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Musical theatre. The Black Crook was a hit musical on Broadway in 1866. [1] Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through words, music, movement and technical aspects of the ...
Apr 18, 2024 · A musical is a theatrical production that is characteristically sentimental and amusing in nature, with a simple but distinctive plot, and offering music, dancing, and dialogue. Notable musicals include Show Boat (1927), Oklahoma! (1943), West Side Story (1957), Hair (1967), Cats (1981), and Hamilton (2015).
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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May 25, 2023 · Musical Theater: A Brief History. The following information on musical theater is excerpted from the Berklee Online course Script Analysis for Theater, authored by David Valdes, which is enrolling now. Theater has always been based on crafting stories and images meant to yield emotional experiences for an audience, whether to enlighten, educate ...
Dec 28, 2023 · The term “musical theatre” has seemingly been in a constant state of evolution since ancient times. Despite the fact that motion pictures have dented the popularity of musical theatre, the art form is still alive and well today. It’s a safe bet that the tradition of musical theatre will continue to evolve far into the generations of the ...
- Beginnings
- Development of Musical Comedy
- Operetta and World War I
- The Roaring Twenties
- The 1930s
- The Golden Age
- More Recent Eras
Musical theater in Europe dates back to the theater of the ancient Greeks, who included music and dance in their stage comedies and tragedies as early as the fifth century B.C.E. Aeschylus and Sophocles even composed their own music to accompany their plays. The third century B.C.E. Roman comedies of Plautus included song and dance routines perform...
The first theater piece that conforms to the modern conception of a musical is generally considered to be The Black Crook, which premiered in New York on September 12, 1866. The production was a staggering five-and-a-half hours long, but despite its length, it ran for a record-breaking 474 performances. The same year, The Black Domino/Between You, ...
Among the best-known composers of operetta, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, were Jacques Offenbach and Johann Strauss II. In England, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan created an English answer to French operetta, styled British comic opera, that became family-friendly hits in Britain and America in the 1870s and 1880s. Alth...
By the end of the 1920s, motion pictures like The Jazz Singer could be presented with synchronized sound, and critics wondered if the cinema would replace live theater altogether. The musicals of the Roaring Twenties, borrowing from vaudeville, music hall, and other light entertainments, tended to ignore the plot in favor of emphasizing star actors...
Encouraged by the success of Show Boat, creative teams began following the format of that popular hit. Of Thee I Sing (1931), a political satire with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Morrie Ryskind, was the first musical to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The Band Wagon (1931), with a score by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz,...
The Golden Age of the Broadway musical is generally considered to have begun with Oklahoma! (1943) and to have ended with Hair(1968).
1970s
After the success of Hair, rock musicals flourished in the 1970s, with Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, Grease, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Some of these rock musicals began with "concept albums" and then moved to film or stage, such as Tommy. Others had no dialogue or were otherwise reminiscent of opera, with dramatic, emotional themes; these were referred to as rock operas. The musical also went in other directions. Shows like Raisin, Dreamgirls, Purlie, and The Wiz brought a significant...
1980s and 1990s
The 1980s and 1990s saw the influence of European "mega-musicals" or "pop operas," which typically featured a pop-influenced score and had large casts and sets and were identified as much by their notable effects—a falling chandelier (in Phantom), a helicopter landing on stage (in Miss Saigon)—as they were by anything else in the production. Many were based on novels or other works of literature. The most important writers of mega-musicals include the French team of Claude-Michel Schönberg an...
Looking back at the history of musical theater in America, there was a period of relative stability followed by some pivotal points of change in the way musicals were presented. Describe when how the musical changed over the course of the last hundred years. In the 1970’s and 1980’s musical theater hit a slump after about 60 years of ...
What is musical theatre? Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole.
