Musicals & Musical Theater: A Guide to Research and Resources

This guide provides a basic starting point to locate key resources for studying and researching musicals and musical theater at Princeton.

Studying opera or taking voice lessons? See our guides to Opera and Vocal Music.

For almost all online searches, the spelling theater or theatre really matters and can drastically affect search results. Note these general guidelines of when to use one or the other.

American practice (can be inconsistent):

• Theater: Standard spelling used in most U.S. academic writing and popular journalism about the discipline, as well as the general term for the performance venue. Also the prescribed usage for subject descriptors in U.S.-based library catalogs and journal databases.
• Theatre: Spelling often (but not always) found in titles of companies, institutes, performance houses, journals, and websites; and in academic and arts-focused writing to express the collective art form (e.g., "the American theatre," "theatre arts," "theatre and performance studies").

British & Canadian practice: Use theatre for all contexts (including book titles issued jointly in the U.S. and the U.K., such as the Oxford and Cambridge university presses).

Subject search in library catalog or database: Use theater for all contexts (unless working in a Canadian or British resource or catalog), even if the title of the publication has "theatre."

• Tip: a truncation search on theat* will retrieve results on both spellings, plus the plural forms and the adjective "theatrical."