Studies on Broadway Musicals
百老匯歌舞劇研究
段馨君
Introduction
• If by musical theater
we mean a staged
dramatic
entertainment in which
music is used as a vital
creative component,
then we may suggest
that America has
always had a musical
theater.
Chicago Ambassador thearter
• Part two deals with the considerable artistic
influence of writers, composers and lyricist
whose achievement carried the American
musical from its developments period to
recognized achievement.
• Popular songwriters like Irving Berlin, Cole
Porter, George Gershwin, and Lerner and
Loewe contributed much to the twentiethcentury musical, it was Jerome Kern, Rodgers
and Hammerstein, and Stephen Sondheim
who set the ship of traditional to sail in
significant new direction.
Irving Berlin
• Part three describes the basic elements of a
music show : book, lyrics, score, dance, and
design.
Cole Porter
George Gershwin
• Audience are the lifeblood of the theater, and
we are that audience. It matters less that we
disagree, than that through argument,
research, and participation, we continue to
care.
Broadway: The American Musical . Hello, Broadway! | PBS
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/hello/index.html
• Director-choreographer Bob Fosse described
as an evening in the theater when ”everybody
has a good time--- even in the crying scenes.”I
hope this book gives everybody a good time,
reawaken the joy of remembered musical, and
leads to more enlightened appreciation of this
popular American art.
Bob Fosse
Introduction: A philosophy of musical
theater
• Scholarly speculation about that primitive
theater of ritual aside, the idea of the
deliberate union of drama and song in opera.
• Audience have enjoyed such alternatives to
the spoken drama as operetta, ballet,
pantomime, minstrelsy, vaudeville, burlesque,
extravaganza, revue, musical comedy, and
musical play.
• All musical theater embodies the spirit and
philosophy of the theater of romance.
• Romantic love meant an ideal love: selfless,
spiritual, eternal, without human fetters.
• It endows its adherents with an emotional
ascendancy not unlike feeling the weight of
mortality melt away while knowing one is
mortal.
威爾第：茶花女－他或許是我夢中的情人
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpt7wCswcQI
• To measure a work accurately means to weigh
the contributions of librettist, composer,
lyricist, director, choreographer, actors, singers,
dancers, and lighting.
• Has not the lesson of Rodgers and
Hammerstein been that the skilled integration
of musical-dramatic elements that reveal
optimistic content promotes consistent
success in the popular musical theater?
• The process of musical theater is life-affirming
as well. Identify the principlal tools of its
carftsmen. Movement. Song. Dance. Each
distinguishes moments when we are truly
alive.
• Most American musical theater was popular
theater, entertainment created for the
majority of people.
• Now, the quantitative measures of popularuty
and success long runs, box-office receipts, film
Lloyd Webber
sales, cast albums and mediaAndrew
spinoffs
apply
customarily to revivals and Andrew Lloyd
Webber propeties.
• Musical stage knows that all musical theater is
presentational
• Presentationalism means more than a style of
presentation.
• Finally, musical theater requires a strict
acceptance of the conventions unique to it.
• The history of musical theater in America has
been an uninterrupted march toward the
crafts that particularize experiences in sound
and movement so popular and so universal as
to make the American musical the nation’s
most visible modern contribution to world
theater.
CH1. European forms in early
america
• Since the first recorded musical theater
performance in the colonies was of a ballad
opera, Flora(1735).
• Although the olio originated as a practical
response to some technical problem like
diverting the attention of the audience while
stagehands shifted cumbersome scenery, the
public so enjoyed and demanded these
interludes that the custom persisted untile
late in the nineteenth century when the
Severe disciplined theater practices associated
with the theater realism washed away all
entertainment excesses in a tidal wave of
reform.
• .
曲目〈心中的人兒～永
遠自由〉(這我不知道原
文的歌名)
The ballad opera
• The ballad opera is not a true opera.
Traditionally the word opera defines a
dramatic theater piece with continuous music
as the dominant artistic feature.
• Where early opera uses recitative between
arias, the ballad uses spoken dialogue.
• Spectacular achievement in 1728 of John
Gay’s Beggar’s opera.
Beggar's Opera (1728) - Cold and Raw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdIjAMVCHE0&feature=related
The Beggar’s opera.
• This was the special point of the work: crime is
less an affront in a world of poverty than is
official corruption.
Painting based on The Beggar's Opera, Scene
V,William Hogarth, c. 1728, in the Tate Britain
Comic opera
• The comic opera of the
English tradition contained
spoken dialogue rather
than recitative, and
resembled the French
opera bouffe and the
German operetta in spirit
and temperament. Hover,
one major distinction did
prevail. Opéra "bouffe"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFk2FsCv4pg&feature=related