"Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical? In [this book], Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, marvels at their unflagging inventiveness, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he invites us to fall in love all over again by showing us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate...

"Our Musicals, Ourselves is the first full-scale social history of the American musical theatre from the imported Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas of the late nineteenth century to such recent musicals as The Producers and Urinetown. While many aficionados of the Broadway musical associate the genre only with diversionary shows like The Music Man or My Fair Lady, John Bush Jones singles out musicals for their social relevance. He is interested in...

"A carefully curated, cheerfully opinionated guidebook surveying 201 of the most significant selections from the Great American Songbook, ranging from celebrated masterpieces to forgotten gems"--

Since it first opened on Broadway in September, 1964, Fiddler on the Roof has constantly been onstage somewhere, including four Broadway revivals, four productions on London's West End and thousands of schools, army bases and countries from Argentina to Japan. Barbara Isenberg interviewed the men and women behind the original production, the film and significant revivals-- Harold Prince, Sheldon Harnick, Joseph Stein, Austin Pendleton, Joanna Merlin,...

"In 1975, the Broadway musical Chicago brought together a host of memes and myths-- the gleefully subversive character of American musical comedy, the reckless glamour of the big-city newspaper, the mad decade of the 1920s, the work of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon (two of the greatest talents in the musical's history), and the Wild West gangsterville that was the city of Chicago itself. The tale of a young woman who murders her departing lover and then...