Musical theatre

Musical theatre is a special kind of show that mixes singing, speaking, acting, and dancing. It tells stories using music, words, and movement. The music is just as important as the acting and dialogue.

Modern musical theatre started in the 1800s with plays that had music, like the light opera works of Jacques Offenbach in France, Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain, and creators like Harrigan and Hart in America. Musicals became very popular, with famous shows like Show Boat, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, Les Misérables, and Hamilton.

Today, musicals are performed all over the world. They can be big shows in famous places like Broadway in New York City or the West End in London. Or they can be smaller shows in community theatres, schools, or on tour. Many people enjoy performing musicals in their local areas.

Definitions and scope

Book musicals

Since the 20th century, a "book musical" is a type of musical play where songs and dances are part of a strong story. The three main parts of a book musical are the music, the words (lyrics), and the book. The book is the story, with the characters, what happens, and the spoken words. Together, the music and words are called the score. A musical needs a team of creative people, like a director and a choreographer, to bring the story to life. Shows also need special designs for the sets, costumes, and lighting.

Most musicals last between one and a half to three hours, usually split into two parts with a break in between. The first part introduces the characters and music and often ends with a problem. The second part solves the problem and may repeat some important songs. Musicals can be based on real stories, books, or even movies, and many have been turned into films too.

Comparisons with opera

Musical theatre is similar to opera but has some key differences. Musicals often have more talking between the songs and include more dancing. They usually use popular music styles and are performed in the language of the audience. Unlike opera, where singing is the main focus, musical theatre performers must also act and dance. Some famous composers have created works for both musical theatre and opera. Musicals often use a smaller group of musicians, called a pit orchestra, to accompany the singing.

Eastern traditions and other forms

There are many traditions of theatre with music from Eastern cultures, such as Chinese opera and Japanese Noh. India has made many musical films, often called Bollywood musicals. Japan has also developed special musicals based on popular comics. There are also shorter versions of musicals made for schools and young performers, sometimes called minimusicals.

History

Early antecedents

The beginnings of musical theatre in Europe go back to the theatre of ancient Greece, where music and dance were part of comedies and tragedies in the 5th century BCE. The European Renaissance saw older styles evolve into early forms of musical theatre. In England, Elizabethan and Jacobean plays often included music. Court parties developed during the Tudor period that included music, dancing, singing, and acting. These grew into sung plays that resemble English operas, starting with The Siege of Rhodes in 1656. In France, playwright Molière turned some of his comedies into musical shows with songs and dance in the late 1600s.

From the 1700s, popular forms of musical theatre in Britain included ballad operas, like John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and later pantomime, comic opera, and music hall. Colonial America didn’t have much theatre until 1752, when a company from London arrived. Early American musical theatre included British styles, but names didn’t always match the style.

1850s to 1880s

Around 1850, French composer Hervé tested a style of comic musical theatre called opérette. Famous composers of operetta were Jacques Offenbach from the 1850s to the 1870s and Johann Strauss II in the 1870s and 1880s. In America, mid-19th century musical entertainment included variety revues, which turned into vaudeville, and minstrel shows. Victorian burlesque was first popularized in the US by British groups. A very popular show that opened in New York in 1866, The Black Crook, mixed dance and original music to tell its story. It was famous for its revealing costumes and ran for a record 474 performances.

As transportation improved, safer street lighting led to more evening theatre visitors. Plays ran longer, bringing better profits and higher production values. The first musical to run over 500 shows was the French operetta The Chimes of Normandy in 1878, with 705 performances. English comic opera borrowed ideas from European operetta, most successfully in the long-running Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, including H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) and The Mikado (1885). These shows were made for family audiences.

1890s to the new century

[A Trip to Chinatown] (1891) was Broadway’s top-long runner until Irene in 1919. Hundreds of musical comedies were put on Broadway in the 1890s and early 1900s, with songs from New York’s Tin Pan Alley, including works by George M. Cohan. Meanwhile, musicals took over London’s stage in the Gay Nineties, led by producer George Edwardes. The first of these, In Town (1892) and A Gaiety Girl (1893) set the style for the next three decades.

[The Belle of New York] (1898) was the first American musical to run over a year in London. The British musical comedy Florodora (1899) was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, as was A Chinese Honeymoon (1901), which set a London record with 1,074 shows and 376 in New York.

Early 20th century

Operettas almost disappeared from English-speaking stages but returned to London and Broadway in 1907 with The Merry Widow. In America, Victor Herbert created a series of lasting operettas like The Fortune Teller (1898), Babes in Toyland (1903), Mlle. Modiste (1905), The Red Mill (1906) and Naughty Marietta (1910).

In the 1910s, P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, and Jerome Kern made the “Princess Theatre” shows and started Kern’s later work. People needed escape during World War I, and they filled theatres. The 1919 hit musical Irene ran for 670 shows, a Broadway record until 1938.

