Table of Contents

Introduction Chapter 1 The Birth of (the Popular Culture of) a Nation: Stage Entertainment in a New Land Chapter 2 The Civil War Era to the Gilded Age Chapter 3 The Early 20th Century Chapter 4 The Great Depression to World War II Chapter 5 World War II to 1960 Chapter 6 We’ve Surely Got Trouble: The 1960s and 1970s Chapter 7 The Megamusical to Hamilton Chapter 8 Other Angles: Different Approaches to the American Stage Musical Putting It Together: A Step-By-Step Look At Musicals from the Page to the Stage, by Robert Meffe (San Diego State University, USA) Making Musicals for Serious Pleasure, by Stacy Wolf (Princeton Univesity, USA) Off Off Off Off Broadway: Musicals and the Regional Theater, by Laura MacDonald (University of Portsmouth, UK) Today, Broadway; Tomorrow, the World: The “American” Musical and Globalization, by Jessica Sternfeld (Chapman University, USA) Ways of Knowing: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studying the Stage Musical, by Elizabeth Titrington Craft (Harvard University, USA) and Joanna Dee Das (Williams College, USA) Notes Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

Promotional Information

A comprehensive introduction to the American stage musical from the early 20th century to the present, with a focus on key periods of cultural change.

About the Author

Elizabeth L. Wollman is Associate Professor of Music at Baruch College, City University of New York, in New York City, USA.

Reviews

Elizabeth L. Wollman manages to create subject of many academic dreams: a scholarly text with mass-market appeal. Meticulously researched and bristling with citations, A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical has the dual feature of potentially being heavily cited at MATC or ATHE, while simultaneously being quoted by Jennifer Ashley Tepper at BroadwayCon or on Twitter. The book's greatest strength is its tone, which is key to the book's dual marketability as a classroom text or a theatre lover's enrichment reading.
*New England Theatre Journal*

Particularly useful for those just embarking on study of theater, A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical takes a fresh look at the Broadway musical, a unique art form … This book is meant as further illumination of the numerous extant works on musical theater history. In the last of the eight sections, "Critical Perspectives," Wollman offers five essays, written by contemporary scholars, that shed further light on the forces behind commercial musical theater, thus providing the reader with additional voices and opinions about the development she outlines in the main body of the text. The detailed notes, index, and bibliography offer further opportunity for researchers to connect with a greater body of writing. This compact book provides a vast wealth of information. Summing Up: Highly recommended.
*CHOICE*

Wollman offers a substantial historiography of the musical, in the context of the form as a commercial industry, in this recent addition to Bloomsbury's excellent 'Critical Companion' series ... The volume comprises a substantial monograph section, with several valuable contributions by figures such as Stacey Wolf, who offers an important consideration of amateur musical theatre.
*New Theatre Quarterly*