Hairspray is the 2003 Tony Award(R) winner for Best Musical!

Based on filmmaker John Waters' affectionately subversive homage to his Baltimore youth, Hairspray takes place in 1962. Chubby Tracy Turnblad (Marissa Jaret Winokur, 2003 Tony winner for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical) is transformed into a teen celebrity on a local TV dance program. With her irresistible stage mother (Harvey Fierstein, 2003 Tony winner for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical) at her side, she attempts to win the heart of the local heartthrob and integrate The Corny Collins Show at the same time.

The first-ever book to tell the stories of over 300 inspiring women who wrote Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals that Publishers Weekly calls an exhaustive tribute to women whose contributions to Broadway musical history have often been overlooked. Library Journal praises the book, saying, Tepper has fashioned a winning book on the unsung heroines of Broadway musicals that will be appreciated by readers of women's studies and theater lore. Kirkus Reviews says it's an encyclopedic reference and a long-overdue tribute to female lyricists and composers.
From the composers who pounded the pavement selling their music in Tin Pan Alley at the turn of the twentieth century; to the lyricists who broke new ground writing shows during the Great Depression; to the book writers who penned protest musicals fighting for social justice during the 1970s; to those who are revitalizing the landscape of American theatre today, Women Writing Musicals tells the stories of over 300 inspiring women who wrote Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals.
Jennifer Ashley Tepper's definitive book covers prolific and celebrated Broadway writers like Betty Comden and Jeanine Tesori, women who have written musicals but gained fame elsewhere like Dolly Parton and Sara Bareilles, and dramatists you've never heard of--but definitely should have. Among the gems shared here are the stories of Clara Driscoll, who saved the Alamo and also wrote a Broadway musical; Micki Grant, whose mega-hit musical about the Black experience made her the first woman to write book, music, and lyrics for a Broadway show; María Grever, who made her Broadway debut at age 56 and who was the first Mexican female composer to achieve international success; and the first all-female writing team for a Broadway musical, in 1922: Annelu Burns, Anna Wynne O'Ryan, Madelyn Sheppard, and Helen S. Woodruff. This book is a treasure trove for theatre-loving readers that Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor and singer Kristin Chenoweth praises as a wonderful resource for actors, and an important read for anyone interested in theatre.

Revealing, funny, whimsical, and wise, outlaw country legend Willie Nelson shares the untold stories behind the his favorite songs, with all the lyrics and a dynamic assortment of never-before-seen photos and ephemera.

From his earliest work in the 1950s to today, Willie looks back at the songs that have defined his career, from his days of earning $50 each to his biggest hits, from his less well-known songs (but incredibly meaningful to him) to his concept albums. Along the way, he also shares the stories of his guitar Trigger, his family and family, as well as the artists he collaborated with, including Patsy Cline, Waylon Jennings, Ray Charles, Merle Haggard, Ray Price, Dolly Parton, and many others.

Willie is disarmingly honest--what do you have to lose when you're about to turn 90? --meditating on the nature of songwriting and finding his voice, and the themes he's explored his whole life--relationships, infidelity, love, loss, friendship, and, of course, life on the road.

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - Titled after perhaps Stephen Sondheim's most autobiographical song, from Sunday in the Park with George--Finishing the Hat not only collects his lyrics for the first time, it offers readers a rare personal look into his life as well as his remarkable productions.

Stephen Sondheim's career spanned more than half a century; his lyrics are synonymous with musical theater and popular culture. Sondheim--the winner of seven Tonys, an Academy Award, seven Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize and more--treats us to never-before-published songs from each show, songs that were cut or discarded before seeing the light of day, along with the lyrics for all of his musicals from 1954 to 1981, including West Side Story, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd.

He discusses his relationship with his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, and his collaborations with extraordinary talents such as Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Ethel Merman, Richard Rodgers, Angela Lansbury, Harold Prince and a panoply of others. The anecdotes--filled with history, pointed observations and intimate details--transport us back to a time when theater was a major pillar of American culture. Best of all, Sondheim appraises his work and dissects his lyrics, as well as those of others, offering unparalleled insights into songwriting that will be studied by fans and aspiring songwriters for years to come.

