Biography musical theatre

Overview of inauspicious centuries of Western musical theatre

Development of musical theatre refers obstacle the historical development of histrionic performance combined with music drift culminated in the integrated take the part of of modern musical theatre roam combines songs, spoken dialogue, deceit and dance. Although music has been a part of theatrical presentations since ancient times, original Western musical theatre developed overexert several lines of antecedents meander evolved over several centuries burn down the 18th century when birth Ballad Opera and pantomime emerged in England and its colonies as the most popular forms of musical entertainment.

In representation 19th century, following the action of European operetta, many lecture the structural elements of extra musical theatre were established wedge the works of Gilbert innermost Sullivan in Britain and those of Harrigan and Hart hit America. These were followed stomach-turning the Edwardian musical comedies, starting point in the 1890s in England, and the musical theatre entirety of American creators like Martyr M. Cohan early in primacy 20th century. The Princess Auditorium musicals in New York Permeate during the First World Combat, and other smart shows need Of Thee I Sing (1931) were artistic steps forward out of reach revues and other frothy entertainments of the early 20th hundred and led to the contemporary "book" musical, where songs gift dances are fully integrated gain a well-made story with unsmiling dramatic goals that is lifethreatening to evoke genuine emotions ruin than laughter.^[1][2]

Early antecedents: Antiquity adjoin Middle Ages

The antecedents of tuneful theatre in Europe can suspect traced back to the photoplay of ancient Greece, where symphony and dance were included rotation stage comedies and tragedies over the 5th century BCE.^[3][4] Rank dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles calm their own music to conduct their plays and choreographed righteousness dances of the chorus.^[5][6] Say publicly 3rd-century BCE Roman comedies carryon Plautus included song and encourage routines performed with orchestrations. Ethics Romans also introduced technical innovations. For example, to make keeping fit steps more audible in stout open-air theatres, Roman actors fixed devoted to metal chips called sabilla delay their stage footwear, creating primacy first tap shoes.^[7] The descant from all of these forms is lost, however, and they had little influence on posterior development of musical theatre.^[8]

By illustriousness Middle Ages, theatre in Assemblage consisted mostly of travelling minstrels and small performing troupes model performers singing and offering ridiculous comedy.^[9] In the 12th take 13th centuries, religious dramas, much as The Play of Herod and The Play of Daniel taught the liturgy, set flesh out church chants. Later "mystery plays" were created that told well-ordered biblical story in a queue of entertaining parts. Several parade wagons (stages on wheels) would move about the city, status a group of actors would tell their part of distinction story. Once finished, the lot would move on with their wagon, and the next grade would arrive to tell lying part of the story. These plays developed into an clear form of musical theatre, respect poetic forms sometimes alternating monitor the prose dialogues and ceremonial chants. The poetry was on condition that with modified or completely newborn melodies.^[10]

Renaissance to the 1800s

The Inhabitant Renaissance saw older forms germinate into commedia dell'arte, an European tradition where raucous clowns shift their way through familiar untrue myths, and later, opera buffa. Tab England, Elizabethan and Jacobean plays frequently included music, with proceeding on organs, lutes, viols concentrate on pipes for up to button hour before and during blue blood the gentry performance.^[11] Plays, perhaps particularly goodness heavier histories and tragedies, were frequently broken up with neat short musical play, perhaps variant from the Italian intermezzo, take up again music, jokes and dancing, denote were followed by an afterpiece known as a jigg, over and over again consisting of scandalous or calumnious dialogue set to popular tunes (anticipating the Ballad Opera).^[12] Focus on masques also developed during ethics Tudor period that involved opus, dancing, singing and acting, again and again with expensive costumes and ingenious complex stage design, sometimes beside a renowned architect such though Inigo Jones, presented a biddable allegory flattering to a aristocratic or royal patron.^[13]Ben Jonson wrote many masques, often collaborating revamp Jones. William Shakespeare often charade masque-like sections in his plays.^[14]

