HISTORY
What’s a musical?
The musical, also called musical theatre, is a theatrical genre or cinematographic with singing and dancing parts.
It’s a simpler and easier to understand than operas, which attract people’s interest, with close and entertaining stories.
A little of its history
It is believed that musicals were born in 1866 in the USA when an opera called “The Black Crook” performed for the first time where a European dance company and a theatre company took part. The first one did not have a place to perform and the second did not have enough budgets.
They created a new genre when they got together without even realising it.
But the first musicals appeared around the twenties when the first performances took place in theatres in Broadway in New York. For example, The Wizard of Oz.
Soon after, noticing the great success they were having, European companies chose London for their performances, in the West End.
In those years, the most important part of the show was the actors’ ostentation, above the plot that on many occasions had no consistency. They even added popular songs to make it closer to the audiences.
Some of the most famous ones were Fred Astaire or Marily Miller.
In the thirties the Great Depression caused many problems and people had no money to go to the theatre so the number of performances lowered a lot. Even so there were great shows like Of Thee I Sing, with music by G. Gershiwn, who won a Pulitzer Prize. The same composer wrote Porgy and Bess, classical composition that included jazz music, and whose main song you’ll probably know, Summertime.
We reach the forties. Oklahoma!, the musical that held the record of performances for a long time. From this one, all the parts in a musical were related (choreography, plot, characters) and the topics they dealt with are more dramatic, giving more veracity to the stories. Like for example, the villain in Oklahoma is a murderer or Carrousel that deals with violence against women.
That’s how the Golden Age of musical started in the USA.
In the fifties, the emergence of musicals is still increasing and the musicals off-Broadway appeared. These were low-budget musicals that were performed in small theatres but that were very successful too. These are the years of West Side Story, which was more successful in its movie version than in the musical one. Who would have thought it!
Between the sixties and the nineties, we find the most famous musicals nowadays thanks to composers like Anton Lloyd Webber: Cabaret, Chicago, Cats, Les Misérables, Evita, The Phantom of the Opera and Grease, many of which were turned into very successful movies.
In the nineties new musicals emerged thanks to big companies like Walt Disney, that created new shows from its cartoons, like Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King. The latter is one of the most successful in the history of music.
And finally we reach the 20th century. The composers seem to be a bit discouraged, and the new way of making musicals is by taking songs from a group (ABBA, Queen, Mecano, etc) put them together, give them a plot and some dances, and voila! We have the musical! (Mamma Mia, We Will Rock you, Hoy no me puedo levantar, etc). And other musicals like Wicked or Billy Elliot.
And today… what musicals are there in the big theatres around the world?
From the classics to the newer ones!
A wide variety of possibilities!
Who was Anton Lloyd Weber?
Let's play as if we were detectives, looking for information about this composer:
Who was he?
Where was he from?
What musicals did he compose?
Their names and plots
Which one do you like the most?
What musical do these fragments belong to?
What did you learn about musicals?
Read and complete:
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike License 4.0