Accompanying Sondheim's sparkling writing are behind-the-scenes photographs from each production, along with handwritten music and lyrics from the songwriter's personal collection.

Penetrating and surprising, poignant, funny and sometimes provocative, Finishing the Hat is not only an informative look at the art and craft of lyric writing, it is a history of the theater that belongs on the same literary shelf as Moss Hart's Act One and Arthur Miller's Timebends. It is also a book that will leave you humming the final bars of Merrily We Roll Along, while eagerly anticipating the next volume.

This brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls.--Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

The staggering purity of this show will touch all open hearts...In its refined, imaginative simplicity, it daringly reverses all the conventional rules by returning the American musical to an original state of innocence.--John Heilpern, The New York Observer

An unexpected jolt of sudden genius, edgy in its brutally honest, unromanticized depiction of human sexuality.--New York Post

Spring Awakening is an extraordinary new rock musical with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Grammy Award-nominated recording artist Duncan Sheik. Inspired by Frank Wedekind's controversial 1891 play about teenage sexuality and society's efforts to control it, the piece seamlessly merges past and present, underscoring the timelessness of adolescent angst and the universality of human passion.

Steven Sater's plays include the long-running Carbondale Dreams, Perfect for You, Doll (Rosenthal Prize/Cincinnati Playhouse), Umbrage (Steppenwolf New Play Prize), and a reconceived version of Shakespeare's Tempest, which played in London.

Duncan Sheik is a singer/songwriter who also collaborated with Sater on the musical The Nightingale. He has composed original music for The Gold Rooms of Nero and for The Public Theater's Twelfth Night in Central Park.

Whether they appeared on Broadway or the Strand, the shows appearing in 1924 epitomized the glamor of popular musical theatre. What made this particular year so distinctive - so special - was the way it brought together the old and the new, the venerated and the innovative, and the traditional and the chic. William Everett, in his compelling new book, reveals this remarkable mid-Roaring Twenties stagecraft to have been truly transnational, with a stellar cast of producers, performers and creators boldly experimenting worldwide. Revues, musical comedies, zarzuelas and operettas formed part of a thriving theatrical ecosystem, with many works - and their leading artists - now unpredictably defying genres. The author demonstrates how fresh approaches became highly successful, with established leads like Marie Tempest and Fred Stone appearing in new productions even as youthful talents such as Florence Mills, Fred and Adele Astaire, Gertrude Lawrence and George Gershwin now started to make their mark.

The musical tale of a domineering stage mother's inadvertent creation of a burlesque stripper, now available in paperback for the first time.

Over sixty years after its opening night, West Side Story is perhaps the most famous and beloved of twentieth-century musicals and stands as a colossus of musical and dramatic achievement. It not only helped define a generation of musical theatre lovers but is among the handful of shows that have contributed to our understanding of American musical identity at mid-century. Bringing together contemporary scholars in music, theatre, dance, literature, and performance, this Companion explores this explosive 1950s remake of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and its portrayal of the raw passion, rivalries, jealousy and rage that doom the young lovers to their tragic fate. Organised thematically, chapters range from Broadway's history and precursors to West Side Story; the early careers of its creators; the show's score with emphasis on writing, production, and orchestrations; issues of class, colourism, and racism; New York's gang culture, and how the show's legacy can be found in popular culture throughout the world.

A landmark musical, one of those few shows that enter the permanent lore of the theatre by altering the vocabulary of dramatic possibilities. -Time

There's never been a franker, more sophisticated work written for the musical stage. -San Francisco Examiner

With a deliberately episodic, painfully accurate book by George Furth and an unforgettable score by Stephen Sondheim, Company is a total reversal of the usual musical comedy format. It is rigorously unsentimental. It has the courage to be both bitter and honest about love and marriage. -Kevin Kelly, Boston Globe

A breakthrough Broadway musical in 1970, Company remains fresh, acerbic and original today. The musical's themes--marriage and commitment, friendship and loneliness--and its innovations in form mark it as a landmark of modern American musical theatre.

Company's 25^th anniversary was commemorated by two major revivals: in New York at the Roundabout Theatre Company and in London at the Donmar Warehouse. This edition incorporates all revisions and additions made for these productions.

