| In the Begining:
Musical theatre in Europe dates back to the theatre of
the ancient Greeks, who included music and dance in their
stage comedies and tragedies as early as the 5th century
B.C. Aeschylus and Sophocles even composed their own music
to accompany their plays. The Third Century B.C. Roman comedies
of Plautus included song and dance routines performed with
orchestrations. The popularity of theatre declined somewhat
in the Roman Empire, but some innovations were made: to
make the dance steps more audible in large open air theatres,
Roman actors attached metal chips called "sabilla"
to their stage footwear – the first tap shoes. During
the middle ages, performers travelled from town to town
trying to find an audience. At times, they were barred,
as it was feared that they brought the plague. 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. To teach the latin bible to illiterate masses,
cycle plays were created that told a biblical story divided
into entertaining parts. Several pageant wagons (stages
on wheels) would move about the city, and a group of actors
would tell their part of the story. Once finished, the group
would move on with their wagon, and the next group would
arrive to tell its part of the story. These plays developed
into an autonomous form of musical theatre, 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 farcical comedies
into musical entertainments with songs (music provided by
Jean Baptiste Lully) and dance in the late 1600s. Arts of
all kinds became widely popular, including musical theatre.
By the 1700s, two forms of musical theatre 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). Other musical theatre forms developed by the 19th
century, such as vaudeville, British music hall, melodrama
and burlesque. Melodrama's popularity, in particular, was
popularized partly because most London 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 did not have
a significant theatre presence 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 (theatre 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 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.
Musical Theatre as we know it:
The first theatre piece that conforms to the modern conception
of a musical, adding dance and original music that helped
to tell the story, 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. The length of
runs in the theatre 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 theatres 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 equalled on the musical stage until World
War I, but musical theatre soon broke the 500 performance
mark in 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 followed 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 theatre (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. 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 Theatre, perceiving that
theatregoers' 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 Theatre, Daly's Theatre 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 theatres), 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.
The move to Operetta and and the effects of World
War I on Musical Theatre:
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 (still going
strong!), and the astonishing hit Chu Chin Chow, as well
as popular revues like The Bing Boys Are Here. tIn 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 Post War Musical Theatre Experience
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 motion picture
was beigining to mount 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 little
to tie the various numbers together. In London, the Aldwych
Farces were similarly successful, and stars such as Ivor
Novello were popular. These spectacles also raised production
values, and mounting a musical generally became more expensive.
Typical of the decade were lighthearted productions like
Sally; Lady Be Good; Sunny; No, No, Nanette; Oh, Kay!; and
Funny Face. Their books may have been forgettable, but they
produced enduring standards from George Gershwin, Cole Porter,
Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz
Hart, among others, and stars like Marilyn Miller and Fred
Astaire. 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 and Rudolf Friml in America.
Clearly, cinema had not killed live theatre.
Leaving these comparatively frivolous entertainments behind,
and taking the drama a giant step beyond Victor 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 together more seamlessly than in previous
musicals. 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.
Americas Great Depression
The Great Depression affected theatre audiences on both
sides of the Atlantic, as people had little money to spend
on entertainment. In addition, "talkie" films
at low prices presented a strong challenge to theatre of
all kinds. 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. 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), starred dancing
partners Fred Astaire and his sister Adele. Porter's Anything
Goes (1934) affirmed Ethel Merman's position as the First
Lady of musical theatre – a title she maintained for
many years. 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.
British writers such as Noel Coward and Ivor Novello continued
to deliver old fashioned, sentimential musicals, such as
The Dancing Years. Similarly, Rodgers & Hart returned
from Hollywood to churn out a series of lighthearted Broadway
hits, including On Your Toes (1936, with Ray Bolger, the
first Broadway musical to make dramatic use of classical
dance), Babes In Arms (1937), I'd Rather Be Right, a political
satire with George M. Cohan as President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
and The Boys From Syracuse (1938), and Cole Porter wrote
a similar string of hits, including Anything Goes (1934)
and DuBarry Was a Lady (1939) and despite the economic woes
and the competition from film, the musical survived. In
fact, the move towards political satire in Of Thee I Sing,
I'd Rather Be Right and Knickerbocker Holiday, together
with the musical sophistication of the Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers
and Weill musicals and the fast-paced staging and naturalistic
dialogue style created by director George Abbott showed
that musical theatre was finally evolving beyond the gags
and showgirls musicals of the Gay Nineties and Roaring Twenties
and the sentimental romance of operetta.
The Golden Age of Musical Theatre (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).
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. Rodgers and
Hammerstein hired ballet choreographer Agnes de Mille, who
used everyday motions to help the characters express their
ideas. 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 Mornin'. It was
the first "blockbuster" Broadway show, running
a total of 2,212 performances, and was made into a hit film.
It 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 over 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).
The American musicals overwhelmed the old-fashioned British
Coward/Novello-style shows, one of the last big successes
of which was Novello's Perchance to Dream (1945, 1,021 performances).
From Theatre to Screen
The 1940s and 1950s saw the Musical Theatre Traditions
transfer to the silver screen and every broadway and was
soon turned into a major movie blockbuster. 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. 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, possibly due to the love of anything american
in Britain at the time), while The Music Man ran nearly
twice as long, with 1,375 performances. However, the film
of West Side Story was extremely successful. 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, and was given three subsequent revivals,
with Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, and Bernadette Peters tackling
the role made famous by Ethel Merman. The 1950s ended with
a big bang, however, with The Sound of Music, the last musical
written by Rodgers and Hammerstein, which became another
hit for Mary Martin and, especially after the release of
its extremely successful 1965 film version, has become one
of the most popular musicals in history.
Watch out, here come those long haired hippies!
In 1960, The Fantasticks was first produced off-Broadway.
This intimate allegorical show would quietly run for over
40 years at the Sullivan Street Theatre in Greenwich Village,
becoming by far the longest-running musical in history.
The 1960s would then see a number of traditional blockbusters
like Fiddler on the Roof and Hello, Dolly! before moving
to more risqué pieces like Cabaret and ending with
the emergence of the rock musical. Two men had considerable
impact on musical theatre history beginning in this decade:
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 an infamous 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. While some
critics have argued that some of Sondheim’s musicals
are less popular with the public because of their unusual
lyrical sophistication and musical complexity, others 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.
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. 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 more 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 racially 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.
The Musical Moves into the 1970s and the budgets
explode (and inplode!)
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. 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.
Time for World-Wide Phenominons
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, which became the
longest-running international musical hit in history. the
team, in collaboration with Richard Maltby, Jr., continued
to produce hits with Miss Saigon (inspired by Madame Butterfly).
The British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, saw similar mega-success
with 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.
lThe growing scale (and cost) of musicals led to some concern
that musicals were eschewing substance in favor of style.
In contrast, the last two decades of the 20th century saw
many writers create smaller scale, but critically-acclaimed
and financially successful musicals (Falsettoland, Passion,
Little Shop of Horrors, Bat Boy: The Musical, 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 the
"jukebox musical". 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). 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. 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.
Is it a Theatre Production of a Film or a Film
Production of a show???
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.
Musicals not from the West-end or Broadway????
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. 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 and 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. |