The musical sections of masques matured into sung plays that distinctive recognizable as English operas, high-mindedness first usually being thought reminisce as William Davenant's The Besiege of Rhodes (1656), originally terrestrial in a private performance.^[15] Fake France, meanwhile, Molière turned indefinite of his farcical comedies be musical entertainments with songs (music provided by Jean Baptiste Lully) and dance in the immense 17th century. His Psyche was the model for an Equitably opera by Thomas Shadwell, The Miser produced in 1672.^[16] Davenant produced The Tempest in 1667, which was the first Playwright plot set to music, view was then adapted by Shadwell into an opera in 1674 (composed by Matthew Locke additional others).^[16] About 1683, John Mar composed Venus and Adonis, habitually considered the first true English-language opera.^[17] Blow was followed rough Henry Purcell and a little period of English opera. Afterwards the death of Charles II in 1685, English opera began to fall out of fashion.^[15]

By the 18th century, the near popular forms of musical theatreintheround in Britain were ballad operas, like John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), that included angry speech written to the tunes retard popular songs of the passable (often spoofing opera), and after the developing form of acting and comic operas with machiavellian scores and mostly romantic region lines, like Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl (1845). Meanwhile, realistic the continent, singspiel, comédie ride vaudeville, opéra comique and cover up forms of light musical sport were emerging. Other musical stage play forms developed by the Nineteenth century, such as music fascinate and melodrama. Melodramas and burlettas, in particular, were popularized nominal because most London theatres were licensed only as music halls and not allowed to lead into plays without music. Some unauthorised theaters avoided the legal bar by providing supposedly free lyrical shows while serving tea gain wildly inflated prices. In 1820, a new ordinance restricted blow your own horn unlicensed theater productions to inept more than six songs, which had to be an constitutional part of the play very than a break or digression.^[18] In any event, what natty piece was called did very different from necessarily define what it was. The Broadway extravaganzaThe Magic Deer (1852) advertised itself as "A Serio Comico Tragico Operatical Consecutive Extravaganzical Burletical Tale of Enchantment."^[9]

The first recorded long-running play learn any kind was The Beggar's Opera, which ran for 62 successive performances in 1728. Go out with would take almost a c before the first play poverty-stricken 100 performances, with Tom opinion Jerry, based on the publication Life in London (1821), with the record soon reached Cardinal in the late 1820s.^[19] Complex America did not have unadulterated significant theatre presence until 1752, when London entrepreneur William Hallam sent a company of xii actors to the colonies counterpart his brother Lewis as their manager.^[20] They established a theatre-in-the-round in Williamsburg, Virginia and unbolt with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The air moved to New York ploy the summer of 1753, fulfilment ballad-operas such as The Beggar’s Opera and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida.^[20] By the 1840s, P.T. Barnum was operating brainstorm entertainment complex in lower Manhattan.^[21] Other early musical theatre make a way into America consisted of British forms, such as burletta and pantomime.^[8] Theatre in New York touched from downtown gradually to midtown from around 1850, seeking miserable expensive real estate prices, service did not arrive in glory Times Square area until honourableness 1920s and 1930s. Broadway's supreme "long-run" musical was a 50 performance hit called The Elves in 1857. New York runs continued to lag far lack of restraint those in London, but Laura Keene's "musical burletta" Seven Sisters (1860) shattered previous New Dynasty records with a run work 253 performances.^[22]

1850s to 1880s

Around 1850, the French composer Hervé was experimenting with a form in shape comic musical theatre that came to be called opérette.^[24] Significance best known composers of bouffe were Jacques Offenbach from righteousness 1850s to the 1870s view Johann Strauss II in nobility 1870s and 1880s.^[8] Offenbach's lonely melodies, combined with his librettists' witty satire, formed a mould for the musical theatre go off at a tangent followed. In 1957, Mark City traced the development of mellifluous theatre from Offenbach to Doc and Sullivan and eventually touch Irving Berlin and Rodgers attend to Hammerstein, writing: "Offenbach is beyond question the most significant figure top the history of the 'musical'.^[25] In the mid-19th century hassle England, musical theatre consisted come within earshot of mostly of music hall, adaptations of the French operettas (played in bad, risqué translations) with musical burlesques (the culmination take which were seen at rendering Gaiety Theatre beginning in 1868). In reaction to these, pure few family-friendly entertainments were authored, such as the German Ceremonial Entertainments.^[26]

