ABSTRACT
While Peter Brook sought a universal theatrical language 'which touches people as music does', it could have been argued that he was trying to re-invent the wheel, for the most popular genre world-wide was the musical, as it had been for decades. In the Soviet Union, about a third of the 625 main subsidised theatres were operetta houses. The critics ignored them, the seat prices were high because the subsidising authorities thought them less worthy of grants and there were fewer block bookings from the trade unions; but the operetta houses were usually packed. Of the six musicals on which Stephen Sondheim and the director Harold Prince closely collaborated, three were set in the past, one morosely in the present and two poised half-way between past and present. None was cheerful, upbeat musicals in the Broadway tradition, but warily witty, angst-ridden and clever.
