The Steve Bias

Various composers and lyricists have contributed to the array of musicals that have graced the Great White Way: from Sondheim (Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Company) to Schwartz (Wicked, Godspell, Pippin), Flaherty (Once On This Island, Ragtime, Anastasia) to Sater (Spring Awakening, Alice by Heart, Some Lovers), Lutvak (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) to Trask (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), these writers share fame among theater enthusiasts, a slew of Tony Awards, and the nickname “Steve.” But are Steves more likely to find success in musical theater?

In 2023, I conducted a survey on Reddit, asking users of r/Broadway to name their top 10 songs. 79 users submitted 786 total songs, which amounted to 459 unique songs from 178 different musicals. These 178 musicals were written by a total of 71 writers (e.g. Lin-Manuel Miranda) or writing teams (e.g. Rodgers & Hammerstein). Stephen Sondheim accounted for 10% of the songs, having written 47 of the submitted numbers. The result that most intrigued me was that 5% of the writers (composer or lyricist) were named Steven or Stephen; yet they wrote 21% of the named songs. This gives way to the Steve bias. 

Steve bias: composers/lyricists named Steve are significantly more likely to write notable musicals than those who are not named Steve. 

In the data collected from the Reddit survey, 6 Steves wrote 96 songs. 65 non-Steves wrote the remaining 363 songs. An unpaired two-tailed t test was conducted, which yielded a t value (the difference between the group means and the pooled standard error) of 21.8154; with a p value of p<0.0001, this data is significant. 

What does this mean? The Stephen bias holds up. Composers/lyricists are more likely to write popular songs if their name is Steve. 

Surely this is just evidence for Steve being the most popular name in musical theater — hypothesis two. 

I curate a spreadsheet of musicals, currently sitting at 1,222 musicals. These musicals were written by 780 different composers and 817 different lyricists. I sorted the names of these writers and came up with the following chart of name popularity:

Composer name	Quantity	Lyricist name	Quantity
Jonathan	29	Jonathan	33
Robert	27	Robert	25
James	24	Michael	23
Michael	23	David	21
Richard	23	James	19
David	21	Richard	18
Harold	17	George	16
William	15	Steven	15
George	14	William	15
Paul	14	Paul	13

Steve appears surprisingly infrequently considering the hypothesis. Less than 2% (1.87%) of lyricists in musical theater are named Steve, and Steve doesn’t even crack the top ten names in the composer category. Statistically, the names that make up musical theater are quite diverse (in number, at least). 

15 (1.87%) of 817 musical theater lyricists are named Steve. Yet nearly half of them (6) made it into the 71 writers that redditors named. While Steve may not be the most popular name — or even a particularly common one — in musical theater, it does tend to be attached to theater’s more popular writers. 

Future discussion shall follow, elaborating on the gender bias among musical theater writers. The top ten names of both composers and lyricists were male names; indeed, no female name appeared more than thrice in the data. This implies that either women are rare in musical theater writing, or that their names are more varied.

Of course, this study does smell of correlation equaling causation. It is highly unlikely that the name of the writer has much bearing on their success in this genre (at least beyond such barriers as race and gender) — there is no logical explanation for why Steves are more successful musical theater writers than Freds. This article is purely for entertainment purposes and to amuse the reader and the author alike.