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- A blend of opera and musical theatre – Over in America, opera composers were up against a new (ish) genre of music storytelling: the musical. And while some composers chose to stay in the operatic lane, others wrote pieces that were true opera-musical hybrids with Broadway-style features like upbeat dance numbers and casual spoken dialogue.
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Apr 18, 2024 · Much of American popular music of the first decades of the 20th century was written by European immigrants, such as Victor Herbert, Rudolf Friml, and Sigmund Romberg.
- Classical Ballet
Classical ballet, with origins in the 17th-century French...
- Theatre Music
From the early 20th century new dramatic developments were...
- Minstrel Show
minstrel show, an American theatrical form, popular from the...
- Musical Film
There was also a growing subtlety in musicals, as in the...
- Dialogue
dialogue, in its widest sense, the recorded conversation of...
- Classical Ballet
Sep 21, 2020 · Prior to the boom of traditional musical theatre in the 1920s, musical productions were generally operatic in nature. Known by some as the “golden age of opera”, this is where the popularity of opera and operettas was at its peak. However, at the very beginning of the 20th century, a few musicals started to pop up here and there. Popular ...
- Overview
- Stage musicals
When, in the 1930s and ’40s, dancing became an integral element in a genre governed chiefly by song—instead of being merely a diversion—the “musical” established itself as the legitimate theatrical heir to “musical comedy” and a form of popular theatre art that dominated the latter half of the 20th century. It has been challenged by the newer “rock musical,” using a variation of the common musical vernacular and techniques related more to the recording studio than to the theatre, the effect of which is not yet determined. Meanwhile, what originally started as a democratic counterpart to aristocratic opera reached its fruition as the theatrical association of sentiment with illusion.
The sentiment is usually dispensed by the narrative; the illusion is created by the music. The most potent narratives in stage musicals have often been adaptations of classical drama and literature—for example, Romeo and Juliet transformed into West Side Story; The Taming of the Shrew into Kiss Me, Kate; Don Quixote into Man of La Mancha; and Oliver Twist into Oliver—or the many variations on the Cinderella-Pygmalion legend by which rags are transformed into riches (from The Shop Girl in 1894 to My Fair Lady in 1956). A distinction was at one time drawn between the frivolous musical comedy and the “musical play,” denoting a dramatically serious or even tragic narrative, but both are now equally defined as musicals.
Their specifically musical character is born from a marriage of convenience between first- and second-generation descendants of European operetta and music-hall variety, on the one hand, and American jazz and American music hall, on the other—plus the romantic balladry of both continents. An English musicologist, Wilfred Mellers, asserts that, although most successful stage songs contain subtleties unappreciated by the nonmusical listener, they all reflect “an illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions” and that “the world of musical comedy never gets beyond, or wants to get beyond, this illusion.”
The first musical comedy to be called so was A Gaiety Girl, staged in 1893 by George Edwardes at the Gaiety Theatre, London. A romantic farce adorned by the songs of Sidney Jones, it was successfully exported to New York in the same year. John Hollingshead (Edwardes’ predecessor at the Gaiety Theatre) wrote in 1903:
The invention or discovery of musical comedy was a happy inspiration of Mr. George Edwardes’s. It provided a new form of entertainment for playgoers who go to a theatre for amusement and recreation, which was more elastic in plot or story than the old burlesque . . . [It] exhibited a little of the old burletta and vaudeville, most of the best elements of farce, a dash of the French revue . . . and much that would not have been out of place in Parisian opéra-bouffe.
Some 50 years of development in musical theatre are reflected in the contrast between the foregoing remarks and the following comment in 1952 by Jack Burton, American theatre historian, on Oklahoma! (1943), an epoch-making musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein:
When, in the 1930s and ’40s, dancing became an integral element in a genre governed chiefly by song—instead of being merely a diversion—the “musical” established itself as the legitimate theatrical heir to “musical comedy” and a form of popular theatre art that dominated the latter half of the 20th century. It has been challenged by the newer “rock musical,” using a variation of the common musical vernacular and techniques related more to the recording studio than to the theatre, the effect of which is not yet determined. Meanwhile, what originally started as a democratic counterpart to aristocratic opera reached its fruition as the theatrical association of sentiment with illusion.
The sentiment is usually dispensed by the narrative; the illusion is created by the music. The most potent narratives in stage musicals have often been adaptations of classical drama and literature—for example, Romeo and Juliet transformed into West Side Story; The Taming of the Shrew into Kiss Me, Kate; Don Quixote into Man of La Mancha; and Oliver Twist into Oliver—or the many variations on the Cinderella-Pygmalion legend by which rags are transformed into riches (from The Shop Girl in 1894 to My Fair Lady in 1956). A distinction was at one time drawn between the frivolous musical comedy and the “musical play,” denoting a dramatically serious or even tragic narrative, but both are now equally defined as musicals.
Their specifically musical character is born from a marriage of convenience between first- and second-generation descendants of European operetta and music-hall variety, on the one hand, and American jazz and American music hall, on the other—plus the romantic balladry of both continents. An English musicologist, Wilfred Mellers, asserts that, although most successful stage songs contain subtleties unappreciated by the nonmusical listener, they all reflect “an illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions” and that “the world of musical comedy never gets beyond, or wants to get beyond, this illusion.”
The first musical comedy to be called so was A Gaiety Girl, staged in 1893 by George Edwardes at the Gaiety Theatre, London. A romantic farce adorned by the songs of Sidney Jones, it was successfully exported to New York in the same year. John Hollingshead (Edwardes’ predecessor at the Gaiety Theatre) wrote in 1903:
The invention or discovery of musical comedy was a happy inspiration of Mr. George Edwardes’s. It provided a new form of entertainment for playgoers who go to a theatre for amusement and recreation, which was more elastic in plot or story than the old burlesque . . . [It] exhibited a little of the old burletta and vaudeville, most of the best elements of farce, a dash of the French revue . . . and much that would not have been out of place in Parisian opéra-bouffe.
Some 50 years of development in musical theatre are reflected in the contrast between the foregoing remarks and the following comment in 1952 by Jack Burton, American theatre historian, on Oklahoma! (1943), an epoch-making musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein:
Since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals. Although music has been a part of dramatic presentations since ancient times, modern Western musical theatre emerged during the 19th century, with many structural elements established by the light opera works of Jacques Offenbach in France ...
Jul 10, 2020 · History in musicals! Here's my chronological timelime of popular musicals based on when they are set not when they were written.
Apr 7, 2020 · Enjoy! THE 101 GREATEST PLAYS FROM THE PAST 100 YEARS (1920-2020} 1. LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT by Eugene O'Neill [1956] For films, we offer Citizen Kane to the world. For TV shows, Breaking...
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