Musical Theater

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The Fantasticks is the longest-running musical in history

Musical Theater Portal

Musical theater is a form of theater combining music, songs, spoken dialog and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole.

Musical theater works, usually referred to as "musicals", are performed around the world. They may be presented in large venues, such as big budget West End and Broadway theatewr productions in London and New York City, or in smaller Off-Broadway or regional productions, on tour, or by amateur groups in schools, theaters and other performance spaces. In addition to Britain and the U.S., there are vibrant musical theater scenes in Germany, Austria, Philippines, France, Canada, Japan, Eastern Europe, Australia, and other countries.

Some famous musicals include Oklahoma!, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Les Misérables, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Rent, and The Producers.

Introduction and definitions

The three main components of a musical are the music, the lyrics, and the book. The book of a musical refers to the "play" or story of the show – in effect its spoken (not sung) lines; however, "book" can also refer to the dialog and lyrics together, which are sometimes referred to (as in opera) as the libretto (Italian for “little book”). The music and lyrics together form the score of the musical. The interpretation of the musical by the creative team heavily influences the way that the musical is presented. The creative team includes a director, a musical director and usually a choreographer. A musicals production is also creatively characterized by technical aspects, such as set, costumes, stage properties, lighting, etc. that generally change from production to production (although some famous production aspects tend to be retained from the original production, for example, Bob Fosse's choregraphy in Chicago).

There is no fixed length for a musical, and it can range from a short one-act entertainment to several acts and several hours in length (or even a multi-evening presentation); however, most musicals range from one and a half hours to three hours. Musicals today are typically presented in two acts, with one intermission ten to 20 minutes in length. The first act is almost always somewhat longer than the second act, and generally introduces most of the music. A musical may be built around 4-6 main theme tunes that are reprised throughout the show, or consist of a series of songs not directly musically related. Spoken dialog is generally interspersed between musical numbers, although the use of "sung dialog" or recitative is not unknown, especially in so-called "sung-through" musicals such as Les Misérables.

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Musical theater is closely related to another theatrical performance art, opera. These forms are usually distinguished by weighing a number of factors. Musicals generally have a greater focus on spoken dialog (though some musicals are entirely accompanied and sung through, such as Jesus Christ Superstar and Les Misérables; and on the other hand some operas, such as Die Zauberflöte, and most operettas, have some unaccompanied dialog), on dancing (particularly by the principal performers as well as the chorus), on the use of various genres of popular music (or at least popular singing styles), and on the avoidance of certain operatic conventions. In particular, a musical is almost never performed in any but the language of its audience. Musicals produced in London or New York, for instance, are invariably sung in English, even if they were originally written in another language (again, Les Misérables, originally written in French, is a good example). While an opera singer is primarily a singer and only secondarily an actor, a musical theater singer is usually an actor first, who can at least hold a tune and "put over" a song, but is often not a professional singer as such. Composers of music for musicals often have to take the limitations of such performers into account, and theaters staging musicals generally use amplification of the actors' singing voices in a way that would normally be disapproved of in an operatic context.

In isolation, at least, none of these features is truly "defining," and in practice it is often difficult to distinguish among the various kinds of light musical theater, including "operetta," "comic opera," "light opera," "musical play," "musical comedy," "burlesque," "travesty," "music hall," and even "revue." Some works (e.g. by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim) have received both "musical theater" and "operatic" treatment. Similarly, some older operettas or light operas have had modern productions or adaptations that treated them as musicals. Sondheim said: I really think that when something plays Broadway it's a musical, and when it plays in an opera house it's opera. That's it. It's the terrain, the countryside, the expectations of the audience that make it one thing or another. This article primarily concerns musical theater works that are distinctively "non-operatic," but there inescapably remains some overlap between lighter operatic forms and the more musically complex or ambitious musicals: a grey area, in which production styles are almost as important as actual musical or dramatic content in defining into which art form the piece falls.

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As with a well-crafted operetta or opera, a "book" musical's moments of greatest dramatic intensity are often performed in song. Proverbially, "when the emotion becomes too strong for speech (or recitative) you sing; when it becomes too strong for song, you dance." A song is (ideally at any rate) crafted to suit the character (or characters) and their situation within the story; although there have been times in the history of the musical (e.g. the 1920s) when this integration between music and story has been tenuous.

A show often opens with a song that sets the tone of the musical, introduces some or all of the major characters, and shows the setting of the play. Within the compressed nature of the musical, the writers must develop the characters and the plot. Music provides a means to express emotion. However, typically, many fewer words are sung in a five-minute song than are spoken in a five-minute block of dialogue. Therefore there is less time to develop drama than in a straight play of equivalent length, since a musical usually devotes more time to music than to dialogue.

