In 1950 Broadway was in its golden era, with a musical style that belonged to the mainstream of U.S. popular music. Within a decade, however, Broadway had all but disappeared from the pop charts, a condition that persists to the present day. Among the prime causes of that decline was the rise in the later 1950s of a new youth-oriented style of popular music. When rock ‘n’ roll first appeared, Broadway initially took little notice of it, and with good reason. Loud, dance-oriented music, usually built in circular forms with only a few different chords, seemed to offer little that could be used to express a character on stage, especially for composers steeped in the Tin Pan Alley traditions that had dominated on Broadway for more than half a century.

By the mid-1960s, however, Broadway could no longer ignore the newest sounds of pop music, and in 1968 Hair brought rock—at least something called by that name—to the New York stage. The show's subtitle, “The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” then gave its name to a new theatrical subgenre, which attempted to fuse the youth-oriented popular music of the day with the traditional techniques of Broadway. In the years since Hair, dozens of other shows, some explicitly labeled “rock musicals” and others simply using the sounds of rock or pop, have played in New York City and throughout the United States. Titles from the 1970s come quickly to mind—Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Grease—as do those musicals from more recent years—Rent, Spring Awakening, and Passing Strange. Still others, such as Jersey Boys and Rock of Ages, might also be included in the mix, as should many now-forgotten shows. Taken together, however, the shows that have played on Broadway as “rock musicals” cover such a broad range of stylistic traits as to almost belie the notion of a unified genre. Nevertheless, the term “rock musical” continues to be used, often casually, to describe many theatrical works that either draw on musical styles associated most frequently with U.S. youth or otherwise seem to express a youthful sensibility outside the theatrical traditions from Jerome Kern to Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Given the impact of rock and other forms of popular music on Broadway over the past five decades, Elizabeth L. Wollman's The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig is noteworthy as the first published monograph on the rock musical. To be more accurate, this book, which is a revision of the author's 2002 doctoral dissertation, is not quite the “history” that the publisher's subtitle claims. Wollman trained as an ethnomusicologist, and although her text does follow a roughly chronological order, her book is not an attempt to identify all productions or other events related to the rock musical. It is also not a close study of the music itself. As the author notes, “I chose not to focus on the compositional attributes of specific songs, but instead to concentrate on broader dimensions of the topic. This book is thus a social history, not a book of music analysis” (9–10). My observations are not complaints, but rather an acknowledgement of how Wollman has chosen to make one of the first major forays into this previously uncharted territory.

Her book is laid out as an introduction and six chapters, which form the chronology, with five “interludes” between the chapters. Each chapter deals roughly with a single decade, beginning with the late 1950s and ending just after the turn of the millennium, and focuses on one major topic from that particular decade. The interludes provide closer looks at various broad issues, which are not discussed in chronological order. As Wollman notes, readers interested primarily in history can read the chapters and skip the interludes, whereas others more interested in interpretation with their history can read the interludes in any order they choose (7). Although it may be possible to skip the interludes, such an approach would miss some of Wollman's more significant contributions to the topic.

It is also important to note how Wollman works around the problem of defining the rock musical, something that she never explicitly does. Presumably her definition is apparent from the shows that she chooses to examine. She includes lengthy discussions of Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Rent, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and several other obvious candidates for inclusion in the genre, but some readers may wonder about other not-so-obvious shows that are considered, such as Little Shop of Horrors and Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death, or skipped over, like Grease. This is not to say that Wollman has made any egregious mistakes of either omission—she makes no claims for comprehensiveness—or inclusion. Rather, it simply emphasizes the problems of defining the genre. If there is an area that might have received greater attention, it is the contributions of off-Broadway, especially in the 1960s. There is no mention of any shows by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford (Now is the Time for All Good Men [26 September–31 December 1967] and The Last Sweet Days of Isaac [26 January 1970–2 May 1971]), for instance.

These quibbles aside, Wollman is at her best addressing larger issues in the explanatory interludes. From the first interlude onward, she makes clear the tension between the “authenticity” of rock music, seen chiefly in the unfettered expression of a performer's own true emotions in performance, and the artifice of the theater, seen in the eight weekly repetitions of a well-rehearsed show. In Wollman's analysis, the clash between the spontaneity of the former and the regimentation of the latter is a nearly unbridgeable gap, and she offers several excellent examples of this problem. Her description of the off-Broadway show Bright Lights, Big City (24 February–21 March 1999), which she observed closely from its workshops to its production, is particularly instructive. Composer Paul Scott Goodman, who also appeared on stage, single-handedly destroyed his own show by refusing to submit to the discipline of theatrical routine in order to indulge in self-centered, improvisatory behavior on a nightly basis (190–99). Similarly, Stephen Trask, lead guitarist for the on-stage band in Hedwig, was more interested in drawing attention to himself as a rock star than in integrating himself into the cast (186–89). Finally, Paul Simon's approach to rehearsals, which resembled the production of a studio album and not a Broadway show, doomed The Capeman as a theatrical work (176–80).

Wollman also gives a good account in Interlude 4 of how the renovations of New York's Times Square area—its “Disneyfication,” as it has been called—have affected commercial theater in New York, and not just rock musicals. To her credit, she relies here more on interviews with nearly a dozen different individuals—including producers, directors, actors, theater technicians, and ordinary theatergoers—than just published sources. Wollman's frequent use of interviews with figures such as the now-deceased Tom O'Horgan, director of Hair and several other early rock musicals, makes this book a quasi-primary source that will retain its value for theater historians for some time to come.

This book is a good introduction to the topic for almost anyone from the nonspecialist to the scholar. Again, some readers might wish for more about the off-Broadway origins of the rock musical or about nostalgia-driven “jukebox musicals” that use pre-existing songs in place of original music, such as Jersey Boys or Rock of Ages, but Wollman has given us enough of a starting point in her discussion of the aesthetics of the rock musical for others to continue this line of inquiry. At a time when Mamma Mia! is entering its second decade on Broadway and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a show with a score composed by two rock musicians, has become a punch line for late-night comedians after burning through $70 million of investors’ money, the question of how rock music and Broadway interact is more than relevant today.