Barred from many employments, Jewish artists entered the music industry and produced a twentieth-century canon of Tin Pan Alley hits, show tunes, and jazz standards combining light opera, sophistication, and Black music. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical Show Boat (1936) set a new paradigm: its “Ol’ Man River” blends minstrelsy, classical music, and spirituals. George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928) fused European influences with blues, foxtrot, ragtime, and jazz. His “I Got Rhythm” (1930) is among history’s most influential jazz compositions, and his jazz opera Porgy and Bess (1935) boldly depicts Black experience. Gershwin’s union of lowbrow-highbrow, Jewish and African American music created a radical multicultural art. Although recent scholars accuse Gershwin, Kern, and others of cultural exploitation, many Black jazz artists embraced their music. Even Duke Ellington, who denounced Porgy and Bess, eventually recorded it and imitated Gershwin’s chord progressions and rhythms.

Although musical theatre originally mixed theatrical and musical styles and genres – from minstrel shows and burlesque to ballet and opera – it only developed a cohesive form that told a story through speech, song, and dance in the 1920s. Musicals quickly became America’s most popular theatrical entertainment. They continued to evolve, even incorporating social topics and aesthetic elements emerging more organically as part of the story. Many recent hits have been jukebox musicals (relying on hit pop songs) and film-to-stage adaptations. There is a commercial rationale for this proliferation: whether it is name recognition of the sources or nostalgia for their original releases, they help box office success. Recently, even Disney has made repurposing its movie catalog into musicals a continuous, profitable operation. Musicals have also become a vehicle for satire and parody, resulting in memorable television and YouTube musical sketches. Broadway’s engagement with popular culture has become a symbiotic one.

This chapter convenes seven notable directors – Denise Chapman, TammyRa’ Jackson, Ron O.J. Parson, Mark Clayton Southers, Timothy Douglas, Seret Scott, and Bartlett Sher – who have collectively directed nearly eighty productions of Wilson’s works. The conversation features these artists reflecting on their directing approach, Wilson’s grounding in American theatre, and the challenges of exploring the worlds Wilson creates.

Between 1984 and 2017, ten plays authored by Wilson would be staged on Broadway. Collectively known as the American Century Cycle, these dramas are recognized as perhaps the greatest singular triumph of any playwright in the American theatre. Wilson came to be celebrated for his distinctive authorial voice, mesmerizing audiences with his facilitation of Black American speech. The dramatist also helped launch the careers of many actors who would become household names, including Charles Dutton, Angela Bassett, and Viola Davis. This chapter offers a brief overview of the productions of Wilson’s plays on Broadway, giving particular attention to his collaborations with such directors as Lloyd Richards, Marion McClinton, and Kenny Leon.

August Wilson accomplished something singular with the American Century Cycle, a project that provides a sustained look at the particularities of a community over a consequential period. This chapter situates and explores Wilson’s artistic achievements in the context of US theatre history. It gives particular attention to the “place” Wilson occupies within the American theatrical landscape.

Set and costume designs are a large part of worldbuilding for the plays that actors inhabit. These elements enhance and contextualize the historical, geographic, and temporal environments for the performance. August Wilson was incredibly detailed in what he asked for in his plays, not just from the actors but also from the designers. Constanza Romero and David Gallo are but two of the designers who have brought the world of Wilson’s American Century Cycle to full realization. This chapter features a conversation between Romero, Gallo, and Willa J. Taylor about their design processes and practices when working on Wilson’s plays.

Chapter Three analyzes Rogers’ move into vaudeville , the national entertainment circuit that fascinated the American public during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Oklahoman became a star attraction whose cowboy garb and tremendous roping skills delighted audiences all over the country. Rogers also gradually developed another skill that became his calling card – humorous commentary. As an emblem of the American West that was gradually disappearing in the wake of urban, industrial growth, and a natural humorist whose down-home jests and good-natured wisecracks delighted audiences, Rogers began to establish a national presence. This period also saw his stormy courtship of, and marriage to, Betty Blake, a young woman from back home. The marriage would last for the rest of his life.

American scholar and theorist David M. Halperin convincingly reveals the correlations between gay subjectivity and the Broadway musical and shows how the aesthetic form of the genre is in itself prototypically queer. Additionally, musicals can impart a sense of shared identity and cultural connections that ease the coming-out process, and they may confer common bonds within gay communities. Examining key historical eras and significant productions, this chapter builds on the work of D.A. Miller and Halperin and explores the sociological linkages between U. S. gay male culture and the musical, asking how the theatre became associated with male homosexuality. The study analyzes five musicals, Show Boat (1927), West Side Story (1957), La Cage Aux Folles (1983), Fun Home (2013), and A Strange Loop (2019). Each was originally produced in a notable moment in queer history and implicitly or explicitly manifests the tensions of its time. These five musicals reflect distinct ways musicals appeal to gay consumers and suggest opportunities for imagining possibilities of the gay genre as a queer utopia.

