ABSTRACT
Rock music has always had an uneasy relationship with theAmerican musical theater. Although the critical and commer-cial impact of the 1968 Broadway production of Hair led many members of the theater industry to believe that rock would revolutionize the American musical, there have since been few successful rock musicals staged. Over the last thirty years, Broadway and Off-Broadway have been littered with flops, the creators of which attempted to blend the performance aesthetics of rock with those of the American musical. For every critically and commercially successful attempt at this combination-Hair, for example, or Rent-there have been so many highly publicized, costly failures that most theater industry members view a successful rock musical as a contradiction in terms.
