Short introductory books on significant theories, concepts, forms and elements of musical theatre.
Adaptation in Musical Theatre positions musical theatre as part of a broader cultural trend of recycling, referencing, remixing and alluding to existing creative works and texts. Despite critics often dismissing stage adaptations as lazy and safe bet options for producers, this book argues that crafting an adaptation enables creative teams to take fresh and imaginative approaches to a source text, given the multitude of ways in which the structures and styles of two (or more) different media can be combined.
From Les Misérables to Wicked, by way of Legally Blonde and Fun Home, this lively book addresses several modern musicals, each adapted from a different type of source – including fiction, film and graphic novels – and each offering a different approach to adapting existing work.
Published in Methuen Drama's Topics in Musical Theatre series, this book offers students a concise and readable study of a key and ever-evolving forms within musical theatre studies using relevant and contemporary case studies.
Adam Rush is Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer in Musical Theatre at the University of Winchester, UK. He is co-author of
Musical Theatre Histories: Expanding the Narrative (2022) with Millie Taylor. His research explores intertextuality, adaptation, digital media, and fan culture in contemporary musical theatre. This work has been published in
Studies in Musical Theatre and in several edited collections. Adam completed his Ph.D. at the University of Lincoln in 2017 and holds a Masters in Theatre and Performance from Queen Mary, University of London.
Robert Gordon is Professor of Theatre and Director of the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, where in 2003 he introduced the first British MA in Musical Theatre for producers and writers and a new BA in Musical Theatre in 2018. He is author of The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theory in Perspective (2006), Harold Pinter's Theatre of Power (2012) and, with Olaf Jubin and Millie Taylor, British Musical Theatre Since 1950 (2016). Edited collections include The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies (2014) and, with Olaf Jubin, The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical (2016). He has acted and directed in South Africa, the UK, Ireland, the USA, Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic. In 2013, he directed the European première of Kander and Ebb's Steel Pier in Brno, while his musical version of Five Children
and It with composer Nick Hutson, received a professional workshop in 2015. He is currently engaged as a writer and actor of Shylock Speaks, which premiered in February 2020.
Emilio Méndez is associate professor of Theatre Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He has worked as a director and translator. He has published works on the history of musical theatre in Mexico and Mexican training programmes for theatre. He received the 2015 National University Distinction for Young Academics in the field of Artistic Creation and Cultural Dissemination.
