come under discussion. I have picked broadly known musicals
in order to avoid spending time on plot summaries and other
general introductory information. I keep coming back to Show
Boat, Lady in the Dark,Oklahoma!,Carousel, Guys and Dolls,
My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Cabaret, A Chorus Line, Phantom
of the Opera, Follies, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd. Other
shows are discussed here and there—Sally has a few para-
graphs, as do On Your Toes, Boys from Syracuse, and Gypsy—but
the argument is consistently grounded in the group of major
musicals just listed. A Chorus Linethreads its way into one
chapter after another as the book progresses; I find it one of the
defining examples of the musical. Stephen Sondheim, Richard
Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein II are the writers mentioned
most frequently—Rodgers and Hammerstein in the earlier
chapters, Sondheim in the later ones. The final chapter dwells
especially on Sondheim because his musicals tend to reflect on
their own means of production, a habit of thought he learned
from Hammerstein. Sondheim writes musicals that are about
musicals even when they are also about something else. There
is such an instinct for musical theatre in his work that his
shows reflect on their own conventions and become commen-
taries on the aesthetics of the form. I cannot stay away from a
Sondheim show if it is at all within reach, and the reason is that
Sondheim makes me think about what I am doing when I am
there, at his show. He is not the only writer who does that, but
he does it consistently, and he learned to do it from immersion
in the history of the genre, where Rodgers and Hammerstein
are the most important figures.
It is only shorthand that lets us talk of “a Sondheim show”
or “a Rodgers and Hammerstein show.” Many other individu-
als leave their visible imprint on a show as we know it. As just
one example, Folliesshould be identified as by Stephen Sond-
heim and James Goldman, directed by Hal Prince and Michael
Bennett, with choreography by Michael Bennett, scene design
by Boris Aronson, orchestration by Jonathan Tunick, and so
on. I call it a Sondheim show anyway, to save space, but here,
at the beginning, I would like to list some members of the cre-
ative team behind each of the frequently mentioned titles,
xii PREFACE