Bernstein’s later Broadway shows, West Side Story and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, represent his greatest smash hit success and his biggest flop. This chapter focuses on the music of these two shows, and more specifically on what happened to the music after the initial runs were over, when the theatres went dark, and how, in both cases, the music became abstracted from its original context through arrangements, cover versions, and use in advertising, film, and television, sometimes reframing the meaning of the original material. As is to be expected, the two stories are quite different: West Side Story has become deeply embedded in the culture while 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was nearly banished to obscurity. The reception of both shows, however, reveals something about the enduring nature of Bernstein’s music.

Bernstein’s fame, reputation, and personality have for the most part been seen as excessive and problematic. This perception militated from the start against his position in time, place, and tradition as a serious composer being influential or even accepted. Yet from the golden moment of opportunity for American composers in which he grew to adulthood to his barely noticed final works, he was following a diligent route of creative output that may yet bear fruit at greater distance from the man himself, though it would be difficult to claim that, taken as a whole, it has yet done so.

Chapter 11 documents Ilf and Petrov’s family ties to America. The pair visited Ilf’s uncles in Hartford, Connecticut, and saw Petrov’s brother’s play, Squaring the Circle, on Broadway. They detailed neither of these adventures in the published travelogue. But again, as with the complex hybrids, the contacts shed light on the process of cultural exchange. Seeing Ilf’s Jewish Russian American relatives in Hartford and an American production of Valentin Kataev’s popular Soviet farce on Broadway allowed Ilf and Petrov to reflect on the possibility of bridging divides and to grapple with the most difficult kind of cultural understanding: getting one another’s jokes.

Providing an overview of Chekhov on the American stage, James Loehlin emphasizes the game-changing effect of Chekhov, Stanislavsky, and the Moscow Art Theater on American acting and playwriting, while offering a sense of the rich history of production and experimental adaptation that Chekhov encountered both off-Broadway and across the USA.

August Wilson had one of the most impressive debuts in the history of theater in America, an area whose highest echelons had previously been dominated, overwhelmingly, by white playwrights. The four plays Wilson brought to Broadway between 1984 and 1990, however, not only changed the scope of American drama but also the shape of its audience, drawing Black theatergoers to Broadway in numbers significant enough to impact Broadway’s sense of its audience and of the infinite possibilities of live theater. These 1980s productions thus not only set the parameters of Wilson’s ten-play cycle – one play set in each decade of the twentieth century – as it explores the tension in African American history between community expectation and heroic disappointment, but, within those parameters, also enabled Wilson to create on the American mainstage some portion of the history that might have been visible in a world where American history is always already Black.

Within contemporary Western gay communities, Alexander the Great is often championed as a hero and an inspirational figure – the ultimate high-status homosexual. This chapter explores the various ways in which he has been visualised within the gay community and its wider – more closeted – community. The chapter explores his literary image in the novels of Mary Renault, in stage musicals and pornography and in mainstream Hollywood cinema. The darker, anti-gay, reading of Alexander is also explored in the context of right-wing nationalism and the military.

Rosenthal provides a critical history and analysis of the connections between mainstream and experimental theatre in New York, from the 1960s to 2020, with a focus on Broadway. She argues that Broadway and mainstream theatre underwent multiple and significant transformations during the 1960s and in the decades that followed. Rosenthal analyzes the work of playwrights, directors, composers, choreographers, and designers who made art both downtown in experimental theatres and uptown on Broadway. The concept of the “mainstream experimental” is used as a descriptor for Broadway throughout the following half century, as commercial theatre continued to push and shape US society and culture at large. Alongside artists, pathbreaking producers off and on Broadway are the focus of this chapter, along with the prominence of ensemble-based musicals and dramatic works and the success of solo performances on Broadway. The contributions and legacies of LGBTQ artists such as Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, and Lisa Kron, and Black artists including August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, Ntozake Shange, Anna Deavere Smith, and Jeremy O. Harris, are central to Rosenthal’s argument and critique.

The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre since 1945 provides an overview and analysis of developments in the organization and practices of American theatre. It examines key demographic and geographical shifts post-1945 American theatre experienced in spectatorship and addresses the economic, social, and political challenges theatre artists have faced across cultural climates and geographical locations. Specifically, it explores artistic communities, collaborative practices, and theatre methodologies across mainstream, regional, and experimental theatre practices, forms, and expressions. As American theatre has embraced diversity in practice and representation, the volume examines the various creative voices, communities, and perspectives that prior to the 1940s had been mostly excluded from the theatrical landscape. This diversity has led to changing dramaturgical and theatrical languages that take us in to the twenty-first century; these shifting perspectives and evolving forms of theatrical expressions paved the ground for contemporary American theatrical innovation.

This chapter reviews the major segments of performing arts. These include commercial theater productions, orchestras, dance, and opera, The coverage extends to art markets and museums and to financing and economic aspects.