ABSTRACT

From the favorites of Tin Pan Alley to today’s international blockbusters, the stylistic range required of a musical theatre performer is expansive.

Musical theatre roles require the ability to adapt to a panoply of characters and vocal styles. By breaking down these styles and exploring the output of the great composers, Songwriters of the American Musical Theatre offers singers and performers an essential guide to the modern musical. Composers from Gilbert and Sullivan and Irving Berlin to Alain Boublil and Andrew Lloyd Webber are examined through a brief biography, a stylistic overview, and a comprehensive song list with notes on suitable voice types and further reading.

This volume runs the gamut of modern musical theatre, from English light opera through the American Golden Age, up to the "mega musicals" of the late Twentieth Century, giving today’s students and performers an indispensable survey of their craft.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

chapter |38 pages

Chapter 1Light opera

Jacques Offenbach, Johann Strauss II, W.S. Gilbert, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Franz Lehár, Victor Herbert, Rudolf Friml, and Sigmund Romberg

chapter |16 pages

Chapter 2Popular musical theatre songs of the early 1900s

George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern

chapter |26 pages

Chapter 3The great songwriters of Tin Pan Alley

Harry Warren, Jimmy McHugh, Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Arthur Schwartz, Howard Dietz, and Harold Arlen

chapter |25 pages

Chapter 4The great wits and sophisticates

Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart, E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, Johnny Mercer, Dorothy Fields and Vernon Duke

chapter |20 pages

Chapter 5The great jazz composers

Eubie Blake, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, and Fats Waller, and the great jazz singers

chapter |35 pages

Chapter 6The Golden Age – the integrated musical

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Alan Jay Lerner and Fredrick Loewe, Frank Loesser, Kurt Weill, Burton Lane, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and Jule Styne

chapter |31 pages

Chapter 7The culmination of the Golden Age of the American musical

Jerry Herman, Charles Strouse, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Cy Coleman, and John Kander and Fred Ebb

chapter |19 pages

Chapter 8Sui generis

Stephen Sondheim

chapter |26 pages

Chapter 9New sounds – the 1970s

Galt MacDermot, Stephen Schwartz, Marvin Hamlisch, Maury Yeston, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, Richard Maltby Jr and David Shire, and William Finn

chapter |22 pages

Chapter 10The mega-musical

Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil

chapter |36 pages

Chapter 11Musicals of the 1990s and 2000s – the new eclecticism

Elton John, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, Ricky Ian Gordon, Frank Wildhorn, Jonathan Larson, Jason Robert Brown, Jeanine Tesori, Michael John LaChiusa, Andrew Lippa, Adam Guettel and Tom Kitt

chapter |7 pages

Chapter 12Other popular styles

The jukebox musicals