Musicals - Tapa dura

An update to Kurt Ganzl's hugely popular Musicals, first published in 1995. The musical today stands where it always has - at the centre of a truly popular culture. How it got there is told in Musicals which charts each significant turn in the genre's glorious development, through some 300 photographs and incisive, informative text, including feature spreads on the milestones of musical theater, their creators and innovators, and the famous venues in Paris, Vienna, London and New York associated with them. Also included are spreads of musicals that have successfully made the transition from the stage to the wide screen, such as The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls and West Side Story. To bring it bang up to date, the text has been revised with an extra sixteen pages added, looking at the most popular musicals of the past five years including The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and Rent.

Kurt Ganzl is a New Zealander of Viennese stock. He joined the New Zealand Opera Company as a bass soloist after which he moved to London where for the next 20 years he worked as a performer, then as a talent agent and as a casting director both for musicals and plays in London's West End and for musical and operatic productions in Europe, the States and Europe. In 1986 his two-volume history The British Musical Theater (Macmillan/OUP) was published, followed by Ganzl's Book of the Musical Theater (Bodley Head/Schirmer). The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theater (Blackwell/Schirmer was published in 1994.