A stage entertainment or film that tells a story using a mixture of dialogue, songs, and dance routines. Probably the single most impressive contribution made by Broadway to the modern theatre, the musical developed from many sources, including vaudeville, revue, melodrama, and operetta.
The first work to combine these influences to create a recognizably new genre was William Wheatley’s spectacular ballet-melodrama The Black Crook, first produced in New York in 1866. George Edwardes’ In Town, produced at his old Gaiety Theatre, London, in 1892, is usually considered the first British musical. Edwardes developed a highly successful formula that involved the use of a sketchy plot as a framework for memorable songs and expensive production numbers featuring attractive chorus girls.
A stage entertainment or film that tells a story using a mixture of dialogue, songs, and dance routines. In the early 20th century US musicals remained heavily indebted to the tradition of European operetta. After World War I, however, a more energetic and sophisticated, but still essentially lightweight, type of show was pioneered by such writers as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers, and Rodgers and Hart. In 1928 Jerome Kern’s Show Boat gave a new prominence to plot and demonstrated that the musical could encompass more serious themes.
These developments were taken further in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s landmark production Oklahoma! (1943). The same combination of an exciting plot, memorable songs, vigorous professional dancing, and extravagant costumes and sets characterized their subsequent hits Carousel (1945), and South Pacific (1949). The tradition they had established was continued by Lerner and Loewe in international successes such as My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960). Other hits of the 1950s and 1960s included West Side Story (1957), Hello Dolly! (1963), Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and Cabaret (1966).
In the late 1960s and 1970s the tradition of the classic Broadway musical appeared to decline. The only important US writer to continue in the genre was Stephen Sondheim, whose sophisticated and idiosyncratic works won critical praise but lacked popular appeal. The main development of this period was the advent of the rock musical, as represented by Hair (1967) and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat (1968), and Jesus Christ Superstar. In the 1970s and late 1980s Lloyd Webber led a revival of the large-scale spectacular musical with a series of shows that proved immensely successful on both sides of the Atlantic: these included Evita (1978), Cats (1981), Phantom of the Opera (1986), and Sunset Boulevard (1992). The blockbuster musicals of this era also include the Cameron Mackintosh productions Les Misérables (1985) and Miss Saigon (1987), both by the French team of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg. A more recent trend has been the creation of a stage show from an already familiar corpus of hit songs, as with the hugely successful Abba musical Mamma Mia! (2001), or from a well-loved film, as with Mel Brooks’s The Producers (2004) or Billy Elliot (2005).
from Jonathan Law, ed., The Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre (London, 2011).
