where I introduced the subject into the curriculum about six
years ago, I ask the students not to wonder if the musical is up
to the standards of the university but if the standards of the
university are up to dealing with the musical. Can we bring
our ways of academic thinking to bear on this form of Ameri-
can drama? Can we talk aesthetically about musicals? The
challenge is not to the musicals, which are staged across the
country—in commercial theatres, in high school theatres, in
dinner theatres, and on street corners (I have seen parts of My
Fair Ladyon a street corner)—without any help from univer-
sity teachers and students. The musical does not need the uni-
versity, but it may well be that the university needs the musical,
as a valid subject of academic study. There is a challenge in-
volved, and it is offered to the universities: are we in universi-
ties able to use our methods of analysis—historical, musical,
literary, philosophical—and still get this form of popular en-
tertainment right?
In answering this question, I am first concerned to describe
the continuity of the musical’s aesthetic form across its history,
from the shows of the 1920s and 1930s, which themselves were
based on conventions reaching back to the later nineteenth
century, to the shows that seem most vivid in the musical the-
atre today. I am not writing a history of the genre, and I have
omitted many examples that would have to be included in a
historical survey. Still, there is a historical trajectory underpin-
ning the argument, according to which Oklahoma!was not a
revolution in the musical so much as an extension of the musi-
cal’s range and later shows such as West Side Storyand Cabaret
and A Chorus Linerepresent further extensions of the capabili-
ties of the form. This is how the historical silhouette appears
when one thinks about the aesthetics of the genre. However, I
am not writing a history, nor am I erecting a taxonomy of the
form. There are types and subtypes of the musical’s broader
conventions, but I am trying to describe those broader conven-
tions themselves, briefly, perhaps readably, and without ency-
clopedic hopes.
I have tried to keep the focus on a small number of musicals,
to which I keep returning as different aspects of the genre
PREFACE xi