The New Singing Theatre: A Charter for the Music Theatre Movement – by Michael Bawtree

At last, from an author uniquely qualified and ideally equipped to discuss all the elements (words, movement, music, light, use of space, narrative, vocal technique) that make up the "New Singing Theatre,", here is a book that lucidly recounts both the evolution and the content of this new and still-forming art. The book attempts a first definition that brings under the heading "New Singing Theatre" all the disparate works loosely known as musical theatre, everything from Broadway musicals to complex chamber works by avant-garde composers, through voguish multimedia events to whittled-down traditional opera too embarrassed to call itself opera. The book also is a first blueprint for the new form which has so rapidly evolved from anticipatory works in the 1920s and 1930s to the flowering of new works and new ways in the years since World War II. Based on Bawtree's worldwide experience working in the U.S., Canada, England, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Cuba, The New Singing Theatre will be required reading for all those concerned with staging dramatic works with music--producers, directors, administrators, designers, and singing actors.

Released: 1991