PREFACE

A

NUMBER of writers on the theatre and its history have
come to think of the Broadway musical as one of the
most important forms of American drama we have,
and my aim in this book is to put that belief into concrete
terms by discussing the principles and conventions that lie be-
hind the best-known shows. There are good books on the ma-
jor Broadway composers and lyricists; of these, two books
on Sondheim, Stephen Banfield’s Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals
(1993) and Steve Swagne’s How Sondheim Found His Sound
(2005), strike me as the clearest sign that serious work is now
being done on a form of theatre that was once passed off as
trivial entertainment. Raymond Knapp’s The American Musical
and the Formation of National Identity(2004) effectively places
the musical in a context of American social and cultural his-
tory. Methods of musical analysis have been brought to bear
on the genre, with Joseph Swain’s shrewd book of this kind
now in its second edition (The Broadway Musical, 2002). Geof-
frey Block, whose study of major musicals (Enchanted Evenings,
1997) shows how such archives as the Performing Arts Library
at Lincoln Center and the Music Division of the Library of
Congress can be put to critical uses, has launched a series of
volumes on individual composers. Ethan Mordden’s decade-
by-decade account of Broadway shows is essential reading for
anyone interested in the American theatre, and the amount of
sheer chronicle detail that has been searched out and published
in works such as Richard C. Norton’s three-volume Chronology
of American Musical Theater(2002) and Gerald Bordman’s The
American Musical Theatre(3rd ed., 2001) is scholarly testimony
to the value now being placed on this form of theatre.
I mention only some of the recent good books that are
available if one wants to get a grasp on the musical. But I am
not aware of a book that brings the musical before us as an
aesthetic entity, a genre of drama with definable conventions