In Nothing Like a Dame, theater journalist Eddie Shapiro opens a jewelry box full of glittering surprises, through in-depth conversations with twenty leading women of Broadway. He carefully selected Tony Award-winning stars who have spent the majority of their careers in theater, leaving aside those who have moved on or occasionally drop back in. The women he interviewed spent endless hours with him, discussing their careers, offering insights into the iconic shows, changes on Broadway over the last century, and the art (and thrill) of taking the stage night after night. Chita Rivera describes the experience of starring in musicals in each of the last seven decades; Audra McDonald gives her thoughts on the work that went into the five Tony Awards she won before turning forty-one; and Carol Channing reflects on how she has revisited the same starring role generation after generation, and its effects on her career. Here too is Sutton Foster, who contemplates her breakout success in an age when stars working predominately in theater are increasingly rare. Each of these conversations is guided by Shapiro's expert knowledge of these women's careers, Broadway lore, and the details of famous (and infamous) musicals. He also includes dozens of photographs of these players in their best-known roles.

This fascinating collection reveals the artistic genius and human experience of the women who have made Broadway musicals more popular than ever -- a must for anyone who loves the theater.

Nothing quite prepares you for the disturbing brilliance of Assassins. -David Richards, The New York Times

Dark, demented humor, as horrifying as it is hilarious. -Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press

Intelligent and thrilling musical theatre. Dazzling in its originality. -Ken Mandelbaum, Theaterweek

Stephen Sondheim's groundbreaking achievements in musical theatre attain a new level of audacity and accomplishment in his latest creation, Assassins. Evoking a fraternity of Presidential assassins and would-be assassins across a hundred years of our history (including John Wilkes Booth, Lynette Squeaky Fromme, John Hinckley and Lee Harvey Oswald), he and collaborator John Weidman examine success, failure and the questionable drive for power and celebrity in American society. The result is an unusually imaginative and utterly idiosyncratic entertainment compounded equally of insight, pleasure, and provocation. Assassins is an important and permanent addition to the American stage.

Winner of the 2017 Tony Award for Best Musical

Dear Evan Hansen lodges in your head long after you've seen it or heard it or read it. It feels like a pure expression from young writers at a crossroad of coming to terms with who they are and what they want to say about the world. Its honesty and truths haunt and ultimately open us up to ask the same question, no matter what our age or crossroad: What are the lies we tell ourselves? -James Lapine (from the Foreword)

A letter that was never meant to be seen, a lie that was never meant to be told, a life he never dreamed could be his. Evan Hansen is about to get the one thing he's always wanted: a chance to belong. Deeply personal and profoundly universal, Dear Evan Hansen is a groundbreaking American musical about truth, fiction, and the price we're willing to pay for the possibility to connect.

*This publication includes the book and lyrics to the musical, as well as a foreword by James Lapine. Please note that it does not include the musical score.*

Steven Levenson is the book writer for Dear Evan Hansen. His plays include If I Forget, The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin, Core Values, The Language of Trees, and Seven Minutes in Heaven. A graduate of Brown University, he served for three seasons as a writer and producer on Showtime's Master of Sex.

Benj Pasek & Justin Paul are the song-writing team behind Dear Evan Hansen. Previous musicals include A Christmas Story: The Musical, Dogfight, James and the Giant Peach, and Edges. Their film projects include La La Land (for which they won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for City of Stars, with composer Justin Hurwitz), Trolls, Snow White, and The Greatest Showman. Their television credits include The Flash, Smash, and Johnny and the Sprites. Both are graduates of the University of Michigan Musical Theatre Program and members of the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc.

Winner of three Tony Awards, including Best Book, Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann's Urinetown: The Musical is a tale of greed, corruption, love, and revolution in a time when water is worth its weight in gold.

After a twenty-year drought made water a scarce commodity, private toilets became outlawed. Now, all restroom necessaries are controlled by the Urine Good Company (UGC), a megacorporation that charges fees for using public toilets. Anyone unable to pay fees--or who dares to relieve themselves outside the commode--are arrested and banished to Urinetown.

When UGC employee Bobby Strong's father falls victim to this tyranny, he spearheads a revolution, inspiring the people to rise up and reclaim their own restroom duties--unaware of the realities and consequences of his actions...

