Training for Writers and Performers

Abstract

The widespread growth of Broadway and West End musicals, especially after World War II, has produced a global market in need of industry-ready performers and writers resulting in an exponential growth in training programmes. This chapter offers a global snapshot of the rise of systematic training looking at how innovations in the musical artform reinforce, in writing, collaborative training built primarily on the paradigm of close-knitted, sophisticated dramaturgies of canonical exemplars, and in integrative performance training, a versatility characterised by a seamless fusion of singing, acting and dancing (otherwise ubiquitously trademarked as the ‘triple threat’), which emerged alongside..