Musical Theatre
(and social action)
ADA4M
March 6, 2013
What is Musical Theatre?
• Dance, drama, and singing
– Tells a story (even if just a loose story)
• One group of actors doing all types of
performance
– In contrast, opera has people who sing and people
who dance, but they are not usually the same
actors
What is “Broadway” Theatre?
• Broadway=a street in New York City
• Broadway theatre must be:
– Professional
– In one of the theatres in NYC’s theatre district
– In a theatre with 500+ seats
• 100-500 seats: “Off-Broadway”
• <100 seats: “Off-Off-Broadway”
• Equivalent in London=“West End” theatre
The First Musical?
• The Black Crook (1866)
• 5 ½ hours long!
• 474 performances on Broadway
• Synopsis: an evil count wants to marry the beautiful Amina.
The count sends Amina’s fiancé (Rodolphe) to an ancient
wizard who has made a deal with the devil (he can live forever
if he sacrifices a new person to the devil every year). Rodolphe
escapes, and is eventually helped by a fairy queen to regain
the love of Amina and send away the evil count.
Early Musical Theatre
• Operettas
– Shorter and less serious than operas
– Frequently feature satire and political commentary
– Some dialogue between songs (opera is all sung)
– Simplification: an operetta is an opera with some
acting, musical theatre is a play with some singing
• Began in France, made popular by Hervé and
Jacques Offenbach
• First English operettas in 1860s
Gilbert & Sullivan
•
•
•
•
14 operettas from 1871-1896
W.S. Gilbert: librettist (wrote the words)
Arthur Sullivan: composer (wrote the music)
1881: Savoy Theatre built to showcase their work
– First building in the world to be lit completely by electricity!
Gilbert & Sullivan
• First play: Trial by Jury
– A woman is suing for breach of promise (it was against the law for a man to go back on a
promise to marry). He says she shouldn’t get much money because he’s not a good guy
anyway; she says she should, because she’s madly in love with him. In the end, the judge
marries the woman.
• Most famous plays: The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado,
H.M.S. Pinafore
– Silly characters and situations, often making fun of the grand tradition
of opera and it’s overwrought plots (e.g. Pirates) or of English society
(e.g. The Mikado)
• Common style – “patter song”: very fast and rhythmic with
lots of rhyme, alliteration, and tongue-twisters
– “This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter / Isn’t generally heard,
and if it is, it doesn’t matter” (Ruddigore)
I Am the Very Model of a Modern
Major-General
I'm very good at integral and differential calculus;
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's;
I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox,
I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,
In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous;
I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,
I know the croaking chorus from The Frogs of Aristophanes!
Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore,
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.
There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.
Still Famous: Tom Lehrer’s periodic
table of the elements (as sung by
Daniel Radcliffe)
There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.
There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.
There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.
Still
Famous:
xkcd
webcomic
The Golden Age
• 1940s-1960s
• Themes of love, the “American dream”, and building
your own success
• Happy endings and catchy melodies; many musicals
adapted into films
• Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II
– Oklahoma!, The Sound of Music, South Pacific, The King
and I, Cinderella
• Irving Berlin
– Annie Get Your Gun, White Christmas
• Alan Jay Loerner & Frederick Lowe
– My Fair Lady, Camelot
The Mega-Musical
• 1970s: rock musicals
– Rock music, “edgy” topics, sometimes based on
existing music
• Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Rocky Horror Show
• 1980s onwards: mega-musicals/pop operas
– Pop-style music, large casts, elaborate staging and
special effects
• Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Cats, Wicked
The “Indie” Musical
• Low-budget, small-scale productions
• Unusual topics or staging concepts
• Start small, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t as
popular as the more commercial mega-musicals!
• Examples: Avenue Q (puppets as characters),
Urinetown (makes fun of government control;
drought means characters must pay to use
washrooms, sent away to Urinetown for not paying)
Current Trends
• Musical theatre reality
television!
“I’d Do Anything” (Nancy in Oliver!)
– Open talent searches as tv competition
• Andrew Lloyd Webber (composer: Phantom, JCS, Evita, Cats)
• Cameron Mackintosh (producer of shows above)
Danny and Sandy in
Grease
“How Do You Solve a
Problem Like Maria?” (Maria
in The Sound of Music)
“Over the Rainbow”
(Dorothy in The
Wizard of Oz)
Do you recognize her?
What themes were dealt with in
Kim’s Convenience?
• The difficulty of being an immigrant
– The difficulty of being a 2nd-generation immigrant, caught
between two cultures
•
•
•
•
•
•
Pursuing your dream vs. pursuing a stable career
Responsibility to care for your parents
Interracial relationships
Racism & prejudice
Forgiveness
…
Musicals & Social Action
• Golden Age musicals often focused on
tolerance
– Civil rights movement=striving for racial equality
• 1960s started to see interracial casts
• Topics about race gave way to more modern
topics: war, politics, homosexuality, mental
illness
Avenue Q: Based on “Sesame
Street”
Homework
• Find 2 facts about what society was like for
black people in the USA in the 1960s.