Product Description

"Musical Theatre" is a comprehensive history of stage musicals from Paris during the 1840s, all the way up to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Broadway as it we know it today."Musicals are dead!" From producers to actors to ushers, everyone has said it. Times have changed in the musical theatre. But why should this be considered a harbinger of death? Like film and television, literature and music, the musical theatre has been changing and evolving since its inception.Musicals have been around for more than 2000 years. This book begins with the ancient Greeks, for whom songs were a common element in staging. The Romans borrowed many of the classical forms and added visual spectacle. The musical as we know it was born!The musical theatre we know today first appeared in Paris during the 1840s. It was then a short step to the minstrel shows of the US, Gilbert and Sullivan in the UK and eventually to George M. Cohan, Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein and Andrew Lloyd Webber. The 21st century has brought a new wave of pop comedies like The Rich in anecdotes of shows and show people, "Musicals Theatre: A History" is designed as a celebration for those in the theatre as well as all Broadway and West End fans.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115426 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 408 pages

About the Author
A native New Yorker and life-long fan of the Musical, John Kenrick is in great demand as an expert on the subject. His Web site www.musicals101.com gets more than 150,000 hits a month.

Customer Reviews

A Real Kick-Line of a Book
This one is a must for Musical Theatre buffs and students. There are plenty of useful details about the history, background and biography of writers, composers and stars, and all those little bits of gossip that just help things along.

The book has the snowball effect as well: the further you get into it, the less you want to put it down and the more you want to know.

John Kenrick has a pleasant style, fairly easy to read in spite of the fact that things occasionally get pretty complicated. The book is about how it all happened, and how it keeps changing. It is for people who like their history fairly neat; it's not the book for those who want to discuss theatrical interpretation or a discussion of stars' playing style.

For the British it is lacking in detail from our perspective, though that would be better remedied by a British expert writing their own history of Musical Theatre. Some of Kenrick's remarks do come across as parochial, or even resentful of British style from the 80s, which is rather disappointing as the rest of the book is so well-balanced. You can't have everything.