Singing History

How musicals explain the last 100 years 

What do Wicked, Cats, and West Side Story have in common? They haven’t just made us sing — they’ve shaped how we understand the world, often without our noticing. Long dismissed as mere entertainment, musical theatre is in fact one of the most revealing cultural archives of the last century. Singing History sets out to prove it. 

In this sharp and accessible essay, cultural critic and theatre lover Javi Alonso traces a cultural and social history of the last nine decades through nine landmark musicals, from Carousel and West Side Story to Wicked, Cats, and Waitress. Treating each work as a product of its time, the book explores how major social transformations have been consciously — and unconsciously — staged through song, movement, and spectacle. 

Drawing on history, sociology, politics, economics, and anthropology, Alonso addresses a gap in cultural nonfiction by examining musical theatre as a serious object of analysis. While painting, literature, cinema, and opera have long been studied through sociocultural lenses, Singing History argues that the musical — a hybrid form combining text, music, choreography, design, and architecture — deserves a place within that canon. 

From post-war masculinity and urban violence to racism, queerness, propaganda, gentrification, and collective memory, the book combines cultural analysis, historical context, and personal insight to show how musicals function not merely as a genre, but as a flexible narrative format capable of articulating complex ideas that other arts often soften or sidestep.  

A lucid, passionate defense of musical theatre as a legitimate cultural language and one of the great storytellers of modern history. Because sometimes history isn’t only written. Sometimes, it’s sung.