Thank You for Reading
When I started “Making Musicals Matter” in June, I wasn’t entirely sure what this project would become. Six months and twenty-three posts later, I’ve discovered something I didn’t anticipate: how meaningful it is to revisit the experiences and subjects that have fascinated me throughout my adult life through this particular lens—mingling scholarly reflection with personal memoir.
Writing publicly has changed how I think about my own work. Ideas that had been sitting quietly in my memory for decades have taken on new significance when I’ve tried to articulate why they matter. The process of explaining something forces you to understand it differently. I’ve found myself making connections I hadn’t seen before, between disparate moments in my career, between personal experiences and larger cultural patterns in musical theater.
Thank you for being part of that discovery. Whether you’ve been reading since June or just found your way here recently, your engagement—opening these posts, reading them, occasionally sharing them—has made this feel like a genuine conversation rather than shouting into the void.
Looking Ahead to 2026
I’m excited about what’s coming. In February, I’m teaching a class at the University of Delaware, where I did my undergraduate work in music and theater and where I began my teaching career back in 1979. Coming full circle to that place with SAVI and everything I’ve learned in the intervening decades feels significant. I’m planning to write about that experience—what it means to bring a methodology you’ve developed over fifty years back to the place where you first started forming your ideas about performance.
I’m also deep into the wonderful “messy middle” of developing my new musical Lawless, which means I’m living daily with questions about creative anachronism, dramatic structure, and how musicals can create meaning through their formal choices. Expect posts exploring those questions.
Beyond that, I have essays queued up about Bertolt Brecht’s place in musical theater performance training, experimental works from the 1970s-90s that lack proper documentation, and Frank Zappa’s unexpected experiments with the musical theater form, and his influence on my own sensibility. I’m also planning to revisit some earlier posts through re-publication in January, giving newer subscribers a chance to discover work from when the audience was smaller.
A Question for You
What aspects of musical theater creation and performance are you most curious about? What questions do you find yourself returning to? I’d genuinely love to hear from you—either in the comments here or by reply to this email. Your interests and questions might point me toward subjects I haven’t yet considered.
If You’re New Here
If you subscribed later in the year, you might want to explore some posts from the archive that have attracted strong readership:
“The Musical That Changed My Life” (September 11) tells the story of how I created Assassins in 1979—more than a decade before Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s famous musical of the same name.
“Me and Albert - a collaborator’s story” (December 3 and 9) explores my work with playwright Albert Innaurato on a musical version of his play Gemini and what I learned about the messy, human reality of artistic collaboration.
“The Songs of Angry Men” (August 4 and August 14) is a two-part series examining how musicals have spoken truth to power, looking closely at Les Misérables, Ragtime, The Lion King, and Assassins as works that give powerful voice to the yearning for justice and resistance to oppression.
Moving Forward
I’m grateful for the opportunity to share this work with you. Musical theater matters—as an art form, as a cultural force, as a way of making meaning through the integration of text, music, and performance. That’s always been true. What’s surprised me is how much it matters to have a space to think through these ideas with readers who care about the same questions.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing. Here’s to more discoveries in 2026.