Kurt Gänzl

Kurt-Friedrich Gänzl (born 15 February 1946) is a writer, musicologist, casting director and singer best known for his books about musical theatre. After a decade-long acting and singing career and a second career as a casting director of West End shows, Gänzl has become one of the world's most important chroniclers of the history of musical theatre. According to Canal Académie, "Kurt Gänzl is an institution. No one interested in musicals and operetta can ignore that. He is the world reference – with some few others, like Gerald Bordman, Ken Bloom, or Andrew Lamb – for that subject".

Gänzl was born Brian Roy Gallas in Wellington, New Zealand and is of Austrian descent, the son of Frederick, né Fritz Eduard Gänzl, an educator, and Nancy Gallas, née Agnes Ada Welsh.He studied law and classics at University of Canterbury in New Zealand, receiving a master's degree in 1967 while performing as a radio and concert vocalist.

Early in his career, Gänzl wrote plays. His one-act plays Elektra and The Women of Troy were produced in New Zealand in 1966 and 1967 by Elmwood Players. The latter play won the British Drama League (now British Theatre Association/Drama Magazine) award in 1967. The next year, Ganzl joined the New Zealand Opera Company as a bass soloist. After the company closed, he moved to London and studied for a year at the London Opera Centre. For ten years, he worked as a performer, including a season in London's hit show, The Black and White Minstrels. His last show was Harold Fielding's Hans Andersen at the London Palladium. He then worked as a talent agent and as a casting director for over a dozen musicals and plays in London's West End theatres and for musical and operatic productions in Europe, Australia and America.

While still working as a casting director, Gänzl began writing theatre reference works. In 1986 he published his two-volume history, The British Musical Theatre (Macmillan Press, 1986), which won the Roger Machell Prize for the year's best performing-arts book and the British Library Association's McColvin Medal for the outstanding reference work (any subject) of its season. This was followed by Gänzl's Book of the Musical Theatre (1988 with Andrew Lamb), The Blackwell Guide to the Musical Theater on Record (1989), The Complete 'Aspects of Love' (1990), five editions of Musicals (1995; US: Song and Dance: The Complete Story of Stage Musicals), and The Musical: A Concise History (1997). Gänzl has published over a dozen important books on musical theatre. He has also contributed many biographical entries to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Grove's Encyclopaedia of Music.

Gänzl's seminal reference work, The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre, was published in 1994 and greatly expanded in a second edition in 2001. It was a Dartmouth Medal honoree in 1995 and was awarded "Outstanding Reference Source" in 1997 by the American Library Association. Theatre historian John Kenrick describes it as follows: "Only serious research libraries carry this set listing thousands of shows and individuals. This expanded update of the 1995 original edition is the best source to date on European musicals, with solid coverage of Broadway too." Another critic calls it "the most exhaustive study anyone has yet made of musicals, and it is difficult to imagine it being done in a better or more thorough way."

The Times wrote, "So, with The Encyclopaedia of the Musical Theatre, Kurt Ganzl... has transcended all rivals. His work embraces not only Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue, but Vienna and Budapest, Paris and Rome, Sydney and Toronto. He even apologises for including only three New Zealand entries. If there is a musical production of any kind that he does not know about, then it is odds-on that nobody else does either." Gänzl has said, "My goals are to make the musical theater a respectable academic subject and to put the musical theater into its international context. I want to bring the so-called 'musical' and 'operetta' back together as part of the same art form and to dispel some of the early myths and quasi-historical errors and distortions that have become accepted as part of musical theater history."

At the end of the 1980s, Gänzl moved to St. Paul de Vence in the south of France to concentrate on writing full-time. He later shared his time with New Zealand (where he owns several harness racing horses), Berlin and other operatic centres.

His partner of 30 years, the theatrical agent Ian Bevan, died in 2006 aged 87. His younger brother is the poet and educator John Gallas (born 11 January 1950).

• 1986: The British Musical Theatre (2 vols.; Macmillan Press) ISBN 0-19-520509-X
• 1988: Gänzl's Book of the Musical Theatre (with Andrew Lamb; Bodley Head/Schirmer) ISBN 0-02-871941-7
• 1989: The Blackwell Guide to the Musical Theatre on Record. Blackwell ISBN 0-631-16517-7
• 1990: The Complete "Aspects of Love" (Aurum Press) ISBN 0-670-83192-1
• 1994: The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre (Blackwell/Schirmer; 2 vols, expanded in 2001 to 3 vols.) ISBN 0-02-864970-2
• 1995: Musicals: the Illustrated Story (Carlton) ISBN 0-7475-2381-9
  • 1995 (US edition of same): Song and Dance: The Complete Story of Stage Musicals (Smithmark Publishers) ISBN 0-8317-1890-0
• 1995: Gänzl's Book of the Broadway Musical (Schirmer; Macmillan) ISBN 0-02-870832-6
• 1997: The Musical: a Concise History (Boston: Northeastern University Press ISBN 1-55553-311-6
• 2002: Lydia Thompson: Queen of Burlesque (NY & London: Routledge) ISBN 0-415-93766-3
• 2002: William B. Gill: From the Gold Fields to Broadway (Routledge) ISBN 0-415-93767-1
• 2007: Emily Soldene: In Search of a Singer (Steele Roberts) ISBN 978-1-877338-72-4