Sondheim in Our Time and His

Sondheim in Our Time and His offers a wide-ranging historical investigation of the landmark musical works and extraordinary career of Stephen Sondheim, a career which has spanned much of the history of American musical theater.

W. Anthony Sheppard is Marylin and Arthur Levitt Professor of Music at Williams College. His first book, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater received the Kurt Weill Prize, his article on Madama Butterfly and film earned the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, an article on World War II film music was honored with the Alfred Einstein Award by the American Musicological Society, and "Puccini and the Music Boxes" received the AMS H. Colin Slim Award. His most recent book, Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination, received the AMS Music in American Culture Award and the Society for American Music Lowens Award. Sheppard's research has been supported by the NEH, the American Philosophical Society, the ACLS, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and is now Series Editor of AMS Studies in Music.

Introduction: Our Sondheim
W. ANTHONY SHEPPARD
Part I. Early Stages
1. Williams College Before, During, and After Sondheim
STEVE SWAYNE
2. Fragments of Fairyland: Sondheim's Abandoned Adaptation of Mary Poppins
DOMINIC McHUGH
3. "...nearly everything I wrote": Sondheim and the Actors Studio
JEFFREY MAGEE
4. Breakout from the Asylum of Conformity: Sondheim, Laurents, and the Dramaturgy of Anyone Can Whistle
JAMES O'LEARY
Part II. Staging Identities
5. Sondheim's Whiteness
TODD DECKER
6. Politics, Representation, and Collaboration in Pacific Overtures (1976)
ASHLEY M. PRIBYL
7. Sexual Identity in Company, 1969-2019
ANDREW BUCHMAN
8. Students Performing Gender with Sondheim's Musicals in the Age of #MeToo
STACY WOLF
Part III. Versions, Genres, and Collaborations
9. Sweeney's Identity Crisis and the Dynamic Potential of Generic Hybridity
KIM H. KOWALKE
10. "A sad and listless affair": The Unsung Film Adaptation of Sondheim's A Little Night Music
GEOFFREY BLOCK
Part IV. Reconceived Structures and Techniques
11. Time and Time Again: Temporal Structures in Sondheim's Musicals
JIM LOVENSHEIMER
12. Sunday in the Park with Sondheim, Lapine, Seurat, and Babbitt
LARA E. HOUSEZ
13. Sondheim and the 11 O'clock Principle
ELIZABETH A. WELLS
14. Finishing the Line: Wit, Rhythm, and Rhyme in Sondheim
W. ANTHONY SHEPPARD
Afterword: Moving on with Sondheim
KRISTEN ANDERSON-LOPEZ