Development of musical theatre

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A William Hogarth painting based on The Beggar's Opera (c. 1728), a key antecedent of musical theatre

Development of musical theatre refers to the historical development of

Ballad Opera and pantomime
emerged in England and its colonies as the most popular forms of musical entertainment.

In the 19th century, following the development of European

Princess Theatre musicals in New York City during the First World War, and other smart shows like Of Thee I Sing (1931) were artistic steps forward beyond revues and other frothy entertainments of the early 20th century and led to the modern "book" musical, where songs and dances are fully integrated into a well-made story with serious dramatic goals that is able to evoke genuine emotions other than laughter.[1][2]

Early antecedents: Antiquity to Middle Ages

The Ancient Theatre of Delphi.

The antecedents of musical theatre in Europe can be traced back to the theatre of ancient Greece, where music and dance were included in stage comedies and tragedies during the 5th century BCE.[3][4] The dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles composed their own music to accompany their plays and choreographed the dances of the chorus. The 3rd-century BCE Roman comedies of Plautus included song and dance routines performed with orchestrations. The Romans also introduced technical innovations. For example, to make dance steps more audible in large open-air theatres, Roman actors attached metal chips called sabilla to their stage footwear, creating the first tap shoes.[5] The music from all of these forms is lost, however, and they had little influence on later development of musical theatre.[6]

By the Middle Ages, theatre in Europe consisted mostly of travelling minstrels and small performing troupes of performers singing and offering slapstick comedy.[7] 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. Later "mystery plays" were created that told a biblical story in a sequence of 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.[8]

Renaissance to the 1800s

A view of Rhodes by John Webb, to be painted on a backshutter for the first performance of The Siege of Rhodes (1856)

The European

stage design, sometimes by a renowned architect such as Inigo Jones, presented a deferential allegory flattering to a noble or royal patron.[11] Ben Jonson wrote many masques, often collaborating with Jones. William Shakespeare often included masque-like sections in his plays.[12]

The musical sections of masques developed into sung plays that are recognizable as English operas, the first usually being thought of as

The Tempest in 1667, which was the first Shakespeare plot set to music, and was then adapted by Shadwell into an opera in 1674 (composed by Matthew Locke and others).[14] About 1683, John Blow composed Venus and Adonis, often considered the first true English-language opera.[15] Blow was followed by Henry Purcell and a brief period of English opera. After the death of Charles II in 1685, English opera began to fall out of fashion.[13]

By the 18th century, the most popular forms of musical theatre in Britain were

comédie en vaudeville, opéra comique and other forms of light musical entertainment were emerging. Other musical theatre forms developed by the 19th century, such as music hall and melodrama. Melodramas and burlettas, in particular, were popularized partly because most London theatres were licensed only as music halls and not allowed to present plays without music. Some unlicensed theaters avoided the legal restrictions by providing supposedly free musical shows while serving tea at wildly inflated prices. In 1820, a new ordinance restricted all unlicensed theater productions to no more than six songs, which had to be an organic part of the play rather than a break or digression.[16] 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."[7]

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.

P.T. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in lower Manhattan.[19] Other early musical theatre in America consisted of British forms, such as burletta and pantomime.[6] Theatre in New York moved from downtown gradually to midtown from 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.[20]

1850s to 1880s

The Black Crook (1866), which some historians consider the first modern musical[21]

Around 1850, the French composer

opérette.[22] The best known composers of operetta were Jacques Offenbach from the 1850s to the 1870s and Johann Strauss II in the 1870s and 1880s.[6] Offenbach's fertile melodies, combined with his librettists' witty satire, formed a model for the musical theatre that followed. In 1957, Mark Lubbock traced the development of musical theatre from Offenbach to Gilbert and Sullivan and eventually to Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein, writing: "Offenbach is undoubtedly the most significant figure in the history of the 'musical'.[23] In the mid-19th century in England, musical theatre consisted of mostly of music hall, adaptations of the French operettas (played in bad, risqué translations) and musical burlesques (the culmination of which were seen at the Gaiety Theatre beginning in 1868). In reaction to these, a few family-friendly entertainments were created, such as the German Reed Entertainments.[24]

In America, mid-18th century musical theatre entertainments included crude variety revue, which eventually developed into

legitimate theatrical form. They starred high quality singers (Lillian Russell, Vivienne Segal, and Fay Templeton) instead of the ladies of questionable repute who had starred in earlier musical forms. The Hyers Sisters were also early pioneers in American musical theater, telling the stories of African-American slavery and freedom through musical plays in the 1870s.[26]

Poster, c. 1879

The length of runs in the theatre changed rapidly around the same time that the modern musical emerged. 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

The Chimes of Normandy (Les Cloches de Corneville) ran for 705 performances in 1878 in London, and Alfred Cellier and B. C. Stephenson's 1886 hit, Dorothy
(a show midway between comic opera and musical comedy), set a new record with 931 performances.