Many familiar musical theater works have been the basis for popular musical films, such as The Sound of Music, West Side Story, and My Fair Lady or were adapted or even written for television presentations (for example Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella). Recently, some popular television programs have set an episode in the style of a musical. There has also been a recent revival of the movie musical, such as the 2002 film, Chicago. Similarly, India produces numerous musical films, referred to as "Bollywood" musicals, and Japan produces a considerable number of Anime musicals. Conversely, there has been a trend in recent decades to adapt musicals from the screen to the stage, both from popular animated film musicals, such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, and live-action films, such as The Producers and The Color Purple.

History of the Western musical

In the beginning

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 5th 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 performed with orchestrations. To make the dance steps more audible in large open air theaters, Roman actors attached metal chips called "sabilla" to their stage footwear – the first tap shoes. In the 12th and 13th centuries, religious dramas, such as The Play of Herod and The Play of Daniel taught the liturgy, set to church chants. These plays developed into an autonomous form of musical theater, with poetic forms sometimes alternating with the prose dialogues and liturgical chants. The poetry was provided with modified or completely new melodies. By the Renaissance, these forms had evolved into commedia dell'arte, an Italian tradition where raucous clowns improvised their way through familiar stories, and from there, opera buffa. Molière turned several of his comedies into musical entertainments with songs (music provided by Jean Baptiste Lully) in the late 1600s.

Painting based on The Beggar's Opera, Scene V, William Hogarth, c. 1728

By the 1700s, two forms of musical theater were popular in Britain, France and Germany: ballad operas, like John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), that included lyrics written to the tunes of popular songs of the day (often spoofing opera), and comic operas, with original scores and mostly romantic plot lines, like Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl (1845). In addition to these sources, musical theater traces its lineage to vaudeville, British music hall, melodrama and burlesque. Melodrama's popularity, in particular, was fed by the fact that many theatres were licensed only as music halls and not allowed to present plays without music. In any event, what a piece was called did not necessarily define what it was. The Broadway extravaganza The Magic Deer (1852) advertised itself as "A Serio Comico Tragico Operatical Historical Extravaganzical Burletical Tale of Enchantment."

The first recorded long running play of any kind was The Beggar's Opera, which ran for 62 successive performances in 1728. It would take almost a century before the first play broke 100 performances, with Tom and Jerry, based on the book Life in London (1821), and the record soon reached 150 in the late 1820s.

New York (and so, America) did not have a significant theatere resence until 1752, when William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad-operas such as The Beggar’s Opera and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. By the 1840s, P.T. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in lower Manhattan (theater in New York moved from downtown gradually to midtown beginning around 1850, seeking less expensive real estate prices, and did not arrive in the Times Square area until the 1920s and 1930s). Broadway's first "long-run" musical record was a 50 performance hit called The Elves in 1857. New York runs continued to lag far behind those in London, but Laura Keene's "musical burletta" Seven Sisters (1860) shattered previous New York records with a run of 253 performances.

Development of musical comedy

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, Me and the Post was the first show to call itself a "musical comedy."

Comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart produced and starred in musicals on Broadway between 1878 (The Mulligan Guard Picnic) and 1885, with book and lyrics by Harrigan and music by his father-in-law David Braham. These musical comedies featured characters and situations taken from the everyday life of New York's lower classes and represented a significant step forward from vaudeville and burlesque, towards a more literate form. They starred high quality singers (Edna May, Lillian Russell, Vivienne Segal and Fay Templeton) instead of the ladies of questionable repute who had starred in earlier musical forms.

Poster for an early production.

The length of runs in the theater changed rapidly around the same time that the modern musical was born. As transportation improved, poverty in London and New York diminished, and street lighting made for safer travel at night, the number of potential patrons for the growing number of theaters increased enormously. Plays could run longer and still draw in the audiences, leading to better profits and improved production values. The first play to achieve 500 consecutive performances was the London (non-musical) comedy Our Boys, opening in 1875, which set an astonishing new record of 1,362 performances.

This run was not equaled on the musical stage until World War I, but musical theatre soon broke the 500 performance mark London with the long-running successes of Gilbert and Sullivan's family-friendly comic opera hits, beginning with H.M.S. Pinafore in 1878, which were exceeded by Alfred Cellier and B. C. Stephenson's record-breaking 1886 hit, Dorothy (a show midway between comic opera and musical comedy), with 931 performances, which was chased (but not equaled) by several of the most successful London musicals of the 1890s. The most popular of these shows also enjoyed profitable New York productions and tours of Britain, America, Europe, Australasia and South Africa. These shows were fare for "respectable" audiences and starred respectable girls, a marked contrast from the risqué burlesques, melodramas, bawdy music hall shows and badly translated French operettas that dominated the stage earlier in the 19th century and drew a sometimes seedy crowd looking for easy entertainment.

