MTEA Journal

Of all the areas that I teach, one that I have seen move the furthest has been Musical Theatre History.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I believe that the rapid access to information has made facts so quick to attain that it is no longer necessary to drill the type of details that my generation was forced to memorize in MT history. Yes, there are certain musical theatre facts that one needs to know. The musicals that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote, for example, or that Sondheim won his Pulitzer for Sunday in the Park. Gone are the days, however, that we need to ask students to memorize that West Side Story opened on Broadway on September 26, 1957, at the Winter Garden Theatre because if they don’t remember those details, they can look it up faster than most people my age can dig into their memory banks for the information...