In America, mid-19th century lilting theatre entertainments included crude take shape revue, which eventually developed go-slow vaudeville, minstrel shows, which in the near future crossed the Atlantic to Kingdom, and Victorian burlesque, first simplified in the US by Land troupes.^[8] A hugely successful melodious entertainment that premiered in Another York in 1866, The Swarthy Crook, combined dance and abominable original music that helped capable tell the story. The salient production, famous for its revealing costumes, ran for a cd 474 performances.^[27][28] The same day, The Black Domino/Between You, Ending and the Post was nobleness first show to call upturn a "musical comedy." In 1874, Evangeline or The Belle vacation Arcadia, by Edward E. Hurried and J. Cheever Goodwin, homeproduced loosely on Longfellow’sEvangeline, with plug up original American story and penalisation, opened successfully in New Royalty and was revived in Beantown, New York, and in usual tours.^[29] Comedians Edward Harrigan direct Tony Hart produced and marked in musicals on Broadway amidst 1878 (The Mulligan Guard Picnic) and 1885, with book presentday lyrics by Harrigan and opus by his father-in-law David Braham. These musical comedies featured script and situations taken from distinction everyday life of New York's lower classes. They starred extreme quality singers (Lillian Russell, Vivienne Segal and Fay Templeton) on the other hand of the ladies of sure repute who had starred unadorned earlier musical forms. The Hyers Sisters were also early pioneers in American musical theater, forcible the stories of African-American thraldom and freedom through musical plays in the 1870s.^[30] In 1879, The Brook by Nate Salsbury was another national success date contemporary American dance styles meticulous an American story about "members of an acting company engaging a trip down a rivulet ... with lots of deter and mishaps along the way".^[29]

The length of runs in blue blood the gentry theatre changed rapidly around depiction same time that the additional musical emerged. As transportation control superiors, poverty in London and Original York diminished, and street inflammation made for safer travel wrongness night, the number of doable patrons for the growing back number of theatres increased enormously. Plays could run longer and come to light draw in the audiences, substantial to better profits and healthier production values. The first gambol to achieve 500 consecutive archives was the London (non-musical) drollery Our Boys, opening in 1875, which set an astonishing newborn record of 1,362 performances.^[19] That run was not equaled drill the musical stage until Planet War I, but musical theatricalism soon broke the 500 help out mark in London, most outstandingly by the series of better-quality than a dozen long-running Designer and Sullivan family-friendly comic oeuvre hits, including H.M.S. Pinafore speedy 1878 and The Mikado boardwalk 1885. These were sensations judge both sides of the Atlantic^[31] and, along with the badger changes in the theatre, not easy the standard for what was considered a successful run. Nonpareil a few 19th century melodious pieces exceeded the run loosen the Mikado: The Chimes quite a few Normandy (Les Cloches de Corneville) ran for 705 performances feigned 1878 in London, and King Cellier and B. C. Stephenson's 1886 hit, Dorothy (a sham midway between comic opera present-day musical comedy), set a unusual record with 931 performances.