Charles Hoyt's A Trip to Chinatown (1891) was Broadway's long-run champion (until Irene in 1919), running for 657 performances. Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas were both pirated and imitated in New York by productions such as Reginald DeKoven's Robin Hood (1891) and John Philip Sousa's El Capitan (1896). A Trip to Coontown (1898) was the first musical comedy entirely produced and performed by African Americans in a Broadway theater (largely inspired by the routines of the minstrel shows), followed by the ragtime-tinged Clorindy the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), and the highly successful In Dahomey (1902). Hundreds of musical comedies were staged on Broadway in the 1890s and early 1900s comprised of songs written in New York's Tin Pan Alley involving composers such as Gus Edwards, John J. McNally, John Walter Bratton, and George M. Cohan (Little Johnny Jones (1904), 45 Minutes From Broadway (1906), and George Washington Jr. (1906)). Still, New York runs continued to be relatively short, with a few exceptions, compared with London runs, until World War I.

George Edwardes

Meanwhile, musicals had spread to the London stage by the Gay Nineties. George Edwardes had left the management of Richard D'Oyly Carte's Savoy Theater, perceiving that theatergoers' tastes had turned away from Savoy-style comic operas and their intellectual, political, absurdist satire. They wanted breezy music, snappy, romantic banter, and stylish spectacle. He revolutionized the London stage by presenting musical comedies at the Gaiety Theater, Daly's Theater and other venues that delivered these elements, borrowing others from Harrigan and Hart and adding in his famous Gaiety Girls to complete the musical and visual fun. The success of first of these, In Town in 1892 and A Gaiety Girl in 1893 (which played at other theaters), confirmed Edwardes on the path he was taking.

His early Gaiety hits included a series of light, romantic "poor maiden loves aristocrat and wins him against all odds" shows, usually with the word "Girl" in the title, including The Shop Girl (1894) and A Runaway Girl (1898), with music by Ivan Caryll and Lionel Monckton. These shows were immediately widely copied at other London theatres (and soon in America), and the Edwardian musical comedy swept away the earlier musical forms of comic opera and operetta. At Daly's Theatre, Edwardes presented slightly more complex comedy hits. The Geisha (1896) by Sidney Jones with lyrics by Harry Greenbank and Adrian Ross and then Jones' San Toy (1899) each ran for more than two years and also finding great international success. Other British musical comedy composers of the period included F. Osmond Carr and Edward Solomon.

The British musical comedy Florodora (1899) by Leslie Stuart and Paul Rubens made a splash on both sides of the Atlantic, as did A Chinese Honeymoon (1901), by British lyricist George Dance and American-born composer Howard Talbot, which ran for a record setting 1,074 performances in London and 376 in New York. The story concerns couples who honeymoon in China and inadvertently break the kissing laws (shades of The Mikado). After the turn of the century, Seymour Hicks (who joined forces with American producer Charles Frohman) wrote popular shows with composer Charles Taylor and others, and Edwardes and Ross continued to churn out hits like The Toreador (1901), A Country Girl, The Orchid (1903), The Girls of Gottenberg (1907), Our Miss Gibbs (1909), and The Boy (1917). However, only three decades after Gilbert and Sullivan broke the stranglehold that French operettas had on the London stage, European operettas came roaring back to Britain and America beginning in 1907 with the London hit production of The Merry Widow.

Operetta and World War I

Probably the best known composers of operetta, beginning in the second half of the 19th century, were Jacques Offenbach and Johann Strauss II (usually played in bad, bawdy translations in London and New York). 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 the U.S. in the 1870s and '80s. Although British and American musicals of the 1890s and the first few years of the 20th century had virtually swept operetta and comic opera from the stage, operettas returned to the London and Broadway stages in 1907, and operettas and musicals became direct competitors for a while. The winner of this competition was the theatre going public, who needed escapist entertainment during the dark times of World War I and flocked to theatres for musicals like Maid of the Mountains, Irene, and the astonishing hit Chu Chin Chow, as well as popular revues like The Bing Boys Are Here.

Victor Herbert

In the early years of the 20th century, translations of 19th century continental operettas, as well as operettas by a new generation of European composers, such as Franz Lehár and Oscar Straus, among others, spread throughout the English-speaking world. They were joined by British and American operetta composers and librettists of the 1910s (the "Princess Theatre" shows) by P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton and Harry B. Smith, who paved the way for Jerome Kern's later work by showing that a musical could combine a light popular touch with real continuity between story and musical numbers, and Victor Herbert, whose work included some intimate musical plays with modern settings as well as his string of famous operettas (The Fortune Teller (1898), Babes in Toyland (1903), Mlle. Modiste (1905), The Red Mill (1906), and Naughty Marietta (1910)). These were all owed much to Gilbert and Sullivan and the composers of the 1890s. The legacy of these operetta composers continued to serve as an inspiration to the next generation of composers of operettas and musicals in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Rudolf Friml, Irving Berlin, Sigmund Romberg, George Gershwin, and Noel Coward, and these, in turn, influenced the Rodgers, Sondheim, and many others later in the century. At the same time, George M. Cohan kept the theatres filled with lively musical entertainments, as the Shubert Brothers began to take control of the Broadway theatres.

