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26 Musical Theatre Books, Librettos, and Biographies You can Borrow for FREE (save $468)

As a musical theatre writer, your craft is both an art and a science. You need to have a strong...

Contemporary Musicals Set Outside of New York

Here are 10 contemporary, modern-day musicals set in US locations outside of New York.

How Opening Numbers Reveal a World or Launch the Story

Carol de Giere and Stephen Schwartz discuss the importance (and challenge) of constructing successful opening numbers — and offer a few tips!

How Musicals Make the Most of Time: Montage, Backstory, Memories, and Ticking Clocks

Today’s musicals journey through time with concentrated stories and employ devices like montages, backstory, and ticking clocks to keep audiences engaged.

How Musicals Make the Most of Time – A Conversation with Stephen Schwartz

Carol de Giere and Stephen Schwartz explore how musicals convey time through backstory, memories, and compressed action.

Book Review: Working on a Song: The Lyrics of HADESTOWN

Anais Mitchell’s “Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown” gives insights into lyric-writing, book-writing and story-crafting.

Summer Reading Books for Musical Writers in 2020

Catch up on relevant musical writing books this summer, including ideas for public domain material, how-to books, and books on “the making of a musical.”

Funny Girl

The most famous songs from Funny Girl, “People” and “Don’t Rain On My Parade,” are unusual in that they’re stunningly successful, and yet they contain elements that are “wrong” in a strict definition of the term.

Little Shop of Horrors

It would be a mistake to dismiss Little Shop of Horrors as camp, because it is written with more attention to the intricacies of construction than most serious musicals. In a sense, it’s the last purely funny musical comedy to have stood the test of time; its endurance due, in part, to its solid architecture.

Cabaret

Cabaret is a seductive musical with attractive songs. But we’re well aware of the tragic implications: 1930 Berlin is a bad time and place to be Jewish.

Another Show, Another Opening Number!

Most writers know they have to tackle certain structural must-haves, but there is one in particular that tends to be the most elusive: The Opening Number.

A Chorus Line

A Chorus Line follows many protagonists and so must quickly introduce them in ways that delineate them and make us root for them individually.

Studying Musicals: Jersey Boys

Using the Four Seasons catalogue, Jersey Boys tells a good, solid story with style, drama, and emotion. It uses the music as it should be used – as diegetic songs being performed by The Four Seasons. For those who fondly remember those songs, the musical probably is a nostalgic reminder of days gone by; but, even if you’re not a Four Seasons fan, Jersey Boys still is a genuine crowd pleaser and an enormously entertaining evening of well done musical theater.

Studying Musicals: West Side Story

One of the undisputed masterpieces of musical theatre, West Side Story began as an idea called East Side Story. Director/choreographer Jerome Robbins and composer Leonard Bernstein wanted to set Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in modern dress, dealing with contemporary prejudices.