CH1. European Forms in Early
America
段馨君 Iris Hsin-chun Tuan
Associate Professor
Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences
NCTU
• 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://youtu.be/NtlyE1fTuw8
• 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?
Movement, Song & Dance
• The process of musical theater
is life-affirming as well.
• Identify the principal tools of its
craftsmen.
• 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 popularity and success long
runs, box-office receipts, film
sales, cast albums and media
spinoffs apply customarily to
revivals and Andrew Lloyd
Webber properties.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
• 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).
Giuseppe Verd
the comoposer Flora
• 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 until 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〉
曲目〈心中的人兒～永
遠自由〉
https://www.youtube.co
m/watch?v=SSPK7Ayu
w3s
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CASL6_fOCw0
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.
However, one major
distinction did prevail.
Opéra "bouffe"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It6t0ZdAMxE