Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals

by Scott Miller

Scott Miller once again shares his passion for and knowledge of musical theater in this endlessly entertaining and informative look at how musicals have both reflected and adapted to America's changing mores. Specifically, Miller casts his eye on the triumvirate of postwar social sex, drugs, and rock & roll.

Eager to respond to the concerns and tastes of the increasingly influential baby-boomer generation, musical theater in the late Sixties began to embrace formerly taboo subjects. Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals shows how American culture has changed over the twentieth century, from the Roaring Twenties (The Wild Party) to the cultural chaos of the Fifties (Grease) and the sexual revolution of the Sixties (Hair) and Seventies (Rocky Horror), to the rebirth of the art form in the Nineties (Bat Boy), and up to the present, exploring where we've been and where we might be heading. This is a celebration of the counter-culture taking center stage in the most American of performing arts, and changing it forever.

Shows discussed in the book include The Wild Party, Grease, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Rocky Horror Show, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, I Love My Wife, Bat Boy, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, High Fidelity, The Capeman, bare, Taboo, Jersey Boys, Next to Normal, Edges, Spring Awakening, Passing Strange, Love Kills, Glory Days, Rooms, American Idiot, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson . 
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Genres: History, Nonfiction, Music

296 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2002

About the author

Scott Miller is the founder and artistic director of New Line Theatre, an alternative musical theatre company he established in 1991 in St. Louis, at the vanguard of a new wave of nonprofit musical theatre being born across the country during the early 1990s, offering an alternative to the commercial musical theatre of New York and Broadway tours. He has been working in musical theatre since 1978 and has been directing musicals since 1981. He has written the book, music, and lyrics for ten musicals and two plays. His play Head Games has enjoyed runs in St. Louis, Los Angeles, London, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland; and his musical, Johnny Appleweed, was nominated for four Kevin Kline Awards. He has written more than a dozen books about musical theatre, including The ABCs of Broadway Musicals series. He has also written chapters for several other collections of musical theatre essays, and pieces for several national theatre magazines and websites, and he has composed music for television and radio. For fifteen years, he co-hosted "Break a Leg - Theatre in St. Louis and Beyond," a weekly theatre talk show on KDHX-FM in St. Louis, and now he hosts the theatre podcast Stage Grok, available on iTunes. Miller holds a degree in music and musical theatre from Harvard University, and in 2014, the St. Louis Theater Circle awarded Miller a special award for his body of work in the musical theatre.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Miller's book charts the incorporation of rock (and pop and its variants) music, and less conventional or taboo subject matter in the American musical theater. Using several important case studies, he ties these trends to their larger cultural context. It's a fairly quick read, and Miller's analysis of the shows he selects is often interesting, if sometimes a bit repetitive. He sometimes seems a bit dismissive of musicals of the "Rodgers and Hammerstein era," as he calls it, in his attempt to validate more contemporary musical theater experiments. I've never understood why we have to claim one era as superior to another; all are equally important to our understanding of musical theater as an art and an industry. A bit more historical or industrial context would have given the book a bit more heft. Still, I was left more informed about shows that I had seen and quite intrigued about those I had not.

[Baillie]

I'm not *done* with this, but I've got my necessary research from it. Will return to at a later date.