a collection of interviews conducted by Mark Eden Horowitz, senior music specialist in the music division of the Library of Congress. In these guided conversations, Sondheim expounds in great depth and detail on his craft. As a natural teacher, thoughtful and opinionated, Sondheim discusses the art of musical composition, lyric writing, the collaborative process of musical theater, and how he thinks about his own work. The entire scope of Sondheim's career is covered here, in which Sondheim's greatest works are discussed-from Passion, Assassins, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, and Pacific Overtures to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Merrily We Roll Along, Company, Follies, Anyone Can Whistle, and A Little Night Music. Sondheim even provides thoughts about the film adaptations of his works, such as Sweeney Todd. The book also features an entire chapter on Bounce, the previous incarnation of his latest musical, Road Show. Preserving the essential elements of the previous volumes, this edition includes all of the interviews-verbatim-and features a revised introduction and a postlude with an additional conversation. Finally in paperback, Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions, The Less Is More Edition is a must-have for fans of these creative genius.

In The Ultimate Musical Theatre College Audition Guide, author, acting teacher, and musical theatre program director Amy Rogers offers an honest, no-nonsense guide to the musical theatre audition. Written for high school students and their parents, teachers, and mentors, the book demystifies what can be an overwhelming process with step-by-step explanations of audition checkpoints to answer every student's question, "where do I begin?" Chapters explore degree types, summer programs and intensives, audition coaches, what to sing, what to wear, headshots, how to prepare your monologue, the dance call, the university and program applications, prescreens, on-campus auditions, Unifides, resumes, acceptances/waitlists/rejections, and more. The book also includes advice from over 10 top-tier program directors and faculty, as well as examples from students, parents, and experts currently working on Broadway. Written with compassion, experience, and a love of the industry, Rogers' essential all-in-one guide is guaranteed to prevent surprise throughout the audition process.

Children's Musical / Cast: 10 principals, chorusScenery: Unit set This exuberant, fun packed musical written for a large cast of young people features a glitzy rock 'n' roll score and plenty of action. Unless Joey Nobody and private detective Dirk Manley find Angelo's will in time, bogus heir Deanne la Domme, the glamorous film star, will sell Angelo's New York ice cream parlour to Crazy Flavors. So get out the bobby socks and join Chuck and the gang as they rock in this sizzling hour long musical for schools and youth groups.

This is a unique study of the film musical, a global cinema tradition. The musical is one of cinema's few genuinely international genres but it has never been studied as a global sensation. This book fills this critical gap in film studies as it brings together musicals from 15 nations in order to highlight running themes. Musicals are often studied as part of distinct national traditions that are interpreted as native. However this anthology will dispute previous approaches to reveal the influence of the Hollywood model in musicals from around the world. It includes lists of key resources for additional information. It ends with a coda by Rick Altman, one of the genre's most prominent scholars. It provides case studies that include Great Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Russia, Spain, Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, China, India, Egypt, Turkey. Coverage includes Mambo Girl (1957), Sing As We Go (1934), It's the End of the Song (1930), Downward Slope (1934), The Broadway Melody (1929), The Hole (1997), Joyful Beginning (1955), and, The Heart is Crazy (1997).

Audiences for musical theater are predominantly women, yet the shows onstage are frequently created and produced by men. Onstage, female characters are often victims or sex objects and lack the complexity of their male counterparts. Offstage, women are under-represented among writers, directors, composers and choreographers. While other areas of the arts rally behind gender equality, musical theater seems to demonstrate a disregard for women. If musical theater reflects prevailing attitudes, what does the modern musical tell us about attitudes towards women in America, the UK and Australia? Are women kept out of musical theater by men jealously guarding their territory or is the absence of women a result of commercialization and mechanization of the genre? Based on interviews with women performers, writers, directors, choreographers and executives, this book addresses these questions and offers a female viewpoint on musical theater today.

The romantic, musical dramedy film La La Land is the winner of six Oscars, seven Golden Globes and five BAFTAs. This selection of songs from the Oscar-winning music by Justin Hurwitz, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul has been simplified for easy piano. Features the Oscar-winning song, City of Stars.