The Roaring Twenties

The motion picture mounted a challenge to the stage. At first, films were silent and presented only a limited challenge to theatre. But by the end of the 1920s, films like The Jazz Singer could be presented with synchronized sound, and critics wondered if the cinema would replace live theatre altogether. The musicals of the Roaring Twenties, borrowing from vaudeville, music hall and other light entertainments, tended to ignore plot in favor of emphasizing star actors and actresses, big dance routines, and popular songs (throughout the first half of the twentieth century, popular music was dominated by theatre writers). Many shows were revues with little plot. For instance, Florenz Ziegfeld produced annual spectacular song-and-dance revues on Broadway featuring extravagant sets and elaborate costumes, but there was no common theme tying the various numbers together. In London, the Aldwych Farces were similarly successful.

Typical of the decade were lighthearted productions like Sally; Lady Be Good; Sunny; Tip Toes; No, No, Nanette; Oh, Kay!; and Funny Face. Their books may have been forgettable, but they produced enduring standards from George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Vincent Youmans, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, among others, and stars like Marilyn Miller. Audiences tapped their toes to these musicals on both sides of the Atlantic ocean while continuing to patronize the popular operettas that were continuing to come out of continental Europe and also from composers like Noel Coward in London and Sigmund Romberg in America. Clearly, cinema had not killed live theatre.

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Leaving these comparatively frivolous entertainments behind, and taking the drama a giant step beyond Herbert and sentimental operetta, Show Boat, which premiered on December 27 1927 at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York, represented a complete integration of book and score, with dramatic themes, as told through the music, dialogue, setting and movement, woven seamlessly together. Show Boat, with a book and lyrics adapted from Edna Ferber's novel by Oscar Hammerstein II and P. G. Wodehouse, and music by Jerome Kern, presented a new concept that was embraced by audiences immediately. Despite some of its startling themes—miscegenation among them—the original production ran a total of 572 performances. Still, Broadway runs lagged behind London's in general. By way of comparison, in 1920, The Beggar's Opera began an astonishing run of 1,463 performances at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, England.

The 1930s

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, starred dancing partners Fred Astaire and his sister Adele. While it was primarily a revue, it served as the basis for two subsequent film versions that were "book" musicals in the truest sense. Porter's Anything Goes (1934) affirmed Ethel Merman's position as the First Lady of musical theatre—a title she maintained for many years.

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Porgy and Bess

Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) was a step closer to opera than Show Boat and the other musicals of the era, and in some respects it foreshadowed such "operatic" musicals as West Side Story and Sweeney Todd. The Cradle Will Rock (1937), with a book and score by Marc Blitzstein and directed by Orson Welles, was a highly political piece that, despite the controversy surrounding it, managed to run for 108 performances. Kurt Weill's Knickerbocker Holiday brought to the musical stage New York City's early history, using as its source writings by Washington Irving, while good-naturedly satirizing the good intentions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Great Depression affected theatre audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, as people had little money to spend on entertainment. Only a few shows exceeded a run on Broadway or in London of 500 performances. Still, for those who could afford it, this was an exciting time in the development of musical theatre. The musical had finally evolved beyond the gags and showgirls musicals of the Gay Nineties and Roaring Twenties, integrating dramatic stories into the earlier comic forms (e.g., burlesque and farce), and building on the romantic and musical heritage that it had received from operetta.

The Golden Age (1943 to 1968)

The Golden Age of the Broadway musical is generally considered to have begun with Oklahoma! (1943) and to have ended with Hair (1968).

1940s

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Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! had a cohesive (if somewhat slim) plot, songs that furthered the action of the story, and featured dream ballets which advanced the plot and developed the characters, rather than using dance as an excuse to parade scantily-clad women across the stage. It defied musical conventions by raising its first act curtain not on a bevy of chorus girls, but rather on a woman churning butter, with an off-stage voice singing the opening lines of Oh, What a Beautiful Morning. It was the first "blockbuster" Broadway show, running a total of 2,212 performances, and remains one of the most frequently produced of the team's projects. The two collaborators created an extraordinary collection of some of musical theatre's best loved and most enduring classics, including Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and The Sound of Music (1959).

Americana was displayed on Broadway during the "Golden Age," as the wartime cycle of shows began to arrive. An example of this is "On The Town" (1944), written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, composed by Leonard Bernstein and choreographed by Jerome Robbins. The musical is set during wartime, where a group of three sailors are on a 24 hour shore leave in New York. During their day, they each meet a wonderful woman. The women in this show have a specific power to them, as if saying, "Come here! I need a man!" The show also gives the impression of a country with an uncertain future, as the sailors also have with their women before leaving.

