Musical Theater

Selected Course Offerings:

Shen Curriculum for Musical Theater

A number of electives in Musical Theater are offered on a regular basis.  They include:

Music 185/Theater Studies 236:  American Musical Theater: History and Context
Professor Daniel Egan.
Critical examination of relevance and context in the history of the American musical theater. Historical survey combined with text and musical analysis; non-musical historical trends and how they interact in the musical theater of a given era.

Music 228:  Musical Theater Performance I
Professor Annette Jolles.
The structure and meaning of traditional and contemporary musical theater repertoire. Focus on ways to “read” a work, decipher compositional cues for character and action, facilitate internalization of material, and elicit lucid interpretations. For singers, pianists and directors.

Music 229:  Musical Theater Performance II
Professor Andrea Burns.
A guided exploration of central elements in musical theater performance. Discussion of specific aspects of musical theater including choreography, music direction and originating new works, will be followed by their application in performance.

Music 230:  Composing for Musical Theater.
Professor Joshua Rosenblum.
Introduction to elements of music- and lyric-writing for theater songs. Focus on the development of compositional proficiency in the musical theater idiom and on the refinement of each student’s compositional voice.

Music 330:  Musical Theatre Composition II.
Professor Scott Frankel.
Intermediate and advanced projected-oriented studies in composition of musical theater.

Music 472:  Stephen Sondheim and the American Musical Theater Tradition
Professor Daniel Egan.
The musical theater of Stephen Sondheim, both as a popular phenomenon of the contemporary Broadway stage and in relation to models and forms employed in the past.

Theater Studies 414a/Drama 77a:  Lyric Writing for Musical Theater 
Professor Michael Korie
A practical introduction to the art and craft of libretto/lyric writing for musical theater and opera. Study and analysis of books of musicals and libretti/lyrics for opera from Da Ponte to Hammerstein to today. Exercises in writing one-act musical books, lyrics to “trunk” songs. The possibility of collaboration with student composers.