In fourteen years of collaboration, composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick wrote seven of Broadway's most beloved and memorable musicals together, most famously Fiddler on the Roof (1964), but also the enduring audience favorite She Loves Me (1963), and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Fiorello (1959). With their charm, humor, and boundless musical invention, their musicals have won eighteen Tony Awards and continue to capture the imaginations of millions around the world.
To Broadway, To Life : The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick is the first complete book about these creative figures, one of Broadway's most important songwriting teams. Drawing from extensive archival sources, and from personal interviews and communications with Bock and Harnick themselves and their most important collaborators, author Philip Lambert explores the essence of a Bock-Harnick show-how it is put together, and what makes it work. The book includes discussion of songs such as "Sunrise, Sunset" and "If I Were a Rich Man" that have long been favorites in the public consciousness, and it also explores a vast catalogue of lesser-known songs from their many other shows and works, including a musical puppet show on Broadway, music for the 1964 World's Fair, and a made-for-television musical. Here too is the first look at the little-known youthful professional beginnings of Bock and Harnick in revues and television shows and summer retreats in the 1950s, and the careers they have forged for themselves with new collaborators in the decades since their partnership dissolved in 1970.
The musicals of Bock and Harnick came at a transitional time in Broadway history, when the traditions of Rodgers and Hammerstein were starting to give way to the concept musical, the rock musical, and eventually the mega-musical. To Broadway, To Life combines exhaustive research, close musical investigation, and interpretive critical analysis to place Bock and Harnick in the context of these times, and helps establish their place in the history of the American musical theater.

Before Fiddler on the Roof, before The Jazz Singer, there was Deborah, a tear-jerking melodrama about a Jewish woman forsaken by her non-Jewish lover. Within a few years of its 1849 debut in Hamburg, the play was seen on stages across Germany and Austria, as well as throughout Europe, the British Empire, and North America. The German-Jewish elite complained that the playwright, Jewish writer S. H. Mosenthal, had written a drama bearing little authentic Jewish content, while literary critics protested that the play lacked the formal coherence of great tragedy. Yet despite its lackluster critical reception, Deborah became a blockbuster, giving millions of theatergoers the pleasures of sympathizing with an exotic Jewish woman. It spawned adaptations with titles from Leah, the Forsaken to Naomi, the Deserted, burlesques, poems, operas in Italian and Czech, musical selections for voice and piano, a British novel fraudulently marketed in the United States as the original basis for the play, three American silent films, and thousands of souvenir photographs of leading actresses from Adelaide Ristori to Sarah Bernhardt in character as Mosenthal's forsaken Jewess. For a sixty-year period, Deborah and its many offshoots provided audiences with the ultimate feel-good experience of tearful sympathy and liberal universalism. With Deborah and Her Sisters, Jonathan M. Hess offers the first comprehensive history of this transnational phenomenon, focusing on its unique ability to bring Jews and non-Jews together during a period of increasing antisemitism. Paying careful attention to local performances and the dynamics of transnational exchange, Hess asks that we take seriously the feelings this commercially successful drama provoked as it drove its diverse audiences to tears. Following a vast paper trail in theater archives and in the press, Deborah and Her Sisters reconstructs the allure that Jewishness held in nineteenth-century popular culture and explores how the Deborah sensation generated a liberal culture of compassion with Jewish suffering that extended beyond the theater walls.

The 1950s saw an explosion in the American musical theater. The Broadway show, catapulted into the limelight in the 20s and solidified during the 40s thanks to Rodgers and Hammerstein, now entered its most revolutionary phase, brashly redefining itself and forging a new kind of storytelling. In Coming Up Roses: The Broadway Musical in the 1950s, Ethan Mordden gives us a guided tour of this rich decade.
With loving detail, Mordden highlights the shift in Broadway from shows that were mere star vehicles, showcasing a big-name talent, to the bolder stories, stuffed with character and atmosphere. During this period, subject matter became more intricate, even controversial, and plots more human and complex; Mordden demonstrates how, in response, musical conventions were polished, writing became more finely crafted, and dance became truly indispensable. Along the way we meet the key players: such greats as Ethel Merman, George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, Gwen Verdon, Bob Fosse, Stephen Sondheim, Frank Loesser, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, and many others. We get the backstage scoop on why Guys and Dolls is so well-made, why West Side Story is so timeless, why The King and I and Gypsy pushed the envelope, and why no one ever talks about Ankles Aweigh. All this is peppered with a dash of industry gossip--the directorial struggles, last-minute script rewrites and cast replacements, the power of the poster listings--that made Broadway so nerve-wrackingly vibrant.
This passionate and informed study illuminates a crucial period in American musical theater and shows us the origins of many of the musicals recently revived to huge success on Broadway.

An outrageously fun musical set in an all-girls school in the 60s, from the team behind Bad Girls: The Musical. It's 1963 and the Dame Dorothea Dosserdale School for Girls has a proud tradition of fostering free spirits from all walks of life. So it's a crushing blow when the new headmistress turns out to be a tyrant with strict Victorian values - and top of her hit list are the two sixth-formers accused of 'Unnatural Behaviour' in the Art Room... Brimming with catchy tunes and witty lyrics, Crush is a hilarious pastiche of Girls' School stories - a blend of Malory Towers and St Trinian's - with added hockey sticks and 'lashings of jolly good fun' Coventry Telegraph. Crush was first performed on tour in the UK in 2015.