Creating the «New Musical»: Harold Prince in Berlin

This volume is a contribution to the aesthetics of the «new musical», which has developed into a high art form over the last thirty years. The decisive breakthrough occurred with Bernstein‘s West Side Story in 1957. It was the producer of this show, Harold Prince, whose subsequent epoch-making directorial and conceptual work created the basis on which the individual work of Kander, Sondheim and Lloyd Webber reached a unified level of the highest quality. The «new musical» and its creator Harold Prince were the subjects of a symposium held at the Neuköllner Oper in Berlin a few days after the World Premiere of Bounce in the presence of the Broadway Master. Contributors were academics and theatre practitioners offering a double perspective modeled on the outstanding example of the collaboration set by Foster Hirsch and Harold Prince.