About the work
Camelot is a musical by Frederick Loewe (music) and Alan Jay Lerner (lyrics and book), premiered on Broadway in 1960. It was the successful duo's final stage collaboration after My Fair Lady and is based on T. H. White's Arthurian novel The Once and Future King.
Plot
The young King Arthur builds an order of justice in legendary Camelot and founds the Round Table, whose knights are to set the ideal of chivalry against brute force. He marries Guinevere, but she and the noble French knight Lancelot fall in love. The scheming Mordred exposes the affair and forces Arthur to act against his own laws. War destroys the Round Table; yet in the end Arthur sends a boy away to preserve the memory of the "one brief shining moment" called Camelot.
Cultural significance
Camelot acquired special meaning through a tragic turn of history: after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, his widow Jacqueline likened the Kennedy years to the musical, whereupon "Camelot" became a symbol of an idealistic, lost era in American politics. With Richard Burton and Julie Andrews in the lead roles of the premiere and its title song, the work became a Broadway classic that is still regularly revived.