Description
Book SynopsisFrom
West Side Story in 1957 to
Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Sondheim''s brilliant array of work, including such musicals as
Company,
Follies,
Sweeney Todd,
Sunday in the Park with George, and
Into the Woods, has established him as the preeminent composer/lyricist of his, if not all, time.
Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim''s work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that, by the 1960s, deeply influenced all the American arts. Sondheim''s musicals are central to the transition from the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical. This new style reclaimed many of the self-aware, perfo
