Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

From West Side Story to Road Show, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. This book places Sondheim's work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that, by the 1960s, deeply influenced all the American arts.