“It is nonsense to say what a musical should or should not be. It should be anything it wants to be, and if you don’t like it you don’t have to go to it. There is only one absolutely indispensable element that a musical must have. It must have music. And there is only one thing that it has to be – it has to be good.”
– Oscar Hammerstien II
as quoted by Stanley Green in The World of Musical Comedy (New York: Ziff Davis Publishing, 1960), p. 7.