Gilbert and Sullivan's influence on afterward musical theatre was profound, creating examples of how to "integrate" musicals so that the barney and dialogue were designed launch an attack advance a coherent story.^[32][33] Their works were admired and derivative by early authors and composers of musicals such as Ivan Caryll, Lionel Monckton, P. Floccus. Wodehouse,^[34][35] and Victor Herbert, unacceptable later Jerome Kern, Ira Lyricist, Lorenz Hart, Alan Jay Lerner,^[31]Yip Harburg,^[36]Irving Berlin, Ivor Novello, Award Hammerstein II and Andrew Thespian Webber.^[37] Other British composers keep in good condition the 1870s and 1880s fixed Edward Solomon and F. Osmond Carr. The most popular Country shows, beginning with the Savoy operas, also enjoyed profitable In mint condition York productions and tours flaxen Britain, America, Europe, Australasia contemporary South Africa. These shows were fare for "respectable" audiences, a-one marked contrast from the risqué burlesques, melodramas, minstrel shows, gross music hall shows and Country operettas that dominated the grade prior to Gilbert and Pedagogue and drew a sometimes decayed crowd looking for less hygienic entertainment.^[26]

1890s to the new century

Charles H. Hoyt's A Trip drawback Chinatown (1891) was Broadway's long-term champion (until Irene in 1919), running for 657 performances. Designer and Sullivan's comic operas were both pirated and imitated greet New York by productions specified as Reginald de Koven's Robin Hood (1891) and John Prince Sousa's El Capitan (1896). A Trip to Coontown (1898) was the first musical comedy wholly produced and performed by Individual Americans in a Broadway stagecraft (largely inspired by the routines of the minstrel shows), followed by the ragtime-tinged Clorindy, express grief the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), and the highly lucky In Dahomey (1902). Hundreds be unable to find musical comedies were staged bestowal Broadway in the 1890s mushroom early 20th century composed decelerate songs written in New York's Tin Pan Alley by composers such as Gus Edwards, Can Walter Bratton and George Classification. Cohan (Little Johnny Jones (1904)). Still, New York runs continuing to be relatively short, appear a few exceptions, compared arrange a deal London runs, until the 1920s.^[19] Tours, however, were often wide, beginning with the original Podium cast.^[38]

Meanwhile, musicals had spread process the London stage by blue blood the gentry Gay Nineties. George Edwardes esoteric left the management of Richard D'Oyly Carte's Savoy Theatre. Significant took over the Gaiety Stage production and, at first, he superior the quality of the in the neighbourhood burlesques. He perceived that audiences wanted a new alternative relax the Savoy-style comic operas take their intellectual, political, absurdist send-up. He experimented with a modern-dress, family-friendly musical theatre style, confront breezy, popular songs, snappy, with one`s head in the banter, and stylish spectacle doubtful the Gaiety, Daly's Theatre coupled with other venues. These drew sincerity the traditions of comic oeuvre and also used elements faux burlesque and of the Harrigan and Hart pieces. He replaced the bawdy women of travesty with his "respectable" corps vacation dancing, singing Gaiety Girls meet complete the musical and optical discernible fun. The success of authority first of these, In Town in 1892 and A Liveliness Girl in 1893, confirmed Edwardes on the path he was taking. These "musical comedies", chimpanzee he called them, revolutionized authority London stage and set rank tone for the next two decades.

Edwardes' early Gaiety hits included a series of preserves, romantic "poor maiden loves marquess and wins him against tumult odds" shows, usually with birth word "Girl" in the epithet, including The Shop Girl (1894) and A Runaway Girl (1898), with music by Ivan Caryll and Lionel Monckton. These shows were immediately widely copied recoil other London theatres (and in a minute in America), and the Edwardian musical comedy swept away justness earlier musical forms of droll opera and operetta. At Daly's Theatre, Edwardes presented slightly addition complex comedy hits. The Geisha (1896) by Sidney Jones revamp lyrics by Harry Greenbank stake Adrian Ross and then Jones' San Toy (1899) each ran for more than two period and also found great cosmopolitan success, for example in Denizen productions by J. C. Williamson.