Oklahoma! inspired others to continue the trend. Irving Berlin used sharpshooter Annie Oakley's career as a basis for his Annie Get Your Gun (1946, 1,147 performances); Burton Lane, E. Y. Harburg, and Fred Saidy combined political satire with Irish whimsy for their fantasy Finian's Rainbow (1944, 1,725 performances); and Cole Porter found inspiration in William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew for Kiss Me, Kate (1948, 1,077 performances).

1950s

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My Fair Lady Playbill with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison

Damon Runyon's eclectic characters were at the core of Frank Loesser's and Abe Burrows' Guys and Dolls, (1950, 1,200 performances); and the Gold Rush was the setting for Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's Paint Your Wagon (1951). The relatively brief run—289 performances—of that show didn't discourage Lerner and Loewe from collaborating again, this time on My Fair Lady (1956), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, which at 2,717 performances held the long-run record for many years. Popular Hollywood movies were made of these musicals.

As in Oklahoma!, dance was an integral part of West Side Story (1957), which transported Romeo and Juliet to modern day New York City and converted the feuding Montague and Capulet families into opposing ethnic gangs, the Sharks and the Jets. The book was adapted by Arthur Laurents, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by newcomer Stephen Sondheim. It was embraced by the critics but failed to be a popular choice for the "blue-haired matinee ladies," who preferred the small town River City, Iowa of Meredith Willson's The Music Man to the alleys of Manhattan's Upper West Side. Apparently Tony Award voters were of a similar mind, since they favored the former over the latter. West Side Story had a respectable run of 732 performances (1,040 in the West End), while The Music Man ran nearly twice as long, with 1,375. Laurents and Sondheim teamed up again for Gypsy (1959, 702 performances), with Jule Styne providing the music for a backstage story about the most driven stage mother of all-time, stripper Gypsy Rose Lee's mother Rose. The original production ran for 702 performances, but proved to be a bigger hit in its three subsequent revivals, with Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, and Bernadette Peters tackling the role made famous by Ethel Merman.

1960s

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The first project for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962, 964 performances), with a book based on the works of Plautus by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, and starring Zero Mostel. Sondheim moved the musical beyond its concentration on the romantic plots typical of earlier eras; his work tended to be darker, exploring the grittier sides of life both present and past. Some of his earlier works include Anyone Can Whistle (1964, which—at a mere nine performances, despite having star power in Lee Remick and Angela Lansbury—is a legendary flop), Company (1970), Follies (1971), and A Little Night Music (1973). He has found inspiration in the unlikeliest of sources—the opening of Japan to Western trade for Pacific Overtures, a legendary murderous barber seeking revenge in the Industrial Age of London for Sweeney Todd, the paintings of Georges Seurat for Sunday in the Park with George, fairy tales for Into the Woods, and a collection of individuals intent on eliminating the President of the United States in Assassins. Critics have argued that some of Sondheim’s musicals are less popular with the public because of their unusual lyrical sophistication and musical complexity. But critics have praised these features of his work, as well as the interplay of lyrics and music in his shows. Some of Sondheim's notable innovations include a show presented in reverse (Merrily We Roll Along) and the above-mentioned "Anyone Can Whistle," in which Act 1 ends with the cast informing the audience that they are mad.

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Jerry Herman, played a significant role in American musical theatre, beginning with his first Broadway production, Milk and Honey (1961, 563 performances), about the founding of the state of Israel, and continuing with the smash hits Hello, Dolly! (1964, 2,844 performances), Mame (1966, 1,508 performances), and La Cage aux Folles (1983, 1,761 performances). Even his less successful shows like Dear World (1969) and Mack & Mabel (1974) have had memorable scores (Mack & Mabel was later reworked into a London hit). Writing both words and music, many of Herman's showtunes have become popular standards, including "Hello, Dolly!," "We Need a Little Christmas," "I Am What I Am," "Mame," "The Best of Times," "Before the Parade Passes By," "Put On Your Sunday Clothes," "It Only Takes a Moment," "Bosom Buddies," and "I Won't Send Roses," recorded by such artists as Louis Armstrong, Eydie Gorme, Barbra Streisand, Petula Clark and Bernadette Peters. Herman's songbook has been the subject of two popular musical revues, Jerry's Girls (Broadway, 1985), and Showtune (off-Broadway, 2003).

The musical started to diverge from the relatively narrow confines of the 1950s. Rock music would be used in several Broadway musicals, beginning with Hair, which featured not only rock music but also nudity and controversial opinions about the Vietnam War.

