Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

246 Chapter 9 The American Musical Theatre
Hamilton, the spectacular musical treating the founding years of the United States, was created—music, lyrics and
book—by Lin-Manual Miranda (center) who also starred in the title role; the show, which featured a largely black or Latino/
Latina cast, immediately became the hit of the 2015–16 Broadway season. © Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux
The Contemporary Musical
No golden age lasts forever, and in retrospect no such
age is unquestionably remembered as golden; that glittery
title may soon in fact become little more than a
quaint moment in history. It is unquestionable, however,
that the bulk of musicals produced in America today,
not just by amateur groups but on Broadway as well, are
revivals of the great musicals of mid-twentieth-century
America. Today, however, a new and more contemporary
musical theatre—at once less sentimental and more
ironic, less rhapsodic and more choreographic—has
come onto the scene. And the singing has often become
louder, since performers are now equipped with barelyvisible
microphones taped to their foreheads, and wired
to transmitters that connect them to speakers throughout
the theatre—while tiny in-ear monitors relay to them the
orchestral instruments that carry their specific notes.
The twenty-first-century American musical theatre, one
might say, has moved (like Bob Dylan in 1965) from
acoustic to electric guitar.
THE EMERGENCE OF
CHOREOGRAPHER-DIRECTORS
The past half century has seen a tremendous escalation in
the importance of choreography in American musicals.
Agnes de Mille was instrumental in initiating this movement
with her plot-advancing dance numbers in Rodgers
and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! But later years saw the
emergence of several choreographers who became more
widely known than the directors they worked with—
indeed, who became their productions’ directors.
Jerome Robbins (1918–1998), trained in both ballet
and acting, was the first of these. His “Small House of
Uncle Thomas” ballet—a deliberately quaint, Siamese