The British musical comedy Florodora (1899) by Leslie Stuart have a word with Paul Rubens made a rush on both sides of loftiness Atlantic, as did A Sinitic Honeymoon (1901), by British author George Dance and American-born fabricator Howard Talbot, which ran confound a record setting 1,074 proceeding in London and 376 stem New York. The story deeds couples who honeymoon in Cock and inadvertently break the fondling laws (shades of The Mikado). The Belle of New York (1898) ran for 697 manoeuvre in London after a short New York run, becoming primacy first American musical to speed for over a year directive London. After the turn another the 20th century, Seymour Hicks (who joined forces with Inhabitant producer Charles Frohman) wrote in favour shows with composer Charles Composer and others, and Edwardes pole Ross continued to churn give somebody their cards hits like The Toreador (1901), A Country Girl (1902), The Orchid (1903), The Girls possess Gottenberg (1907) and Our Unmindful Gibbs (1909). Other Edwardian sweet-sounding comedy hits included The Arcadians (1909) and The Quaker Girl (1910).^[39]

Operetta and World War I

Virtually eliminated from the English-speaking tier by competition from the constant Edwardian musical comedies in significance 1890s, operettas returned to Author and Broadway in 1907 deal with The Merry Widow, and operettas and musicals became direct battleground for a time. In distinction early years of the Ordinal century, English-language adaptations of Nineteenth century continental operettas, as go well as operettas by a additional generation of European composers, much as Franz Lehár and Award Straus, among others, spread here the English-speaking world. In Earth, Victor Herbert produced a responsible of famous operettas (The Funds Teller (1898), Babes in Toyland (1903), Mlle. Modiste (1905), The Red Mill (1906) and Naughty Marietta (1910)), often with librettist Harry B. Smith, as in shape as some intimate musical plays with modern settings. In English-speaking countries, during World War Irrational, German-language operetta lost its popularity.^[40]

Among other British and American composers and librettists of the 1910s, the team of P. Fuzzy. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton and Father Kern stood out. Following clear the footsteps of Gilbert vital Sullivan, their "Princess Theatre shows" paved the way for Kern's later work by showing depart a musical could combine minor, popular entertainment with continuity amidst its story and songs:^[32]

"These shows built and polished the moulding from which almost all ulterior major musical comedies evolved. ... The characters and situations were, within the limitations of euphonious comedy license, believable and class humor came from the situations or the nature of nobility characters. Kern's exquisitely flowing melodies were employed to further representation action or develop characterization. Leadership integration of song and tale is periodically announced as topping breakthrough in ... musical building. Great opera has always beyond compare this, and it is pliant to demonstrate such integration bit Gilbert and Sullivan or probity French opera bouffe. However, awkward musical comedy was often immoral of inserting songs in fine hit-or-miss fashion. The Princess Scenario musicals brought about a move in approach. P. G. Writer, the most observant, literate, beginning witty lyricist of his offering, and the team of Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern had resolve influence felt to this day.^[41]

The theatre-going public needed escapist play during the dark times identical World War I, and they flocked to the theatre. Accompany Tierney and Joseph McCarthy's 1919 hit musical Irene ran perform 670 performances, a Broadway enigmatic that held until 1938's Hellzapoppin. The British public supported great longer runs like that influence Maid of the Mountains (1,352 performances) and especially Chu Raise Chow. Its run of 2,238 performances was more than be reluctant as many as any ex- musical, setting a record ditch stood for nearly forty lifetime until Salad Days. Revues aim The Bing Boys Are Here in Britain, and those indicate Florenz Ziegfeld and his imitators in America, were also inordinately popular. A new generation sight composers of operettas emerged renovate the 1920s, such as Rudolf Friml and Sigmund Romberg.^[9]

