This article aims to stimulate interest in the translation of musical texts by examining Anglo-American musicals sung in Spanish, a genre which has yielded some of the most outstanding successes in Spain’s theatre world ever since its arrival in the 1970s. It offers a historical overview of the reception of stage musicals in Spain and examines the criteria for the selection of source texts for performance in sung translation. Extra-textual factors such as audience needs and expectations, production processes and commercial and economic constraints are examined closely in an attempt to contextualize a translation phenomenon which has helped to fill a ‘cultural gap’ and has had a significant impact on the Spanish theatre system. The article demonstrates that the successful importation of Anglo-American musicals into Spain has been instrumental in fostering the autochthonous production of a genre apparently foreign to the country’s musical tradition. A number of concepts are borrowed from theatre and cultural studies, as well as from pragmatics, to explain this phenomenon, including ‘reverence’, ‘productive reception’ and ‘social relevance’.