Racial and religious tolerance

After Show Boat and Porgy and Bess, and as the struggle in America and elsewhere for minorities' civil rights progressed, Hammerstein, Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg and others were emboldened to write musicals and operas which aimed to normalize societal toleration of minorities and urged racial harmony. Early Golden Age works that focused on racial tolerance included Finian's Rainbow, South Pacific, and the The King and I. Towards the end of the Golden Age, several shows tackled Jewish subjects and issues, such as Fiddler on the Roof, Blitz! and later Rags. The original concept that became West Side Story was set in the Lower East Side during Easter-Passover celebrations; the rival gangs were to be Jewish and Italian Catholic.

Tolerance as an important theme in musicals has continued in recent decades. The final expression of West Side Story left a message of racial tolerance. By the end of the '60s, musicals became integrated, with black and white cast members even covering each others' roles, as they did in Hair. Casting in some musicals is an attempt to represent the community at the subject of the drama, as in Rent. Homosexuality has been explored in such musicals, beginning with Hair, and even more overtly in La Cage aux Folles and Falsettos. Parade is a sensitive exploration of both anti-Semitism and historical American racism.

More recent eras

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 African-American influence to Broadway. More and more different musical genres were turned into musicals either on or off-Broadway. Automotive companies and other types of corporations hired Broadway talent to write corporate musicals, private shows which were only seen by their employees or customers.

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1976 brought one of the great contemporary musicals to the stage. A Chorus Line emerged from recorded group therapy-style sessions Michael Bennett conducted with Gypsies — those who sing and dance in support of the leading players —from the Broadway community. From hundreds of hours of tapes, James Kirkwood, Jr. and Nick Dante fashioned a book about an audition for a musical, incorporating into it many of the real-life stories of those who had sat in on the sessions — and some of whom eventually played variations of themselves or each other in the show. With music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Edward Kleban, A Chorus Line first opened at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in lower Manhattan. Advance word-of-mouth— that something extraordinary was about to explode - boosted box office sales, and after critics ran out of superlatives to describe what they witnessed on opening night, what initially had been planned as a limited engagement eventually moved to the Shubert Theatre uptown for a run that seemed to last forever. The show swept the Tony Awards and won the Pulitzer Prize, and its hit song, What I Did for Love, became an instant standard.

Clearly, Broadway audiences were eager to welcome musicals that strayed from the usual style and substance. John Kander and Fred Ebb explored pre-World War II Nazi Germany in Cabaret and Prohibition-era Chicago, which relied on old vaudeville techniques to tell its tale of murder and the media. Pippin, by Stephen Schwartz, was set in the days of Charlemagne. Federico Fellini's autobiographical film 8½ became Maury Yeston's Nine. At the end of the decade, Evita gave a more serious political biography than audiences were used to at musicals, and Sweeney Todd was the precursor to the darker, big budget musicals of the 1980s like Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, and The Phantom of the Opera, that depended on dramatic stories, sweeping scores and spectacular effects. But during this same period, old-fashioned values were still embraced in such hits as Annie, 42nd Street, My One and Only, and popular revivals of No, No, Nanette and Irene.

1980s and 1990s

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Les Misérables: The logo seen around the world

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 and Alain Boublil, responsible for Les Misérables and, in collaboration with Richard Maltby, Jr., Miss Saigon (inspired by Madame Butterfly); and the British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote Evita, based on the life of Argentina's Eva Perón, Cats, derived from the poems of T. S. Eliot, The Phantom of the Opera derived from the novel "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra" written by Gaston Leroux, and Sunset Boulevard (from the classic film of the same name). Several of these mega-musicals ran (or are still running) for decades in both New York and London. The 90s also saw the influence of large corporations on the production of musicals. The most important has been The Walt Disney Company, which began adapting some of its animated movie musicals—such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King—for the stage, and also created original stage productions like Aida, with music by Elton John. Disney continues to create new musicals for Broadway and West End theatres, most recently with its adaptation of its 1999 animated feature, Tarzan.

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1982 Cast Album

The growing scale (and cost) of musicals led to some concern that musicals were eschewing substance in favor of style. The 1990s and 2000s have seen many writers create smaller scale musicals (Falsettoland, Passion, Little Shop of Horrors, Bat Boy: The Musical, and Blood Brothers). The topics vary widely, and the music ranges from rock to pop, but they often are produced off-Broadway (or for smaller London theatres) and feature smaller casts and generally less expensive productions. Some of these have been noted as imaginative and innovative.