Gilbert and Sullivan's influence on later musical theatre was profound, creating examples of how to "integrate" musicals so that the lyrics and dialogue were designed to advance a coherent story.

Savoy operas, also enjoyed profitable New York productions and tours of Britain, America, Europe, Australasia and South Africa. These shows were fare for "respectable" audiences, a marked contrast from the risqué burlesques, melodramas, minstrel shows, bawdy music hall shows and French operettas that dominated the stage prior to Gilbert and Sullivan and drew a sometimes seedy crowd looking for less wholesome entertainment.[24]

1890s to the new century

A Gaiety Girl (1893) was one of the first hit musicals

John Walter Bratton and George M. Cohan (Little Johnny Jones (1904)). Still, New York runs continued to be relatively short, with a few exceptions, compared with London runs, until the 1920s.[17] Tours, however, were often extensive, beginning with the original Broadway cast.[34]

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. He took over the Gaiety Theatre and, at first, he improved the quality of the old burlesques. He perceived that audiences wanted a new alternative to the Savoy-style comic operas and their intellectual, political, absurdist satire. He experimented with a modern-dress, family-friendly musical theatre style, with breezy, popular songs, snappy, romantic banter, and stylish spectacle at the Gaiety, Daly's Theatre and other venues. These drew on the traditions of comic opera and also used elements of burlesque and of the Harrigan and Hart pieces. He replaced the bawdy women of burlesque with his "respectable" corps of dancing, singing Gaiety Girls to complete the musical and visual fun. The success of the first of these, In Town in 1892 and A Gaiety Girl in 1893, confirmed Edwardes on the path he was taking. These "musical comedies", as he called them, revolutionized the London stage and set the tone for the next three decades.

Cover of the Vocal Score of Sidney Jones' The Geisha

Edwardes' 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 found great international success, for example in Australian productions by J. C. Williamson.

The British musical comedy

The Belle of New York (1898) ran for 697 performances in London after a brief New York run, becoming the first American musical to run for over a year in London. After the turn of the 20th 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 (1902), The Orchid (1903), The Girls of Gottenberg (1907) and Our Miss Gibbs (1909). Other Edwardian musical comedy hits included The Arcadians (1909) and The Quaker Girl (1910).[35]

Operetta and World War I

Victor Herbert

Virtually eliminated from the English-speaking stage by competition from the ubiquitous Edwardian musical comedies in the 1890s, operettas returned to London and Broadway in 1907 with The Merry Widow, and operettas and musicals became direct competitors for a time. In the early years of the 20th century, English-language adaptations 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. In America, Victor Herbert produced a string of famous operettas (The Fortune Teller (1898), Babes in Toyland (1903), Mlle. Modiste (1905), The Red Mill (1906) and Naughty Marietta (1910)), often with librettist Harry B. Smith, as well as some intimate musical plays with modern settings. In English-speaking countries, during World War I, German-language operetta lost its popularity.[36]

Among other British and American composers and librettists of the 1910s, the team of

Princess Theatre shows" paved the way for Kern's later work by showing that a musical could combine light, popular entertainment with continuity between its story and songs:[28]

"These shows built and polished the mold from which almost all later major musical comedies evolved. ... The characters and situations were, within the limitations of musical comedy license, believable and the humor came from the situations or the nature of the characters. Kern's exquisitely flowing melodies were employed to further the action or develop characterization. The integration of song and story is periodically announced as a breakthrough in ... musical theater. Great opera has always done this, and it is easy to demonstrate such integration in Gilbert and Sullivan or the French

opera bouffe. However, early musical comedy was often guilty of inserting songs in a hit-or-miss fashion. The Princess Theatre musicals brought about a change in approach. P. G. Wodehouse, the most observant, literate, and witty lyricist of his day, and the team of Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern had an influence felt to this day.[37]

George Gershwin

The theatre-going public needed escapist entertainment during the dark times of

Florenz Ziegfeld and his imitators in America, were also extraordinarily popular. A new generation of composers of operettas emerged in the 1920s, such as Rudolf Friml and Sigmund Romberg.[7]

The primacy of British musical theatre from the 19th century through 1920 was gradually replaced by American innovation in the 20th century. Edwardes' competitor and counterpart in the U.S. was

