Fifty Key Stage Musicals

by Robert W. Schneider (editor), Shannon Agnew (Editor)

This volume in the Routledge Key Guides series provides a round-up of the fifty musicals whose creations were seminal in altering the landscape of musical theater discourse in the English-speaking world.

Each entry summarises a show, including a full synopsis, discussion of the creators' process, show's critical reception, and its impact on the landscape of musical theater.

This is the ideal primer for students of musical theater – its performance, history, and place in the modern theatrical world – as well as fans and lovers of musicals.

307 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 30, 2022

Reviews

[Honor Farley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and readable as it’s in short chapters for each musical. The chronological layout makes it easy to see the development of musical theatre over time, and each essay is clearly extremely well-researched and goes in-depth into one aspect of how each show has affected subsequent musicals.
Only dropped a star for the editing, which was not perfect (missed full-stops, apostrophes etc) but didn’t affect the readability of the book.
I will definitely be hanging on to this one for future reference!

[Donna Lowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think I've ever read a book with such solid--and well-organized--content that was so poorly edited at the sentence level. Does Routledge not have the budget for copy editors and proofreaders? Or do they just not prioritize such things? Aaaannyway, this is otherwise a very comprehensive overview of musical theatre history in a compact form, but..reader beware: there are a lot of errors that should have been corrected.

[Shawn Deal · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good history of 50 Broadway musicals plus a history of the evolution of the Broadway musical.