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.
Keywords:
Stephen Sondheim,
musicals,
Broadway,
musical theater,
intertextuality,
songs,
cinema,
television,
pastiche,
parody
Bibliographic Information
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Print Publication Date:
- Jun 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780195391374
- Published online:
- Jun 2014
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195391374.001.0001
Editor
Robert Gordon,
editor
Robert Gordon is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Director of the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Publications include essays on post-war British theatre, South African theatre, Shakespeare, Wilde, Pirandello and Stoppard: Text and Performance (1991). His broad experience as actor and director informs the survey of modern acting theory in The Purpose of Playing (2006). Harold Pinter: the Theatre of Power was published in 2012 and his production, Pinter: In Other Rooms, toured to Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Thessaloniki in 2011. In 2012 he directed Kander and Ebb’s Steel Pier in Brno and he is co-editing the Oxford Handbook of the British Musical.
