1. American theater history

2. American Theatre History
The Two Area’s of theatre where American really excel: Musicals and Film
The first original theater work of note in
America was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (1882)
The musical production that began
musical theater was Oklahoma!
1944

3. American Theatre History
America’s first great teacher of playwriting and play
productions, George Peirce Baker
Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, the most
discussed play in American Theatre History.
The most successful musical theater writer/
Composer of the past 30 years:
Stephen Sondheim.

4. American Non-Musical Theatre
Eugene O’Neill / Long Day’s Journey into Night , presents a depressing and horrifying picture of a wealthy family in which one son is suffering from tuberculosis, and the father and other son are drunks. The play leaves its audiences drained, partly because it is so powerful and partly because it is about O’Neil’s own family, he being the son with tuberculosis.

5. Non-Musical cont.
Little Foxes, a powerful drama about Southern corruption by our most celebrated woman dramatist, Lillian Hellman.
Our Town by Thornton Wilder

6. Non-Musical cont. Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Keller
Life with Father by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse

7. Non-Musical cont. The Glass Menagerie,
A Street Car Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams
All my Sons, Death of a Salesman,
The Crucible, and
a View from the Bridge
by Arthur Miller

8. Non-Musical cont. The Best playwright of this period Edward Albee.
He wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Sam Shepherd August Wilson

9. Non-Musical cont. (3)
Neil Simon the biggest money maker of all time and certainly one of the funniest writers in all theatre history. Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, and the Goodbye Girl
Woody Allen

10. Musical Theater
Great Collaborators:
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein also knows as Rodgers and Hammerstein. Starts off Musical with Oklahoma! In They also collaborated on such hits as The King and I, The Sound of Music, South Pacific, and Carousel.

11. Musical Theater
Great Collaborators:
Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe also know as Learner and Lowe. Their greatest hits are Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot.

12. Famous Contemporaries of the Great Collaborators
Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein

13. Famous Contemporaries
Meredith Wilson / The Music Man
Highlights of the 1960’s
Hello Dolly! The Fantasticks Fiddler on the Roof

14. The New Muscials
Claude-Michel Schonberg, Alain Boublil, and Herbert Kretzmer / Les Miserables
Edward Kleban / A Chorus Line

15. The New Muscials
Andrew Lloyd Webber / Cats, Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, Phantom of the Opera

16. The New Muscials
Stephen Sondheim / A Funny thing happened on the way to the forum, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods , and West-side story

17. Newest Broadway Musicals