Theatre

Theatre is the recorded repertoire of the dramatic stage: original cast albums, stage scores and spoken productions preserved as audio documents. Its core artefact is the cast recording, which fixes a production's score, performances and dramatic sequence in a form designed to reconstruct the show for a listener who was not in the room. The repertoire spans the integrated Broadway musical of *Rodgers and Hammerstein*, the concept musicals of *Stephen Sondheim*, the sung-through scores of *Andrew Lloyd Webber* and the hip-hop staging of *Lin-Manuel Miranda*, alongside recordings of straight plays and verse drama. Cast albums function simultaneously as souvenir, archive and primary distribution channel for stage writing.