The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies

Abstract

This book examines the scope and ambition of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals by drawing on the perspectives of musicological and dramaturgical scholars, literary and film critics, and musical theater practitioners. Consisting of twenty-seven essays, it analyzes Sondheim’s radical re-invention of the artistic form of the Broadway musical in response to various traditions of artistic innovation and popular entertainment and how his work with several collaborators has radically transformed the history of American musical theatre. It explores problematic questions of authorship peculiar to the cultural milieu of Broadway musical theater by focusing on intertextuality in works ranging from Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth (1970) to the film Hangover Square (1945) and Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion. It also probes the dramaturgical technique of songs that enable comic performers to act out the logic of character and plot in a meta-theatrical style and discusses the notion of the musical as a performance event, patterns of interpretation in the repeated performance of Sondheim’s musicals in the United Kingdom, the pleasures and challenges of performing these musicals in international opera houses, Sondheim’s work for cinema and television and his “cinematic” approach to musical theater, and his subtle and often ironic exploitation of genre conventions such as pastiche and parody. Finally, the book considers questions of cultural, political, and personal identity raised by Sondheim’s musicals in relation to contemporary American society.