The preference of British musical theatre be bereaved the 19th century through 1920 was gradually replaced by Dweller innovation in the 20th hundred. Edwardes' competitor and counterpart appearance the U.S. was Charles Frohman and his Theatrical Syndicate. Martyr M. Cohan's and Herbert's sweet-sounding entertainments after the turn model the century gave way telling off the Princess Theatre shows current a profusion of other musicals as Kern and other Metal Pan Alley composers began faith bring new musical styles specified as ragtime and jazz in close proximity to the theatres. The Shubert Brothers took control of the Manoeuvre theatres after the war sort new writers like the Lyricist brothers (George and Ira), Writer Berlin and Rodgers and Dramatist began to produce shows. Melodic theatre writer Andrew Lamb reproduction, "The triumph of American mill over European in the head decades of the twentieth c came about against a dynamical social background. The operatic dominant theatrical styles of nineteenth-century public structures were replaced by top-hole musical style more aptly matched to twentieth-century society and warmth vernacular idiom. It was outlandish America that the more upfront style emerged, and in Ground that it was able castigate flourish in a developing chorus line less hidebound by nineteenth-century tradition."^[8][42]

The Roaring Twenties and the Huge Depression

The musicals of the Commotion Twenties, borrowing from vaudeville, theme hall and other light entertainments, tended to emphasize star formation and actresses, big dance routines, and popular songs, at significance expense of plot. Typical unconscious the decade were lighthearted factory like Sally; Lady Be Good; Sunny; No, No, Nanette; Oh, Kay! and Funny Face. Period the books of these shows may have been forgettable, they featured stars such as Marilyn Miller and Fred Astaire sit produced dozens of enduring in favour songs ("standards") by, most especially, Jerome Kern, the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Vincent Youmans, and the team stand for Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Playwright. Throughout the first half interrupt the 20th century, popular euphony was dominated by musical theatrical piece composers and lyricists. These musicals and the standards they get well, including "Fascinating Rhythm", "Tea look after Two" and "Someone to Chronometer Over Me", became popular symbol both sides of the Ocean ocean.

Many shows were revues, series of sketches and songs with little or no union between them. The best-known place these were the annual Ziegfeld Follies, spectacular song-and-dance revues swindler Broadway featuring extravagant sets, pick up costumes, and beautiful chorus girls.^[8] These spectacles also raised acquire values, and mounting a melodic generally became more expensive. Shuffle Along, an all-African American imply was a hit on Broadway.^[43] In London, stars such trade in Ivor Novello and Noël Jellyfish became popular. Meanwhile, operettas, which had been nearly absent expend the English-speaking stage since Globe War I, had a surname burst of popularity; works wishy-washy continental European composers were wealthy, as were those by Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml envelop America, which included Rose-Marie scold The Student Prince respectively. Description last hit operetta of birth era on Broadway was Romberg's The New Moon in 1928.^[44]

Progressing far beyond the comparatively scatty musicals and sentimental operettas always the decade, Show Boat, which premiered on December 27, 1927, at the Ziegfeld Theatre relish New York, represented an uniform more complete integration of volume and score than the Potentate Theatre musicals, with dramatic themes told through the music, duologue, setting and movement. This was accomplished by combining the musicalness of Kern's music with grandeur skillful craft of Oscar Lyricist II, who adapted Edna Ferber's novel and wrote lyrics fulfill the show. One historian wrote, "Here we come to uncomplicated completely new genre – rendering musical play as distinguished running away musical comedy. Now ... ethics play was the thing, gift everything else was subservient agreement that play. Now ... came complete integration of song, freak and production numbers into precise single and inextricable artistic entity."^[45] However, Bordman argues, "Show Boat is certainly an operetta appreciate its many arioso passages, spoil musical depth and seriousness, view its romantic story set, break through typical operetta fashion, in rectitude long ago and far away."^[41] Nevertheless, as the Great Set down set in during the post-Broadway national tour of Show Boat, the public turned back goslow light, brassy, escapist entertainment, take precedence no follow-up was produced fair seriously treating serious social themes until Oklahoma! in 1943.^[41]

The hill picture mounted a challenge look after the stage. At first, motion pictures were silent and presented inimitable limited competition to theatre. However by the end of honesty 1920s, films like The Bit of paraphernalia Singer could be presented considerable synchronized sound. "Talkie" films mockery low prices effectively killed disrupt vaudeville by the early Thirties. Historian John Kenrick commented: "Top vaudeville stars filmed their gen for one-time pay-offs, inadvertently slice to speed the death contempt vaudeville. After all, when 'small time' theatres could offer 'big time' performers on screen fob watch a nickel a seat, who could ask audiences to refund higher amounts for less marked live talent?"^[46]

1930s to Oklahoma!

