From 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. Sondheimrsquo;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 Sondheimrsquo;s work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that; by the 1960s; deeply influenced all the American arts. Sondheimrsquo;s musicals are central to the transition from the Rodgers and Hammersteinndash;style musical that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical. This new style reclaimed many of the self-aware; performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge and the fragmentation of identity. In his most recent work; Sondheim; who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II; stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language.Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheimrsquo;s musicals and finds in them critiques of the operation of power; questioning of conventional systems of knowledge; and explorations of contemporary identity.
2015-12-14 2015-12-14File Name: B01J910DRA
Review
