Broadway Singing: In the Jan. and Feb., 1979 issues of High Fidelity, I wrote an extended two-part article on this subject, called Just Singin’ in the Pain. It includes detailed technical analyses, with many specific examples drawn from cast and solo albums, augmented by my live experience of many shows and singers. The examples would of course be different now, but the technical observations would be essentially the same. Substantially complete runs of High Fidelity are out there, though they unfortunately lack the bound-in or accompanying issues of Musical America, in which I and others wrote on live musical events.

“Postdramatic Theatre:” I am obviously not in accord with the sympathetic treatment given the subject by Hans-Thies Lehmann (Postdramatic Theatre, Karen Jürs-Mundy, Routledge, 2006). But this is a fine book, thorough and judicious, and unquestionably the authentic source for the eponymous ways of theatrical thought, which underlie so much of what has transpired in both spoken theatre and opera in recent decades. A useful, though less scholarly and penetrating, prequel would be Tom Sutcliffe’s Believing in Opera (Princeton, 1996).

And a few more books, for anyone interested in pursuing the for-profit, non-profit vexations: As I said above, it’s too complicated a topic to open up here, and may seem to many readers not really germane, since there hasn’t been even a remnant of a for-profit  opera sector for seventy years or so, and the practice of shared productions is not identical with commercial transfers (though there’s an echo there). But an understanding of the pros and cons helps to illuminate the marooned position of the classical arts in our society. These books emphasize, for the most part, the positive side of the exchanges described. And there has been one, ever since non-profit directors and managers realized that in a few long-shot cases, entertainment commerce could be made to underwrite art, and the commercial producers, faced with the increasing drain of the out-of-town tryout or a lengthy run of previews (which used to be at lower ticket prices), discovered the usefulness of letting someone else rehearse and refine some shows, and garner advance reviews and word-of-mouth buildup before risking anything for their investors. The more problematic side? 1) The (potentially) fluffy commercial tail begins to wag the already bedraggled artistic dog in terms of projects undertaken, which raises the question of 2) What rationale can we propound for tax-exempt status, let alone more generous public subvention, if non-profit enterprises are thinking and behaving just like commercial ones?

Epstein, Helen: Joe Papp/An American Life, Little, Brown & Co., 1994: Gives a granular look at the precedent-setting transfer of Hair from New York’s Public Theatre to Broadway (in 1968, the same year as the transfer of The Great White Hope from Washington’s Arena Stage), and then of Chorus Line, which in effect endowed the Public for years to come. A bit removed from the Public’s initial mission of Shakespeare for The People, free or extremely cheap.

Rosenberg, Bernard, and Harburg, Ernest: The Broadway Musical/Collaboration in Commerce and Art, NY Univ. Press, 1993. An informationally splendid overview of developments in the postwar era, much of it based on in-depth interviews with prominent creators, directors, and producers, and on financial statistics drawn from trade publications. Among the goodies: between 1945 and 1990, 76% of Broadway musicals were flops, i. e., did not pay back their investors; but Fella, with 678 performances, was a hit (it did). Nearly all the operas or near-operas produced in the late 1940s and 1950s were flops, though their runs were often extraordinary by operatic standards. One exception: Menotti’s The Consul, at 269 performances a hit. Playing that same year: the Weill/Anderson/Hughes Lost in the Stars and the Blitzstein/Hellman Regina. They all had cast albums.