For decades, British stage musicals struggled to compete against the dazzling Broadway productions that came roaring in from across the pond. But that tide was turned at last in 1978, when Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s production of Evita brought the West End back into contention with Broadway. It was just the first of several blockbuster productionsthat helped Britain dominate musical theater all over the world. In this revealing behind-the-scenes narrative, journalist and author Robert Sellers gives a definitive account of how Evita, Cats, Starlight Express, Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera, Chess, and Miss Saigon changed the business of musical theater in the 1980s. These mega productions of the were larger than life, colorful, and spectacular. Sellers collects insightful, personal stories from cast members, set designers, musical supervisors, dancers, lighting designers, production managers, singers, and choreographers from the shows that finally put Broadway on its back foot. He also describes the backstage drama, production nightmares, and financial woes that threatened to derail the shows at multiple points. Whatever obstacles they faced, though, these productions swept the world and transformed the face of musical theater in ways that still resound today.

An expanded and updated edition of this acclaimed, wide-ranging survey of musical theatre in New York, London, and elsewhere.

This book examines the performance of ‘Britishness’ on the musical stage. Covering a tumultuous period in British history, it offers a fresh look at the vitality and centrality of the musical stage, as a global phenomenon in late-Victorian popular culture and beyond. Through a re-examination of over fifty archival play-scripts, the book comprises seven interconnected stories told in two parts. Part One focuses on domestic and personal identities of ‘Britishness’, and how implicit anxieties and contradictions of nationhood, class and gender were staged as part of the popular cultural condition. Broadening in scope, Part Two offers a revisionary reading of Empire and Otherness on the musical stage, and concludes with a consideration of the Great War and the interwar period, as musical theatre performed a nostalgia for a particular kind of ‘Britishness’, reflecting the anxieties of a nation in decline.

Imaginative analytical and critical work on British music of the early twentieth century has been hindered by perceptions of the repertory as insular in its references and backward in its style and syntax, escaping the modernity that surrounded its composers. Recent research has begun to break down these perceptions and has found intriguing links between British music and modernism. This book brings together contributions from scholars working in analysis, hermeneutics, reception history, critical theory and the history of ideas. Three overall themes emerge from its chapters: accounts of British reactions to Continental modernism and the forms they took; links between music and the visual arts; and analysis and interpretation of compositions in the light of recent theoretical work on form, tonality and pitch organization

The 1990s work of six British composers forms the focus of this collection of essays, arising from a conference that took place at University of Surrey Roehampton in February 1999. The composers whose music is discussed are James Dillon, Thomas Ad Harrison Birtwistle, Jonathan Harvey, Edwin Roxburgh and Sebastian Forbes. Reflecting the aims of the conference, this volume brings together composers and musicologists to discuss significant works from the last decade of the twentieth century, and also some of the wider issues surrounding British music. Arnold Whittall and Julian Johnson provide perspectives on the plurality of contemporary British music. Edwin Roxburgh offers a personal account of 'The Artists' Dilemma', whilst the essays that follow explore aspects of musical form and structure in a variety of works. The second half of the book comprises interviews with most of the composers whose music is discussed in Part I, adding a further dimension to our understanding of the preoccupations of British composition at the end of the twentieth century.

The first study of the global dimensions of musical modernism and its transnational diasporic network of composers, musicians, and institutions.

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical provides a comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre offering both a historical account of the musical's development from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of the unique forms and features of British musicals, which explore the aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings of a tradition that initially gave rise to the American musical and later challenged its modern pre-eminence. After a consideration of how John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) created a prototype for eighteenth-century ballad opera, the book focuses on the use of song in early nineteenth century theatre, followed by a sociocultural analysis of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; it then examines Edwardian and interwar musical comedies and revues as well as the impact of Rodgers and Hammerstein on the West End, before analysing the new forms of the postwar British musical from The Boy Friend (1953) to Oliver! (1960). One section of the book examines the contributions of key twentieth century figures including Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Joan Littlewood and producer Cameron Macintosh, while a number of essays discuss both mainstream and alternative musicals of the 1960s and 1970s and the influence of the pop industry on the creation of concept recordings such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Les Misérables (1980). There is a consideration of "jukebox" musicals such as Mamma Mia! (1999), while essays on overtly political shows such as Billy Elliot (2005) are complemented by those on experimental musicals like Jerry Springer: the Opera (2003) and London Road (2011) and on the burgeoning of Black and Asian British musicals in both the West End and subsidized venues. The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical demonstrates not only the unique qualities of British musical theatre but also the vitality and variety of British musicals today.

The first in-depth historical analysis of British art music post-1945, providing a group-portrait of eleven composers ranging from avant-garde to pop.

This book is not an encyclopaedia of the British musical in the twentieth century, but an examination of its progress as it struggled to find an identity. It shows how the British musical has reacted to social and cultural forces, suggesting that some of its leading composers such as Lionel Bart and Julian Slade contributed much more to the genre than has previously been acknowledged. As the British musical veered between opera, light opera, operetta, spectacle with music, kitchen-sink musical, recherché musical, adaptations of classic novels, socially conscious musicals et al., this fresh assessment of the writers and their work offers a new understanding of the art -- publisher description.

A radically urgent intervention, An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre: 1900 - 1950 uncovers the hidden Black history of this most influential of artforms. Drawing on lost archive material and digitised newspapers from the turn of the century onwards, this exciting story has been re-traced and restored to its rightful place. A vital and significant part of British cultural history between 1900 and 1950, Black performance practice was fundamental to resisting and challenging racism in the UK. Join Mayes (a Broadway- and Toronto-based Music Director) and Whitfield (a musical theatre historian and researcher) as they take readers on a journey through a historically-inconvenient and brilliant reality that has long been overlooked. Get to know the Black theatre community in London's Roaring 20s, and hear about the secret Florence Mills memorial concert they held in 1928. Acquaint yourself with Buddy Bradley, Black tap and ballet choreographer, who reshaped dance in British musicals - often to be found at Noël Coward's apartment for late-night rehearsals, such was Bradley's importance. Meet Jack Johnson, the first African American Heavyweight Boxing Champion, who toured Britain's theatres during World War 1 and brought the sounds of Chicago to places like war-weary Dundee. Discover the most prolific Black theatre practitioner you've never heard of, William Garland, who worked for 40 years across multiple continents and championed Black British performers. Marvel at performers like cabaret star Mabel Mercer, born in Stafford in 1900, who sang and conducted theatre orchestras across the UK, as well as Black Birmingham comedian Eddie Emerson, who was Garland's partner for decades. Many of their names and works have never been included in histories of the British musical - until now.