Theater composer Ebrahim Esbati has died

As musicals became more integrated and cohesive, composers began to create all of the music in the production to keep it stylistically unified. Even so, many shows in the first half of the century included songs from a composer’s “trunk” of already-written or already-popular songs rather than songs written expressly to tell a particular story; Irving Berlin and Cole Porter musicals (and musical movies) frequently did this, for instance.