"This book explores the American musical from both the outside and the inside. In particular, this book concentrates on large-scale, philosophical issues of relevance to the genre, considering historical situations and formal procedures as they bear on the narratices we make concerning productions and performers, artists and audiences, commerce and context. The first four chapters discuss ways of defining histories and texts of the American musical, and also explore formal choices made by singers and dancers; the second group of chapters takes up the subtle challenges of the genre's signal transformations out of minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley to integration and beyond." --Back cover.