Shubert Brothers took control of the Broadway theatres after the war as new writers like the Gershwin brothers (George and Ira), Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hart began to produce shows. Musical theatre writer Andrew Lamb notes, "The triumph of American works over European in the first decades of the twentieth century came about against a changing social background. The operatic and theatrical styles of nineteenth-century social structures were replaced by a musical style more aptly suited to twentieth-century society and its vernacular idiom. It was from America that the more direct style emerged, and in America that it was able to flourish in a developing society less hidebound by nineteenth-century tradition."[6][38]

The Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression

Sheet music from Sally, 1920

The musicals of the

Lady Be Good; Sunny; No, No, Nanette; Oh, Kay! and Funny Face. While the books of these shows may have been forgettable, they featured stars such as Marilyn Miller and Fred Astaire and produced dozens of enduring popular songs ("standards") by, most notably, Jerome Kern, the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Vincent Youmans, and the team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, popular music was dominated by musical theatre composers and lyricists. These musicals and the standards they produced, including "Fascinating Rhythm", "Tea for Two" and "Someone to Watch Over Me
", became popular on both sides of the Atlantic ocean.

Many shows were

African American show was a hit on Broadway.[39] In London, stars such as Ivor Novello and Noël Coward became popular. Meanwhile, operettas, which had been nearly absent from the English-speaking stage since World War I, had a last burst of popularity; works by continental European composers were successful, as were those by Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml in America, which included Rose-Marie and The Student Prince respectively. The last hit operetta of the era on Broadway was Romberg's The New Moon in 1928.[40]

Progressing far beyond the comparatively frivolous musicals and sentimental operettas of the decade, Show Boat, which premiered on December 27, 1927, at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York, represented an even more complete integration of book and score than the Princess Theatre musicals, with dramatic themes told through the music, dialogue, setting and movement. This was accomplished by combining the lyricism of Kern's music with the skillful craft of Oscar Hammerstein II, who adapted Edna Ferber's novel and wrote lyrics for the show. One historian wrote, "Here we come to a completely new genre – the musical play as distinguished from musical comedy. Now ... the play was the thing, and everything else was subservient to that play. Now ... came complete integration of song, humor and production numbers into a single and inextricable artistic entity."[41] However, Bordman argues, "Show Boat is certainly an operetta with its many arioso passages, its musical depth and seriousness, and its romantic story set, in typical operetta fashion, in the long ago and far away."[37] Nevertheless, as the Great Depression set in during the post-Broadway national tour of Show Boat, the public turned back to light, brassy, escapist entertainment, and no follow-up was produced so seriously treating serious social themes until Oklahoma! in 1943.[37]

The motion picture mounted a challenge to the stage. At first, films were silent and presented only limited competition to theatre. But by the end of the 1920s, films like The Jazz Singer could be presented with synchronized sound. "Talkie" films at low prices effectively killed off vaudeville by the early 1930s. Historian John Kenrick commented: "Top vaudeville stars filmed their acts for one-time pay-offs, inadvertently helping to speed the death of vaudeville. After all, when 'small time' theatres could offer 'big time' performers on screen at a nickel a seat, who could ask audiences to pay higher amounts for less impressive live talent?"[42]

1930s to Oklahoma!

Ethel Merman

The Great Depression affected theatre audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, as people had little money to spend on entertainment. Only a few stage shows exceeded a run on Broadway or in London of 500 performances during the decade.

Many shows continued the lighthearted song-and-dance style of their 1920s predecessors. The revue

Hellzapoppin
(1938), a revue with audience participation, which played for 1,404 performances, setting a new Broadway record that was finally beaten by Oklahoma! five years later.

Rodgers and Hart

However, a few creative teams began to build on Show Boat's innovations, experimenting with musical satire, topical books and operatic scope.

Sweeney Todd. The Cradle Will Rock (1937), with a book and score by Marc Blitzstein and direction by Orson Welles, was a highly political pro-union piece that, despite the controversy surrounding it, managed to run for 108 performances. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's I'd Rather Be Right (1937) was a political satire with George M. Cohan as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Kurt Weill's Knickerbocker Holiday, based on source writings by Washington Irving, depicted New York City's early history while good-naturedly satirizing the good intentions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt
.

