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Andrew Lloyd Webber is the most famous—and most controversial—composer of musical theater alive today. Hundreds of millions of people have seen his musicals, which include Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Starlight Express, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and Sunset Boulevard. Even more know his songs.Lloyd Webber’s many awards include seven Tonys and three Grammys—but he has nonetheless been the subject of greater critical vitriol than any of his artistic peers. Why have both the man and his work provoked such extreme responses? Does he challenge his audiences, or merely recycle the comfortable and familiar? Over three decades, how has Lloyd Webber changed fundamentally what a musical can be?In this sustained examination of Lloyd Webber’s creative career, the music scholar John Snelson explores the vast range of influences that have informed Lloyd Webber’s work, from film, rock, and pop music to Lloyd Webber’s own life story. This rigorous and sympathetic survey will be essential reading for anyone interested in Lloyd Webber’s musicals and the world of modern musical theater that he has been so instrumental in shaping.

In this welcome addition to the immensely popular Yale Broadway Masters series, Larry Starr focuses fresh attention on George Gershwins Broadway contributions and examines their centrality to the composers entire career. Starr presents Gershwin as a composer with a unified musical visiona vision developed on Broadway and used as a source of strength in his well-known concert music. In turn, Gershwins concert-hall experience enriched and strengthened his musicals, leading eventually to his great Broadway opera, Porgy and Bess. Through the prism of three major showsLady Be Good (1924), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and Porgy and Bess (1935)Starr highlights Gershwins distinctive contributions to the evolution of the Broadway musical. In addition, the author considers Gershwins musical language, his compositions for the concert hall, and his movie scores for Hollywood in the light of his Broadway experience.

Richard Rodgers was an icon of the musical theater, a prolific composer whose career spanned six decades and who wrote more than a thousand songs and forty shows for the American stage. In this absorbing book, Geoffrey Block examines Rodgers’s entire career, providing rich details about the creation, staging, and critical reception of some of his most popular musicals.Block traces Rodgers’s musical education, early work, and the development of his musical and dramatic language. He focuses on two shows by Rodgers and Hart (A Connecticut Yankee and The Boys from Syracuse) and two by Rodgers and Hammerstein (South Pacific and Cinderella), offering new insights into each one. He concludes with the first serious look at the five neglected and often maligned musicals that Rodgers composed in the 1960s and 1970s, after the death of Hammerstein.