The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary American Stage Musical

The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary American Stage Musical is dedicated to the stage musical’s changing, evolving relationship to American culture in the very late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. In the past decade-and-a-half, international scholars from an ever-widening number of disciplines and specializations have been actively contributing to the burgeoning, consciously interdisciplinary field of musical theater studies. American musicals have served to mirror the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural tenor of the times—not just reflecting culture, they have helped shape and influence it. A genre that may seem, at first glance, to be light-hearted and escapist serves also as a bold commentary on society.

Forty-five essays examine the American stage musical as an ever-shifting product of an ever-changing culture, and collectively shed new light on the American musical as a thriving, contemporary performing arts genre that could have died out in the post-Tin Pan Alley era, but instead has managed to remain culturally viable and influential, in part by newly embracing a series of complex contradictions. At present, the American stage musical is a live, localized, old-fashioned genre that has simultaneously developed into an increasingly globalized, tech-savvy, intensely mediated mass entertainment form. Similarly, as it has become increasingly international in its scope and appeal, the stage musical has also become more firmly rooted to Broadway—the idea, if not the place—and thus branded as a quintessentially American entertainment.