Despite the economic woes of the decade 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 beginning to evolve beyond the gags and showgirls musicals of the Gay Nineties and Roaring Twenties and the sentimental romance of operetta.[6] Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943) completed the revolution begun by Show Boat, by tightly integrating all the aspects of musical theatre, with a cohesive and more serious plot, and songs and dances that furthered the action of the story and developed the characters. It was also the first "blockbuster" Broadway show, running a total of 2,212 performances, and was made into a hit film.[2][45]

See also

Notes and references

  1. ^ Everett 2002, p. 137
  2. ^ a b Rubin, p. 438
  3. ^ Thornton, Shay (2007). "A Wonderful Life" (PDF). Houston, TX: Theatre Under the Stars. p. 2. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 27, 2007. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
  4. ^ Goodwin, Noël. "The history of theatrical music", Britannica.com, accessed August 4, 2021; and Blakeley, Sasha and Jenna Conan. "History of Musical Theatre: Lesson for Kids – Early Musicals", Study.com, accessed August 4, 2021
  5. ^ Flinn 1997, p. 22.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h Kenrick, John. "A Capsule History", Musicals101.com, 2003, accessed October 12, 2015
  7. ^ a b c Kenrick, John. "History of Stage Musicals", Musicals101.com, 2003, accessed May 26, 2009
  8. ^ Hoppin 1978, pp. 180–181
  9. ^ Lord 2003, p. 41
  10. ^ Lord 2003, p. 42
  11. ^ Buelow 2004, p. 26
  12. ^ Shakespeare 1998, p. 44.
  13. ^ a b Buelow 2004, p. 328
  14. ^ a b Carter and Butt 2005, p. 280
  15. ^ Parker 2001, p. 42.
  16. ^ Cullen (2007), p. 810
  17. ^ a b c Gillan, Don (2007). "Longest Running Plays in London and New York". Stage Beauty. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
  18. ^ a b Wilmeth and Miller, p. 182.
  19. ^ Wilmeth and Miller, p. 56
  20. ^ Allen 1991, p. 106
  21. ^ Morley 1987, p. 15
  22. ^ Lubbock, Mark. "The Music of 'Musicals'". The Musical Times, Vol. 98, No. 1375 (September, 1957), pp. 483–85, Musical Times Publications Ltd., accessed 17 August 2010
  23. ^ Lubbock, Mark. "The Music of 'Musicals'", The Musical Times, Vol. 98, No. 1375 (September 1957), pp. 483–485 (subscription required)
  24. ^ a b Bond, Jessie. Introduction to The Life and Reminiscences of Jessie Bond, reprinted at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed March 4, 2011
  25. ^ Cullen (2007), p. 811
  26. ISBN 9780252041631
    .
  27. ^ a b Kenrick, John. "G&S in the USA" at the musicals101 website The Cyber Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre, TV and Film (2008). Retrieved on 4 May 2012.
  28. ^ a b Jones, 2003, pp. 10–11
  29. ISBN 0-87972-466-8
  30. ^ PG Wodehouse (1881–1975), guardian.co.uk, Retrieved on 21 May 2007
  31. ^ "List of allusions to G&S in Wodehouse". Home.lagrange.edu. Archived from the original on 9 December 2008. Retrieved 27 May 2009.
  32. ^ Meyerson, Harold and Ernest Harburg Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz?: Yip Harburg, Lyricist, pp 15-17 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 1st paperback edition 1995)
  33. ^ Bradley (2005), p. 9
  34. ISBN 0-8018-6477-1
  35. ^ See, generally, Index to The Gaiety, a British musical theatre publication with articles about Victorian and Edwardian musical theatre. Accessed February 25, 2011
  36. ^ Kenrick, John. Basil Hood, Who's Who in Musicals: Additional Bios XII, Musicals101.com, 2004, accessed May 7, 2012
  37. ^ a b c Bordman, Gerald. "Jerome David Kern: Innovator/Traditionalist", The Musical Quarterly, 1985, Vol. 71, No. 4, pp. 468–73
  38. JSTOR 3052183
    .
  39. ^ Krasner, David. A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927, Palgrave MacMillan, 2002, pp. 263–67
  40. ^ Midgette, Anne. "Operetta Review: Much Silliness In a Gilt Frame", The New York Times, March 29, 2003, accessed December 1, 2012
  41. ^ Lubbock 2002.
  42. ^ Kenrick, John. "History of Musical Film, 1927–30: Part II". Musicals101.com, 2004, accessed May 17, 2010
  43. ^ 1944 awards, Pulitzer.org, accessed July 7, 2012
  44. ^ Connema, Richard (2000). "San Francisco: As Thousands Cheer and Dear World". TalkinBroadway.Org, Inc. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
  45. ^ Everett 2002, p. 124

Cited books

Further reading

External links
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