SOURCE: Block, Geoffrey. “Happily Ever After West Side Story with Sondheim.” In Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim, pp. 274-93. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Block assesses Sondheim's dramatic output and investigates his place within the American musical theater tradition.

Running Long on Broadway After 1960

By 1960 Broadway had nearly completed the changing of the old guard. Among the giants who contributed significantly to Broadway during the 1940s and 1950s only Loesser and Styne managed to produce a truly major popular Broadway success in the 1960s: Loesser's How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1961) and Styne's Funny Girl (1964). Arguably more for economic than artistic reasons within the next several decades most of the long-running musicals featured in this volume would be at least partially eclipsed by new generations of ever-longer-running shows. In fact, only twelve of the musicals in the...