The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical is dedicated to the musical's evolving relationship to American culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Part 1 - Setting the Stage: An Introduction to Analyzing the Musical Theater / 1. Musical Theater Reception Theory, Or What Happens When You See a Show? (Katie Welsh and Stacy Wolf) / 2. "[title of chapter]" (Millie Taylor) / Part 2 - Starting with the '70s / 3. They're Playing My Song: The American Musical in the Me-Decade (Bryan M. Vandevender) / 4. "My Corner of the Sky": Adolescence and Coming of Age in the Musicals of Stephen Schwartz (Ryan Bunch) / 5. Style as Star: Bob Fosse and Sixty Seconds That Changed Broadway (Ryan Donovan) / 6. Recreating the Ephemeral: Broadway Revivals Since 1971 (James Lovensheimer) / Part 3 - Aesthetic Transformations / 7. Sing: Musical Theater Voices from Superstar to Hamilton (Ben Macpherson) / 8. Amplifying Broadway After the Golden Age (Arreanna Rostosky) / 9. Starlight Expression and Phantom Operatics: Technology, Performance and the Megamusical's Aesthetic of the Voice (Dominic Symonds) / 10. The Sung and the Spoken in Michael John LaChiusa's Musicals (Alex Bádue) / 11. The New "Sounds of Broadway": Orchestrating Electronic Instruments in Contemporary Musicals (Michael M. Kennedy) / 12. Chart-Toppers to Showstoppers: Pop Artists Scoring the Broadway Stage (Matthew Lockitt) / 13. Scenographic Aesthetics and Automated Technologies in Broadway Musicals (Christin Essin) / Part 4 - Reading the Musical Through Gender / 14. Do-Re-#MeToo: Women, Work and Representation in the Broadway Musical (Mary Jo Lodge) / 15. It's Still Working: Collaborating to Perform the Stories of Everyday Americans, Then and Now (Trudi Wright) / 16. The Pink Elephant in the Room (Aaron C. Thomas) / 17. "A Little More Mascara": Drag and the Broadway Musical from La Cage aux Folles to Kinky Boots (John M. Clum) / Part 5 - Reading the Musical through Race and Ethnicity / 18. The Multiracial Musical Metropolis: Casting and Race after A Chorus Line (Todd Decker) / 19. "Before the Parade Passes By": All-Black and All-Asian Hello, Dolly! as Celebration of Difference (Sissi Liu) / 20. Race and the City: Racial Formation in Avenue Q (SAJones) / 21. Can We "Leave Behind the World We Know"? Exploring Race and Ethnicity in the Musicals of Lin-Manuel Miranda (Elizabeth Titrington Craft) / 22. Falsettos and Indecent in the Shadow of Fiddler on the Roof: Reconsidering Jewish Identity on Broadway in the New Millennium (Raymond Knapp and Zelda Knapp) / Part 6 - Reading the Musical through Dance / 23. What Makes a Musical? Contact (2000) and Debates About Genre at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century (Joanna Dee Das) / 24. Dance in Musical Theater Revival and Adaptation: Engaging With the Past While Creating Dances for the Present (Liza Gennaro) / 25. The Convergence of Dance Styles in Hamilton: An American Musical (Phoebe Rumsey) / Part 7 - Reading the Musical through Interdisciplinary Lenses / 26. Post-Secular Musicals in a Post-Truth World (Jake Johnson) / 27. Let's Do the Time Warp Again: Performing Time, Genre, and Spectatorship (Sarah Taylor Ellis) / 28. The Eye of the Storm: Reading Next to Normal with Psychoanalysis (Aleksei Grinenko) / 29. Parent/Child Relationships in the Musicals of Stephen Schwartz (Paul R. Laird) / 30. John Kander: The First Ninety-One Years (James Leve) / 31. Unlikely Subjects: The Critical Reception of History Musicals (Elissa Harbert) / Part 8 - Beyond Broadway: New Media and Fan Studies / 32. Worshipping Lin-Manuel Miranda: Fans and Totems in the Digital Age (Jessica Hillman-McCord) / 33. "Trash Talk and Virtual Protests: The Musical Genre's Personal and Political Interactivity in the Age of Social Media" (Kelly Kessler) / 34. The Great Generational Divide: Stage-to-Screen Hollywood Musical Adaptations and the Enactment of Fandom (Holley Replogle-Wong) / 35. Play It Again (and Again, and Again): The Superfan and Musical Theater (James Deaville) / 36. Joss Whedon and the Geek Musical (Renée Camus) / 37. "YouTube! Musicals! YouTubesicals!" Cultivating Theater Fandom Through New Media (Aya Esther Hayashi) / 38. Dual-Focus Strategy in a Serial Narrative: SMASH, Nashville, and the Television Musical Series (Robynn Stilwell) / Part 9 - Growth and Expansion: Across the Country and Around the World / 39. Sharon McQueen and Milwaukee's Alternative Regional Musical Theater (Amanda McQueen) / 40. Musicals in the Regional Theater (Jeffrey Ullom) / 41. Big River: A New Road to Broadway (Steven Adler) / 42. The Third Biggest Market: Musical Theater in Germany Since 1990 (Frédéric Döhl) / 43. The Korean Self/American Other: Korean Musical Theater in the Context of National Cultural Development (Hyunjung Lee) / 44. The Lion King: An International History (Susan Bennett)