Book Reviews: A Teacher's Guide to Musical Theatre

A helping hand for teachers embarking on central bases of music theatre with their students

A Teacher's Guide to Musical Theatre by Kenneth Pickering and David Henson provides 12 lessons for musical theatre classes. The book is aimed at those teaching young people who have opted to take their study of musical theatre further. The book outlines a topic for each lesson and the various tasks required to compete said topic (with the view that a lesson would take approximately three hours).

There are fantastic ideas for lessons; one lesson titled ‘Patter and Rap’ studies The Mikado and Sondheim's Pacific Overtures and the way in which rap could be performed in these productions. The lesson then goes on to look at Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. The diverse choice of material and the study of patter and rap provides a fresh feel to the study of musical theatre teaching. The lesson's final task asks the students to look at Pyramus and Thisbe's conversation from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and then to create the scene in a rap style. The task is innovative, interesting and offers the opportunity for students to take this famous piece of spoken dialogue and turn it into something new.