In Here for the Hearing: Analyzing the Music in Musical Theater, edited by Michael Buchler and Gregory Decker. University of Michigan Press, 2023.

This essay examines musical theater songs that share a rare trait in their tonal structure: an ascending modulation by whole or half step that, paradoxically, returns to the key in which the song began. Aligning this intensifying modulation with tonic return invites new ways to consider its rhetorical potential.

This project is based on a conference paper I gave at the Society for Music Theory Annual Meeting in 2015.

Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, vol. 35, 2021.

A review essay co-authored with Elizabeth Gerbi and Deborah Rifkin, on music theory textbooks for musical theatre students.

• Bell and Chicurel, Musical Theory for Musical Theatre (2008)

• Francheschina, Music Theory Through Musical Theatre (2015)

• Gerle, Music Essentials for Singers and Actors (2018)

• Riley, Music Fundamentals for Musical Theatre (2020)

Studies in Musical Theatre, vol. 15, number 1, April 2021.

A review of Howard, a 2018 documentary about the lyricist/playwright/director Howard Ashman. Directed by Don Hahn, Stone Circle Pictures. Available on Disney+.

If you cannot access the review at the link below, please contact me.

Telephone Hour: A Quarantine Colloquium • February 8, 2021

This paper explores an apparent musical mismatch that opens the title song of Sunday in the Park with George: When the character Dot begins singing, the key signature for her song has one too many sharps. This is neither a printing error nor a compositional one. Instead, unlike perhaps in any other score written in the Broadway musical theatre tradition, Sunday’s first vocal entrance occurs over a false tonic chord. This illusory (minor-key) harmony gives way to the actual (major-key) tonic when Dot sings the eponymous refrain. I outline how this extraordinary passage comes together through several ordinary facets of musical theatre-making: interpolating both underscore and vamping heightens the initial false sense of stability; and writing songs out of order alleviates the early uncertainty of competing tonics.

As with many Stephen Sondheim musicals, musicologists have unpacked Sunday’s circuitous development as well as the rich harmonic ambiguities that abound within its score. I offer that, ironically, its ambiguities make Sunday an exemplar for the need to merge these areas of musical theatre studies more fully. Although Western tonal music theory helps identify the elements that link one measure to the next, musical theatre’s deeply collaborative creative process brings order to the whole.

Photo: A Seurat study at the National Gallery of Art

Association for Theatre in Higher Education • August 8, 2021
Society for Music Theory • November 8, 2020

Music-analytical studies of songs from book musicals are generally work-centric. Such approaches prioritize musical meaning and interpretation through the dramatic context of a libretto, paralleling the critical valuation of the “integrated” musical. But musical theatre entertainment is considerably more varied than sitting down in a theatre for a live performance of a dramatic work. And for a canon that upholds stereotypes as much as it subverts them, performances that surpass the bounds established by mid-twentieth-century texts offer sites of potent and imaginative reengagement.



In this paper I examine one such category of performances, using Audra McDonald's "Children Will Listen/You've Got to be Carefully Taught" as a case study. McDonald's medley turns Stephen Sondheim’s equivocal, pleading lullaby from Into the Woods on its head by switching back and forth with a serene, mid-register rendition of Lieutenant Cable's outburst against the perniciousness of racism while on active duty in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific. A close reading of musical form shows how these two songs haunt each other, reframing an explicitly instructive lyric with particularized immediacy.



McDonald's performance is part of a broader practice of subverting expectations of song types like torch songs—“freighted with gender and sex-coded meanings” (Hubbs 1996)—through juxtaposition, alternating two affectively opposed songs into a newly constructed ternary form. These performances most often happen in cabarets, recitals, and concerts—beyond the Broadway stage, where play with musical form is much more rigidly codified—providing a liberating space to confront theatrical stereotypes and animate intersectional subtexts.

Opera and Musical Theater in the United States • March 24, 2018

Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince, and George Furth’s 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along is a story told in reverse order. The show begins with three estranged friends whose lives are in a shambles in 1980; it ends with their first meeting as idealistic teenagers in 1957. In this paper, I explore how the musical—itself adapted from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1934 play of the same name (and concept)—uses music and lyrics to heighten the effect of the drama unfolding in reverse.

I focus on what Sondheim calls “reverse reprises…a method for holding the score together” (2010). Like traditional reprises, these are tunes that we hear more than once, gaining new dramatic meaning with each instance—only the “reprise” is performed first, and the original song second. Reverse reprises can consist of entire songs, like “Not a Day Goes By”; large-scale sections, like the refrain of “Old Friends”; or single phrases, like the opening of “Now You Know.” In most cases, Sondheim alters structural elements of both music and lyrics—harmonies, cadences, and accompanimental patterns, as well as rhyme schemes.

Each of the above tunes is performed first as a solo, and later by an ensemble. I argue that this overlooked characteristic of Merrily’s reverse reprises is dramatically significant. Rather than a traditional joyous group number reprised as a solitary reflection, reverse reprises call attention to the motives of everyone in the ensemble. Ultimately, Sondheim’s score refracts the dramatic path in Merrily from ambition, to isolation, to ruin.

Photo: Article excerpt from The New York Times, November 15, 1981