With a preface by David Auburn, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Proof
And an introduction by the authors

WORDS WITH MUSIC: CREATING THE BROADWAY MUSICAL LIBRETTO

Beautiful...a last transmission from a dying star. - Time Out

One of the last works completed by beloved pop icon David Bowie before his death in early 2016, the otherworldy musical Lazarus is a poignant homage to his legacy. Inspired by the 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, Lazarus weaves a thrilling rock opera from new compositions by Bowie as well as many of his classic songs.

Brimming with advice and techniques, this essential reference for book- and songwriters clearly explains the fundamentals of the three crafts of a musical--book, music, and lyrics. Using copious examples from classic shows, Frankel has created the quintessential musical writers' how-to. Among the topics: definitions of musical theater; differences between musical books and straight plays and between poetry and lyrics; what a score is and how it develops; how to write for the voice; and how to audition musicals for producers. With a new introduction and revised text, Frankel's work is ready to guide a new generation of aspiring writers.

From Adelaide in Guys and Dolls to Nina in In the Heights and Elphaba in Wicked, female characters in Broadway musicals have belted and crooned their way into the American psyche. In this lively book, Stacy Wolf illuminates the women of American musical theatre - performers, creators, and characters -- from the start of the cold war to the present day, creating a new, feminist history of the genre. Moving from decade to decade, Wolf first highlights the assumptions that circulated about gender and sexuality at the time. She then looks at the leading musicals to stress the key aspects of the plays as they relate to women, and often finds overlooked moments of empowerment for female audience members. The musicals discussed here are among the most beloved in the canon--West Side Story, Cabaret, A Chorus Line, Phantom of the Opera, and many others--with special emphasis on the blockbuster Wicked. Along the way, Wolf demonstrates how the musical since the mid-1940s has actually been dominated by women--women onstage, women in the wings, and women offstage as spectators and fans.

Come along backstage and peek inside the spectacular and sometimes scandalous world of musical theatre.

From The Wizard of Oz and The Sound of Music to Mamma Mia and Les Misérables, fall in love all over again with selections from every era of musical theatre.

Take a journey through the years and immerse yourself in the behind-the-scenes world of musical theatre! From the dance halls and vaudeville to the silver screen and sensational Broadway shows, this go-to musical guide has all the glitter and glamour of the West End.

It's Showtime!

Delve into profiles of successful creators such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Packed with profiles of musical icons and fun infographics that summarize the plot, characters, and songs, Musicals: The Definitive Visual Guide is the perfect way to embrace your inner theatre geek.

With a foreword by Elaine Paige, this updated edition gives greater coverage on the smash-hit Hamilton and includes mention of new and popular stage and movie musicals. It's a must-have or the ultimate gift for musical theatre fans.

Complete the Series:

If you enjoyed this illustrated celebration of musicals, look out for more titles in this series from DK. Uncover the most mesmerizing moments in ballet history in Ballet: The Definitive Illustrated Story.

Explores the 100 year history of the Norfolk and Norwich Operatic Society and celebrates the company's relationship with the Theatre Royal Norwich, one of the most successful major provincial theatres in the country.

For One Week Only, published in time for the Norfolk and Norwich Operatic Society's centenary in January 2025, celebrates the company's relationship with the Theatre Royal Norwich, one of the most successful major provincial theatres in the country. The book charts the development of the Society over a hundred years of musical theatre, British and American. Each of the almost 100 productions has its own lively, informative and socially aware essay, accompanied by photographs revealing the development of the company from its origins in 1925, as well as showing the changing faces and styles of musical theatre throughout the century. The early years of the Society favoured such continental operettas as The Marriage Market and the bewitching Sybil before a long dalliance with Gilbert and Sullivan from which it broke free after World War II, although Iolanthe returned for her third outing in 1955. The Society's fascination with operetta continued through the 1960s with such sturdy favourites as The Student Prince, The Merry Widow and Rose Marie, with an occasional recognition of the British musical, notably in the 1975 production of Ivor Novello's King's Rhapsody and in the hugely successful Betty Blue Eyes of 2024. For One Week Only explores the history of the N&N and its ongoing contribution to the arts in Norfolk. Warmly and wittily, it lifts the curtain on a story of theatrical endurance and adventure.