Opera Dives Deep: Rodgers and Hammerstein and The Sound of Music

This free series provides audiences with fresh insights from regional scholars and industry professionals to enrich appreciation and understanding of the operas in our season. Both established opera goers and curious newcomers alike are sure to make discoveries.

Rodgers and Hammerstein and The Sound of Music

Paul Laird’s lecture on Rodgers and Hammerstein for the Opera Deep Dives series will include overviews of each man’s work before they started to collaborate in 1943; their joint work on nine shows and two other projects; and their five most important shows that remain in the active repertory. He will also place The Sound of Music into the contexts of their work and the history of musical theater.

Paul Laird is Professor of Musicology at the University of Kansas, where he has taught since 1994. He teaches classes on Broadway musicals, American music, twentieth-century music, Baroque music, performance practice, and directs the Instrumental Collegium Musicum. In 2021 he won the Chancellor’s Club Career Teaching Award. Laird’s research specialties include the American musical theater, the music and works of Leonard Bernstein, the Spanish villancico, and early string instruments. He has published widely on these topics, his most recent books including West Side Story, Gypsy, and the Art of Broadway Orchestration (Routledge, 2022) and (co-written with Gonzalo Fernández Monte) West Side Story in Spain: The Transcultural Adaptation of an Iconic American Show (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With William A. Everett, Laird co-edited three editions of The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, and he has published dozens of articles and chapters in journals, books, and other edited collections. He has lectured at many conferences and universities in the United States, Canada, Ecuador, and various European countries. Laird frequently presents enthusiastic, informed pre-performance lectures for concerts and shows in the Kansas City area and teaches regularly for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Kansas. He has spoken often on the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein in both college classrooms and for Osher classes and looks forward to speaking about this important team’s work for LOKC’s Opera Deep Dives series.

The Sound of Music will appear at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts November 4-12, 2023. Get your tickets today. Learn more.

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Kauffman Foundation Conference Center, Brookside Room, 4801 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, United States