Maggie May is a musical with a book by Alun Owen and music and lyrics by Lionel Bart. Based on "Maggie May", a traditional ballad about a Liverpool prostitute, it deals with trade union ethics and disputes among Irish-Catholic dockers in Liverpool, centring on the life of streetwalker Margaret Mary Duffy and her sweetheart, a freewheeling sailor.

Lionel Bart was a British writer and composer of pop music and musicals. He wrote Tommy Steele's "Rock with the Caveman" and was the sole creator of the musical Oliver! (1960). With Oliver! and his work alongside theatre director Joan Littlewood at Theatre Royal, Stratford East, he played an instrumental role in the 1960s birth of the British musical theatre scene after an era when American musicals had dominated the West End.