The musicals of the Roaring Twenties, influenced by vaudeville, focused more on big dance numbers and popular songs than on plot. Typical shows were cheerful ones like Sally, Lady, Be Good, No, No, Nanette, Oh, Kay!, and Funny Face. Despite weak stories, these shows featured stars like Marilyn Miller and Fred Astaire and created many lasting songs. The best known were the yearly Ziegfeld Follies, big song-and-dance shows on Broadway with fancy sets, elaborate costumes, and beautiful chorus lines.

Show Boat and the Great Depression

Broadway’s Show Boat (1927) went far beyond the light musicals and sentimental operettas of the time, by fully mixing book and music, with dramatic themes told through music, dialogue, setting, and movement.

As the Great Depression started during Show Boat’s national tour, people turned to light, escapist song-and-dance shows. Despite the hard times of the 1930s and competition from film, musicals lived on. In fact, they kept growing in themes beyond the jokes and showgirls of the Gay Nineties and Roaring Twenties and the sentimental love stories of operetta, adding skill and fast-paced direction and natural talking led by director George Abbott.

The Golden Age (1940s to 1960s)

1940s

The 1940s started with more hits by Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Weill, and Gershwin. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) finished the change started by Show Boat, by tightly linking all parts of musical theatre, with a strong story, songs that moved the story forward, and dances that advanced the plot and showed character growth. It broke tradition by opening not with a group of women, but with a woman churning butter, and an off-stage voice singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” with no music. It got great reviews, caused a rush at the box office, and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Rodgers and Hammerstein made an amazing group of some of musical theatre’s best-loved and longest-lasting classics, including Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951) and The Sound of Music (1959). Some of these musicals dealt with deeper subjects than most earlier shows.

1950s

The 1950s were key for the growth of the American musical. The short seven-month run of that show didn’t stop Lerner and Loewe from working together again, this time on My Fair Lady (1956), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, which with 2,717 shows held the long-run record for many years.

[West Side Story] (1957) moved Romeo and Juliet to modern New York City and changed the fighting Montague and Capulet families into rival gangs, the Jets and the Sharks.

Although directors and choreographers have been important to musical theatre style since the 19th century, George Abbott and his workers and followers took a big role in fully mixing movement and dance into musical theatre shows in the Golden Age.

During the Golden Age, car companies and other big businesses began using Broadway talent to write private musicals only seen by their workers or customers.

1960s

In 1960, The Fantasticks opened off-Broadway. This small, symbolic show ran for over 40 years at the Sullivan Street Theatre in Greenwich Village, becoming the longest-running musical ever.

The 1960s saw many big shows, like Fiddler on the Roof (1964; 3,242 shows), Hello, Dolly! (1964; 2,844 shows), Funny Girl (1964; 1,348 shows) and Man of La Mancha (1965; 2,328 shows), and some edgier pieces like Cabaret, before the rise of rock musicals.

The first show for which Sondheim wrote both music and words was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962, 964 shows), with a story based on Plautus by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, starring Zero Mostel. Sondheim moved musicals beyond their usual focus on love stories; his work often looked at the darker sides of life, both past and present.

While some critics say some of Sondheim’s musicals lack commercial appeal, others praise their word skill and music complexity, and the way words and music work together in his shows.

Jerry Herman had a big part in American musical theatre, starting with his first Broadway show, Milk and Honey (1961, 563 shows), about the creation of the state of Israel, and continuing with the big hits Hello, Dolly! (1964, 2,844 shows), Mame (1966, 1,508 shows), and La Cage aux Folles (1983, 1,761 shows).

Musicals began to move away from the narrow limits of the 1950s. Rock music appeared in several Broadway musicals, starting with Hair, which also included nudity and strong views on the Vietnam War, race relations and other social subjects.

Social themes

After Show Boat and Porgy and Bess, and as the fight in America and elsewhere for minorities’ civil rights grew, Hammerstein, Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg and others felt bold enough to write more musicals and operas that aimed to make society accept minorities and call for racial harmony.

Accepting others as important has kept being a theme in musicals in recent years. The final version of West Side Story left a message of racial acceptance. By the end of the 1960s, musicals had black and white actors playing each other’s parts, as they did in Hair. Being gay has also been shown in musicals, starting with Hair, and even more clearly in La Cage aux Folles, Falsettos, Rent, Hedwig and the Angry Inch and other shows in later years.

1970s to present

1970s

After the success of Hair, rock musicals grew in the 1970s, with Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, The Rocky Horror Show, Evita and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

In 1975, the dance musical A Chorus Line came from recorded group therapy-like sessions Michael Bennett held with “gypsies” – those who sing and dance to support the main players – from the Broadway world. With music by Marvin Hamlisch and words by Edward Kleban, A Chorus Line first opened at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in lower Manhattan.

Broadway audiences liked musicals that were different from the Golden Age style and substance. John Kander and Fred Ebb looked at the rise of Nazism in Germany in Cabaret, and murder and the media in Prohibition-era Chicago, which used old vaudeville tricks.

1980s

The 1980s saw the effect of European “megamusicals” on Broadway, the West End and elsewhere. These usually have music with a pop feel, big groups of actors and amazing designs and special effects – a falling chandelier (in The Phantom of the Opera); a helicopter landing on stage (in Miss Saigon) – and very big budgets. Some were based on books or other works of literature. The British group of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and producer Cameron Mackintosh started the megamusical trend with their 1981 musical Cats, based on the poems of T. S. Eliot, which passed A Chorus Line to become the longest-running Broadway show.