There also had been a concern that the musical had lost touch with the tastes of the general public, that the cost of musicals was escalating beyond the budget of many theatregoers, and that the musical was increasingly doomed to be viewed by a smaller and smaller audience. Jonathan Larson's musical Rent (based on the opera La Bohème) attempted to increase the popularity of musicals among a younger audience. It features a cast of twentysomethings, and the score is heavily rock-influenced. The musical became a hit, even with its composer dying of an aortic aneurysm on the night of the final dress rehearsal at New York Theatre Workshop, before he could see it reach Broadway. A group of young fans, styled RENTheads, line up at the Nederlander Theatre hours early in hopes of winning the lottery for $20 front row tickets, and some have seen the show more than 50 times. Other writers who have attempted to bring a taste of modern rock music to the stage include Jason Robert Brown.

Another trend has been to create a minimal plot to fit a collection of songs that have already been hits. These have included Buddy - The Buddy Holly Story (1995), Movin' Out (2002, based on the tunes of Billy Joel), Good Vibrations (the Beach Boys), All Shook Up (Elvis Presley), Jersey Boys (2006, The Four Seasons), Daddy Cool—The Boney M Musical, and many others. This style is often referred to as "jukebox musicals." Similar but more plot-driven musicals have been built around the canon of a particular pop group including Mamma Mia! (1999, featuring songs by ABBA), Our House (based on the songs of Madness), and We Will Rock You (based on the works of Queen).

The 21st century

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Recent trends

In recent years, familiarity has been embraced by producers anxious to guarantee that they recoup their considerable investments, if not show a healthy profit. Some are willing to take (usually modest-budget) chances on the new and unusual, such as Urinetown (2001), Bombay Dreams (2002; about the "Bollywood" musicals churned out by Indian cinema), Avenue Q (2003; utilizes puppets to tell its adult-themed story), and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005; people watching the show can become "spellers" in the show). But the majority prefer to hedge their bets by sticking with revivals of familiar fare like Wonderful Town or Fiddler on the Roof or proven hits like La Cage aux Folles. Today's composers are finding their sources in already proven material, such as films (The Producers, Spamalot, Hairspray, Billy Elliot, and The Color Purple – roughly one-third of the current Broadway musicals are based on films); or classic literature such as Little Women, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Dracula — hoping that the shows will have a built-in audience as a result. The reuse of plots, especially those from The Walt Disney Company, has been considered by some critics to be a redefinition of Broadway: rather than a creative outlet, it has become a tourist attraction. The lack of new concept shows like Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods further underlines this.

The musical is being pulled in a number of different directions. Gone are the days when a sole producer – a David Merrick or a Cameron Mackintosh — backs a production. Corporate sponsors dominate Broadway, and often alliances are formed to stage musicals which require an investment of $10 million or more. In 2002, the credits for Thoroughly Modern Millie listed ten producers, and among those names were entities comprised of several individuals. Typically, off-Broadway and regional theatres tend to produce smaller and therefore less expensive musicals, and development of new musicals has increasingly taken place outside of New York and London or in smaller venues. Wicked, for example, first opened in San Francisco, and its creative team relied on the critical reviews there to assist them in retooling the show before it reached Broadway, where it ultimately became a major success. Spring Awakening was developed off-Broadway before being launched on Broadway in 2006.

It also appears that the spectacle format is on the rise again, returning to the times when Romans would have mock sea battles on stage. This was true of Starlight Express and is most apparent in the musical adaptation of The Lord of the Rings that ran in Toronto, Canada in 2006, and opened for previews in May 2007 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London, billed as the biggest stage production in musical theatre history. The expensive production lost money in Toronto. Conversely, The Drowsy Chaperone , The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Xanadu and others are part of a Broadway trend to present musicals uninterrupted by an intermission, with short running time of less than two hours. The latter two, together with works like Avenue Q, also represent a trend towards presenting smaller-scale, small cast musicals that are able to show a good profit in a smaller house.

Renaissance of the movie-musical and TV "musicals"

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With Moulin Rouge! (2001), Baz Luhrmann revived the moribund movie musical. This was followed by a string of film successes, including Chicago in 2002, Phantom of the Opera in 2004, Dreamgirls in 2006 and Hairspray in 2007. Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (2000) and The Cat in the Hat (2003), made the children's book into live-action musicals. Disney and other animated musicals and more adult animated musical films, like South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999), paved the way for the revival of the movie musical. In addition, India is producing numerous "Bollywood" film musicals, and Japan is producing "Anime" film musicals. Occasionally, "made for TV" movies, such as High School Musical (2006), are made in musical format.

Some recent television shows have set an episode as a musical as a play on their usual format (examples include episodes of Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer's episode Once More, with Feeling, Oz's Variety, or Space Ghost Coast to Coast's O Coast to Coast!/Boatshow) or have included scenes where characters suddenly begin singing and dancing in a musical-theatre style during an episode, such as in several episodes of The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy. Scrubs also featured a recent musical episode, which was written by the creators of Broadway hit Avenue Q. The television series Cop Rock, which extensively used the musical format, was not a success, while the series The Mighty Boosh regularly features musical sequences and has had some acclaim.

