Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 book, Sex and the Single Girl, gave rise to one of the main female cultural icons of the 1960s’ sexual revolution: indeed, the “single girl” became part and parcel of this moment of redefinition of female identity. The three American musicals under study, Sweet Charity (1966), Cabaret (1966) and Thoroughly Modern Millie (musical film, 1967), all present a single girl as their main protagonist, whose mobile and active body occupies most of the space on stage and/or on screen, especially during musical numbers. Musical theatre and film are usually envisioned as conformist, if not counter-revolutionary cultural products. Despite sporting an outstanding number of female protagonists, postwar musicals offered very little possibility of emancipation to their heroines, who were expected to comply with the usual heterosexual imperative of the “marriage trope,” defined by Rick Altman in The American Film Musical (1987) as one of the structuring principles of the genre. However, just as the sexual revolution of the 1960s made the contestation of this heterosexual paradigm possible, the musical itself underwent its own formal revolution. Political concerns regarding the female body and identity are therefore linked to a moment of crisis of the musical, a crisis which manifested itself through growing audience disinterest and the subsequent necessary reinvention of the genre's classic formulas. These three musicals belong to the period bridging the Golden Age of musical theatre and film and the emergence of new generic possibilities: their specific treatment of the single girl’s body seems to embody this very moment of tension and transition. These contradictory pulls introduced a sense of trouble in the representation of the female body in musical theatre and film. Moreover, the understanding of musicals as “works-in-process” (Bruce Kirle) puts forward the necessity to study the evolutions and transformations of this cultural embodiment of the 1960s sexual revolution through subsequent filmic and/or theatrical adaptations.