Abstract
The works collected in this submission constitute the most significant and influential part of my scholarship in dramaturgy, storytelling, adaptation and intertextuality in musical theatre, and are taken from three publications: four chapters are from How Musicals Work and How to Write Your Own (Woolford, 2012), two chapters are from a short monograph, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music (Woolford, 2020) and one chapter, ‘Where did we go right (and wrong)?: Success and failure in the adaptations of The Producers from and to the screen’ (Woolford, 2018) is from an edited collection, Twenty-First Century Musicals From Stage to Screen (Rodesthenous, 2018).
How Musicals Work (Woolford, 2012) is a guide for writers and interested parties. The extracted chapters are concerned with source material, foundations, structure and song-spotting. The first of these is concerned with practical considerations of adaptation, the second with basic dramaturgy and the final two include significant original research to guide writers in storytelling and the placements of song within the narrative. The chapter from Twenty-First Century Musicals From Stage to Screen (Rodesthenous, 2018) considers questions of success and failure in the adaptation of The Producers (1967) for the Broadway stage (2001) and the subsequent movie musical (2005) of the same name. The first chapter of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music considers the adaptation of the true story of the von Trapp family to the stage (1959) and subsequent film (1965), and the second chapter considers the intertextual relationship between the movie version and the subsequent stage productions. The document contextualises the published works from a scholar-practitioner perspective within academia concerned with dramaturgy, structure, storytelling, adaptation and intertextuality in musical theatre.