The megamusicals’ huge budgets changed ideas about money success on Broadway and in the West End. In earlier years, a show could be called a hit after a few hundred performances, but with multimillion-dollar production costs, a show had to run for years just to make a profit.

1990s

In the 1990s, a new group of theatre writers appeared, including Jason Robert Brown and Michael John LaChiusa, who began with shows off-Broadway. The biggest success of these artists was Jonathan Larson’s Rent (1996), a rock musical (based on the opera La bohème) about a struggling group of artists in Manhattan.

Even with the growing number of big musicals in the 1980s and 1990s, a number of lower-budget, smaller musicals found both critical and money success, such as Falsettoland, Little Shop of Horrors, Bat Boy: The Musical and Blood Brothers, which ran for 10,013 shows.

2000s–present

Trends

In the new century, being familiar has been liked by producers and investors worried about getting their big money back. Some took (usually small-budget) chances on new and creative material, such as Urinetown (2001), Avenue Q (2003), The Light in the Piazza (2005), Spring Awakening (2006), In the Heights (2008), Next to Normal (2009), American Idiot (2010) and The Book of Mormon (2011). Hamilton (2015), changed “under-explored American history” into an unusual hip-hop hit.

However, most big-market shows in the 21st century have taken the safe way, with repeats of familiar shows, such as Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line, South Pacific, Gypsy, Hair, West Side Story and Grease, or with changes of other proven material, such as books (The Scarlet Pimpernel, Wicked and Fun Home), hoping that the shows would have a ready audience because of this.

Today, it is less likely that one producer, such as David Merrick or Cameron Mackintosh, backs a show. Big businesses support Broadway, and often groups join together to make musicals, which need an investment of $10 million or more.

Several musicals returned to the big-show style that was so successful in the 1980s, remembering big shows that have been put on at times throughout theatre history, since the old Romans put on fake sea fights.

In 2013, Cyndi Lauper was the “first woman composer to win the [Tony for] Best Score without a male partner” for writing the music and words for Kinky Boots. In 2015, for the first time, an all-woman writing group, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, won the Tony Award for Best New Score (and Best Book for Kron) for Fun Home, although work by male writers is still made more often.

Jukebox musicals

Another pattern has been to make a small story to fit a group of songs that have already been hits. Following the earlier success of Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story, these have included Movin’ Out (2002, based on the songs of Billy Joel), Jersey Boys (2006, The Four Seasons), Rock of Ages (2009, featuring classic rock of the 1980s), Thriller – Live (2009, Michael Jackson), and many others.

Film and TV musicals

Further information: Musical film

Live-action movie musicals were almost gone in the 1980s and early 1990s, with exceptions of Victor/Victoria, Little Shop of Horrors and the 1996 movie of Evita. In the new century, Baz Luhrmann began a return of the movie musical with Moulin Rouge! (2001). This was followed by Chicago (2002); Phantom of the Opera (2004); Rent (2005); Dreamgirls (2006); Hairspray, Enchanted and Sweeney Todd (all in 2007); Mamma Mia! (2008); Nine (2009); Les Misérables and Pitch Perfect (both in 2012), Into The Woods, The Last Five Years (2014), La La Land (2016), The Greatest Showman (2017), A Star Is Born and Mary Poppins Returns (both 2018), Rocketman (2019) and In the Heights and Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story (both in 2021), among others.

Made-for-TV movie musicals were popular in the 1990s, such as Gypsy (1993), Cinderella (1997) and Annie (1999). Several made-for-TV movie musicals in the first ten years of the 21st century were changes of the stage version, such as South Pacific (2001), The Music Man (2003) and Once Upon a Mattress (2005), and a shown-on-TV version of the stage musical Legally Blonde in 2007.

In 2013, NBC began a group of live TV shows of musicals with The Sound of Music Live! Although the making got mixed reviews, it was a ratings hit.

2020–2021 theatre shutdown

The COVID-19 pandemic caused the closing of theatres and theatre festivals around the world in early 2020, including all Broadway and West End theatres. Many performing arts places tried to change or cut losses by giving new (or wider) digital services. In particular this led to the online showing of already-recorded shows by many groups, as well as special crowd-sourced projects.

Because of the closing and loss of ticket money, many theatre groups were in danger. Some governments gave emergency help to the arts. Some musical theatre markets started to open again in steps by early 2021, with West End theatres moving their opening from June to July, and Broadway starting in September. Through 2021, however, increases in the pandemic caused some closings even after markets opened.

Main article: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts and entertainment industry

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts and entertainment industry

Subdivisions

The main subdivisions of musical theatre include musical comedy, operetta, Golden Age musicals, megamusicals, rock musicals, and jukebox musicals.

Social themes

The main themes explored in musical theatre have included racial tolerance, acceptance of minorities, homosexuality, antisemitism, and historical American racism.

Awards

Notable productions

Notable composers and lyricists

Notable performers