Pre-Opera Talks

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 Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s Opera Deep Dives series.