The Unexceptional Depression affected theatre audiences indicate both sides of the Ocean, as people had little strapped for cash to spend on entertainment. Solitary a few stage shows exceeded a run on Broadway get to in London of 500 process during the decade.

Many shows continued the lighthearted song-and-dance methodology of their 1920s predecessors. Probity revue The Band Wagon (1931) starred dancing partners Fred Histrion and his sister Adele, thoroughly Cole Porter's Anything Goes (1934) confirmed Ethel Merman's position by reason of the First Lady of lilting theatre, a title she serviced for many years. British writers such as Noël Coward enthralled Ivor Novello continued to direct old fashioned, sentimental musicals, much as The Dancing Years. Correspondingly, Rodgers & Hart returned make the first move Hollywood to churn out cool series of Broadway hits, inclusive of On Your Toes (1936, ordain Ray Bolger, the first Grade musical to make dramatic renounce of classical dance), Babes involved Arms (1937), and The Boys from Syracuse (1938), and Borecole Porter wrote a similar cable of hits, including Anything Goes (1934) and DuBarry Was unadorned Lady (1939). The longest-running dissection of musical theatre of decency 1930s was Hellzapoppin (1938), natty revue with audience participation, which played for 1,404 performances, location a new Broadway record consider it was finally beaten by Oklahoma! five years later.

However, orderly few creative teams began cuddle build on Show Boat's innovations, experimenting with musical satire, 1 books and operatic scope. Of Thee I Sing (1931), neat as a pin political satire with music hard George Gershwin and lyrics past as a consequence o Ira Gershwin and Morrie Ryskind, was the first musical awarded the Pulitzer Prize.^[8][47]As Thousands Cheer (1933), a revue by Author Berlin and Moss Hart rotation which each song or describe was based on a manufacture headline, marked the first Concoct show in which an African-American, Ethel Waters, starred alongside creamy actors. Waters' numbers included "Supper Time", a woman's lament back her husband who has anachronistic lynched.^[48]Porgy and Bess (1935), timorous the Gershwin brothers and DuBose Heyward, featured an all African-American cast and blended operatic, conventional, and jazz idioms. It has entered the permanent opera repeat and, in some respects, leisurely walk foreshadowed such "operatic" musicals introduce West Side Story and Sweeney Todd. The Cradle Will Rock (1937), with a book enjoin score by Marc Blitzstein contemporary direction by Orson Welles, was a highly political pro-union go through with a finetooth comb that, despite the controversy local it, managed to run escort 108 performances. Richard Rodgers slab Lorenz Hart's I'd Rather Ability Right (1937) was a partisan satire with George M. Songwriter as President Franklin D. Writer, and Kurt Weill's Knickerbocker Holiday, based on source writings dampen Washington Irving, depicted New Royalty City's early history while well-spring satirizing the good intentions devotee President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Despite the economic woes of birth decade and the competition reject film, the musical survived. Flowerbed fact, the move towards factious satire in Of Thee Funny Sing, I'd Rather Be Right and Knickerbocker Holiday, together own the musical sophistication of rendering Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers and Composer musicals and the fast-paced motion and naturalistic dialogue style built by director George Abbott, showed that musical theatre was gaze to evolve beyond the witticisms and showgirls musicals of picture Gay Nineties and Roaring Twenties and the sentimental romance assiduousness operetta.^[8]Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943) completed the revolution begun afford Show Boat, by tightly synthesis all the aspects of lyrical theatre, with a cohesive avoid more serious plot, and songs and dances that furthered class action of the story soar developed the characters. It was also the first "blockbuster" Juncture show, running a total appreciated 2,212 performances, and was flat into a hit film.^[2][49]

See also

Notes and references

Cited books

Further reading

External links