Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and ’90s (review)

Directors and the New Musical Drama addresses the evolution of musical theatre in the 1980s and 1990s by examining the cultural differences between British and American musicals and the role of the director. Through these two critical lenses, Lundskaer-Nielsen argues that certain musicals in the late twentieth century changed the very definition of the form, making it more inclusive and exploratory. To support this argument, she examines commercially successful productions of the “British Invasion” from London’s West End, recent inventive Broadway revivals, and the rise of the American nonprofit theatre.

The first chapter provides a brief history of both American and British musical theatre, leading to the cultural and artistic tensions that emerged when West End imports dominated the Broadway landscape during the 1980s and 1990s. Lundskaer-Nielsen also develops her definition of “musical drama”: a hybrid form of musical theatre combining the essential traditions of Golden Age Broadway musicals (e.g., using song to further the story or investigate an idea) with staging styles and dramaturgy from nonmusical drama. She offers Les Misérables and Miss Saigon as foundational examples of this new genre, since these shows approach song and plot construction with dramaturgical methods from outside the American musical theatre legacy.

Musical drama, then, is the book’s primary focus, filtered through discussion of the director’s contribution. Lundskaer-Nielsen notes that musical theatre historians have rightly credited director-choreographers like Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett for their influence, but have ignored director-dramaturges and director-writers, who rose to prominence in the late twentieth century. Seeing a need for such a contribution, the author examines British and American directors who, she claims, moved musicals toward more pluralistic and experimental expression.

Lundskaer-Nielsen argues that the father of such director-dramaturges is Harold Prince, whose contributions to musical theatre are the subject of chapter 2. She contends that Prince broke from Golden Age–musical song structure with the concept musical Company, and reconfigured traditional musical plot structure by incorporating Brechtian techniques into Cabaret. While many scholars have addressed Prince’s significance in musical theatre history, Lundskaer-Nielsen emphasizes his dramaturgical sensibility as a director and his staging innovations. Prince, then, serves as the model for the author’s subsequent discussion of musical drama directors. Moving to an examination of musicals during the 1980s and 1990s, Lundskaer-Nielsen takes on musical theatre historiography that depicts British productions in this era as commercial and technological successes, but aesthetic failures. She offers a reconsideration of several seminal British musicals of the 1980s that, like Prince’s work, expanded the form beyond early—entirely American—musical theatre construction and themes.

While the author claims to concentrate on influential directors, the British Invasion discussion blurs the text’s focus in the first half of the book. The latter half of the book, however, becomes more systematically focused as Lundskaer-Nielsen discusses several directors who made creative leaps in the nonprofit theatre or in significant Broadway revivals. Taking account of the increasingly important relationship between nonprofit and commercial theatre, the chapters on nonprofit theatre briefly outline its history and detail the work of directors who emerged from that sector. The author also devotes several chapters to directors of selected revivals, and the chapter “Staging the Canon” is a particular strength in the book. Here, the author investigates recent revivals of Nine, Follies, Cabaret, and Oklahoma! to demonstrate her thesis that all of these revivals incorporate thematic and dramaturgical elements from various kinds of nonmusical drama.

The final sixty pages of the book consist of transcripts from interviews Lundskaer-Nielsen conducted with notable musical theatre figures which served as source material for the book. Those interviewed include directors Matthew Warchus, David Leveaux, and James Lapine; composer/lyricists Adam Guettel, William Finn, and Richard Maltby Jr.; producers Ira Weitzman and Margo Lion...