The international musicals scene

The U.S. and Britain were the most active sources of book musicals from the mid-19th century through the mid-20th century (although Europe produced various forms of popular light opera and operetta, for example Spanish Zarzuela, during that period and even earlier). However, the light musical stage in other countries has become more active in recent decades.

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Musicals from other English speaking countries (notably Australia) often do well locally, and occasionally even reach Broadway or the West End (e.g., The Boy from Oz).

Successful musicals from continental Europe include shows from (among other countries) Germany (Elixier and Ludwig II ), Austria (Dance of the Vampires and Elisabeth), France (Notre Dame de Paris, Les Misérables and Romeo & Juliette) and Spain (Hoy No Me Puedo Levantar).

Japan has recently seen the growth of an indigenous form of musical theatre, both animated and live action, mostly based on Anime and Manga, such as Kiki's Delivery Service and Tenimyu). The popular Sailor Moon metaseries has had twenty-nine Sailor Moon musicals, spanning thirteen years. Beginning in 1914, a series of popular revues have been performed by the all-female Takarazuka Revue, which currently fields five performing troupes.

The Indian Bollywood musical, mostly in the form of motion pictures, is tremendously successful.

South Africa has an active musical theatre scene, with revues like African Footprint and Umoja and book musicals, such as Kat and the Kings by David Kramer and Taliep Petersen and Sarafina! by Mbongeni Ngema touring internationally. Locally, musicals like Vere, Love and Green Onions, Over the Rainbow: the all-new all-gay... extravaganza and Bangbroek Mountain are recent original musical theatre projects.

Relevance of the musical today and in the future

In the 2006-07 season, 12 million tickets were purchased on Broadway for a gross sale amount of almost $1 Billion. The League of American Theatres and Producers announced that more than half of those tickets were purchased by tourists (5 million domestic and 1.3 million foreign). This does not include off-Broadway and smaller venues. These statistics were near historic records. So, theatre in New York and London is selling well. However, Stephen Sondheim has been less than optimistic:

"You have two kinds of shows on Broadway – revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for The Lion King a year in advance, and essentially a family... pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is – a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar.... I don't think the theatre will die per se, but it's never going to be what it was.... It's a tourist attraction."

But the success of original material – Avenue Q, Urinetown, Spelling Bee, as well as creative re-imaginings of film properties, including Thoroughly Modern Millie, Hairspray and The Color Purple, prompts Broadway historian John Kenrick to write: "Is the Musical dead? ...Absolutely not! Changing? Always! The musical has been changing ever since Offenbach did his first rewrite in the 1850s. And change is the clearest sign that the musical is still a living, growing genre. Will we ever return to the so-called "golden age," with musicals at the center of popular culture? Probably not. Public taste has undergone fundamental changes, and the commercial arts can only flow where the paying public allows."

See also

• List of musicals
• Cast recording
• Show tunes
• Industrial musical
• List of musical theatre composers
• List of notable musical theatre productions
• List of choreographers
• AFI's 100 Years of Musicals

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Ganzl, Kurt. The Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre (3 Volumes). New York: Schirmer Books, 2001.
• The Broadway Musical Home
• The Cyber Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre, TV and Film
• Information from History.com
• Bloom, Ken and Frank Vlastnik (2004-10-01). Broadway Musicals : The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time. New York, New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. ISBN 1-57912-390-2. 
• Kantor, Michael and Laurence Maslon (2004). Broadway: the American musical. New York, New York: Bulfinch Press. ISBN 0-8212-2905-2. 
• Botto, Louis (2002-09-01). in Robert Viagas: At This Theatre. Applause Books. ISBN 1-55783-566-7. 
• Mordden, Ethan (1999). Beautiful Mornin': The Broadway Musical in the 1940s. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512851-6. 
• Article on history of musical theatre, focusing on American musicals
• Stacy's Musical Village - large musical theatre site
• Traubner, Richard. Operetta: A Theatrical History. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1983

External links

• Internet Broadway Database (ibdb.com)
• Musical Cast Album Database (castalbumdb.com)
• Broadway.com - extensive theater site with news, photos and more
• Theatre.com - extensive theatre site with London news, photos and more
• Musical Cyberspace: Broadway and Beyond
• Science Fiction Musicals Sourcebook
• Musical Workshop - listings of contemporary musicals
• Edwardian theatre site with numerous midi files and other information
• Guide to Broadway
• List of articles available from British musical theatre publication The Gaiety and related publications
• Long running plays (over 400 performances) on Broadway, Off-Broadway, London, Toronto, Melbourne, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin
• Broadway musical fansite
• Class Act Movie Musicals
• League of American Theatres amd Producers
• Broadway In Chicago
• Thoroughly modern 'movicals' Friday November 04 2005, Arts Hub

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• Musical Theater  ^history

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• History of "Musical Theater"

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