OLLI at Duke • Summer Term 2025
Course Description
Most courses on Broadway musicals focus on the works of a certain period or those by a certain team of creators. However, some shows resist such categories: either they’re not typical of their era or their creative teams didn’t create many shows. This course will explore six Broadway musicals—all critical and popular successes—that meet the criteria of both “singular” and “sensational”: Damn Yankees, The Music Man, The Wiz, A Chorus Line, Ain’t Misbehavin’, and Dreamgirls. When it seems useful to do so, the instructor will provide background information on the key creators and place the musicals in the context of their decade. The course is primarily lecture with video and audio clips; students will be able to ask questions and make comments during each class.
Instructor : Alan Teasley
Alan Teasley began his career as a high school English and drama teacher. After retiring from the Durham Public Schools in 2006, he taught in Duke’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program. A member of the OLLI Advisory Council, he is an avid theatergoer with a particular fondness for American musicals. This is his seventeenth course on musical theater for OLLI. Previous courses have focused on Stephen Sondheim, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Kander & Ebb, Frank Loesser, Lerner & Loewe, Jerry Herman, Bock & Harnick, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Schwartz, Jerome Kern, Jule Styne, the ten musicals that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, six “Off-Broadway Classics,” “British Musicals on Broadway,” and “The Women of Broadway”--a survey of musicals with book, lyrics, and/or music by women. He has also presented a two-course survey of “Broadway’s Silver Age,” focused on the musicals of Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart, George & Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter. All materials for these courses are on this website, except for the two courses on Stephen Sondheim which are located at https://www.sondheim101.com/