Sondheim in Our Time and His

W. Anthony Sheppard is Marylin and Arthur Levitt Professor of Music at Williams College. His first book, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater received the Kurt Weill Prize, his article on Madama Butterfly and film earned the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, an article on World War II film music was honored with the Alfred Einstein Award by the American Musicological Society, and "Puccini and the Music Boxes" received the AMS H. Colin Slim Award. His most recent book, Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination, received the AMS Music in American Culture Award and the Society for American Music Lowens Award. Sheppard's research has been supported by the NEH, the American Philosophical Society, the ACLS, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and is now Series Editor of AMS Studies in Music.

To say I have put Sondheim on a pedestal would be an understatement. He is the genius of all geniuses. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of my chosen religion: musical theater. As has been explored in multiple chapters in this book, Sondheim's monolithic greatness—to my mind and in the Broadway community at large—is connected to his ability to capture the nuanced paradoxes of the human heart and mind.

• Introduction: Our SondheimW. ANTHONY SHEPPARD Part I. Early Stages1. Williams College Before, During, and After Sondheim STEVE SWAYNE2. Fragments of Fairyland: Sondheim's Abandoned Adaptation of Mary Poppins DOMINIC McHUGH3. "...nearly everything I wrote": Sondheim and the Actors StudioJEFFREY MAGEE4. Breakout from the Asylum of Conformity: Sondheim, Laurents, and the Dramaturgy of Anyone Can Whistle JAMES O'LEARY Part II. Staging Identities5. Sondheim's WhitenessTODD DECKER6. Politics, Representation, and Collaboration in Pacific Overtures (1976)ASHLEY M. PRIBYL7. Sexual Identity in Company, 1969-2019ANDREW BUCHMAN8. Students Performing Gender with Sondheim's Musicals in the Age of #MeTooSTACY WOLF Part III. Versions, Genres, and Collaborations9. Sweeney's Identity Crisis and the Dynamic Potential of Generic HybridityKIM H. KOWALKE10. "A sad and listless affair": The Unsung Film Adaptation of Sondheim's A Little Night MusicGEOFFREY BLOCK Part IV. Reconceived Structures and Techniques11. Time and Time Again: Temporal Structures in Sondheim's MusicalsJIM LOVENSHEIMER12. Sunday in the Park with Sondheim, Lapine, Seurat, and BabbittLARA E. HOUSEZ13. Sondheim and the 11 O'clock PrincipleELIZABETH A. WELLS14. Finishing the Line: Wit, Rhythm, and Rhyme in SondheimW. ANTHONY SHEPPARD Afterword: Moving on with SondheimKRISTEN ANDERSON-LOPEZ