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Development of the modern musical play
The first theater piece that conforms to the modern conception of a musical is generally considered to be The Black Crook, which premiered in New York on September 12, 1866. The production was a staggering five-and-a-half hours long, but despite its length, it ran for a record-breaking 474 performances. The same year, The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post was the first show to call itself a "musical comedy." [5]
Comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart produced and starred in musicals on Broadway between 1878 (The Mulligan Guard Picnic) and 1884, with book and lyrics by Harrigan and music by his father-in-law David Braham. These musical comedies featured characters and situations taken from the everyday life of New York's lower classes and represented a significant step forward from vaudeville and burlesque, towards a more literate form. They starred high quality singers (Edna May, Lillian Russell, Vivienne Segal and Fay Templeton) instead of the ladies of questionable repute who had starred in earlier musical forms.
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The length of runs in the theatre changed rapidly around the same time that the modern musical was born. As transportation improved, poverty in London and New York diminished, and street lighting made for safer travel at night, the number of potential patrons for the growing number of theatres increased enormously. Plays could run longer and still draw in the audiences, leading to better profits and improved production values. The first production to achieve 500 consecutive performances was the London comedy Our Boys, opening in 1875, which set an astonishing new record of 1,362 performances.[6] This was soon followed in London by the long-running successes of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera hits, beginning with H.M.S. Pinafore, which were exceeded by Alfred Cellier and B. C. Stephenson's record-breaking hit, Dorothy, in 1886 (a show midway between comic opera and musical comedy) and equalled by many of the most successful London musicals of the 1890s.
Hundreds of musical comedies were staged on Broadway in the 1890s and early 1900s comprising music written in New York's Tin Pan Alley involving composers such as Gus Edwards, John J McNally, John Walter Bratton and George M. Cohan (Little Johnny Jones (1904), 45 Minutes From Broadway (1906), and George Washington Jr. (1906)). Charles Hoyt's A Trip to Chinatown (1891) was able to compete against Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas, which were imitated in New York by productions such as Reginald DeKoven's Robin Hood (1891), and John Philip Sousa's El Capitan (1896). A Trip to Coontown (1898) was the first musical comedy entirely produced and performed by blacks in a Broadway theater (largely inspired to the routines of the minstrel show), followed by the ragtime-tinged Clorindy the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), and the highly successful In Dahomey (1902). New York runs, however, continued to be relatively short, with a few exceptions, compared with London runs, until after World War I.[7]
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Musicals had spread to the London stage by the 1890s. George Edwardes left the management of Richard D'Oyly Carte's Savoy operas and perceived that theatregoers' tastes had turned away from comic operas. He revolutionized the London stage by presenting musical comedies at the Gaiety Theatre, Daly's Theatre and other venues. His early Gaiety hits included a series of light, romantic "poor maiden loves aristocrat and wins him against all odds" shows, usually with the word "Girl" in the title, including The Shop Girl (1894) and A Runaway Girl (1898), with music by Ivan Caryll and Lionel Monckton. At Daly's Theatre, Edwardes presented more complex comedy hits. The Geisha (1896) by Sidney Jones with lyrics by Harry Greenbank and Adrian Ross and then San Toy (1899) each ran for more than two years, which was unusual at the time. Other British composers of the period included F. Osmond Carr, Edward Solomon and Leslie Stuart.
The British musical comedy Florodora (1899) by Leslie Stuart and Paul Rubens made a splash on both sides of the Atlantic, as did A Chinese Honeymoon (1901), by British lyricist George Dance and American-born composer Howard Talbot, which ran for a record setting 1,074 performances in London and 376 in New York. The story concerns couples who honeymoon in China and inadvertently break the kissing laws (shades of The Mikado). After the turn of the century, Seymour Hicks (who joined forces with American producer Charles Frohman) wrote popular shows with composer Charles Taylor and others, and Edwardes and Ross continued to churn out hits (The Toreador (1901), A Country Girl, The Orchid (1903), The Girls of Gottenberg (1907), Our Miss Gibbs (1909), and The Boy (1917)). However, only three decades after Gilbert and Sullivan broke the stranglehold that French operettas had on the London stage, European operettas came roaring back to Britain and America beginning in 1907 with The Merry Widow.
Probably the best known composers of operetta, beginning in the second half of the 19th century, were Jacques Offenbach and Johann Strauss II. In England, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan created an English equivalent to French operetta, styled comic operas, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado, that became hits in Britain and the U.S. in the 1870s and '80s. The works of these composers (together with the extant forms of burlesque, vaudeville and music hall) influenced the development of the musical. Their colleagues, Edward Solomon and Alfred Cellier, began writing comic operas but moved to musicals as that form began to dominate the London stage. Although British and American musicals of the 1890s and early 20th century were influenced by operetta, when operettas returned to the London and Broadway stages in 1907 (with the London hit production of The Merry Widow), operettas and musicals became direct competitors.
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After the turn of the 20th century, the sentimental operettas of a new generation of operetta specialists, such as Franz Lehár and Oscar Straus, among others, spread from Europe throughout the English-speaking world, displacing the early light British and American musicals. They were joined by British and American operetta composers and librettists of the 1910s (the "Princess Theater" shows) by Jerome Kern, P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, who paved the way for Kern's later work by showing that a musical could combine a light popular touch with real continuity between story and musical numbers, and Victor Herbert, whose work included some intimate musical plays with modern settings as well as the operettas for which he's best remembered. These were all heavily influenced by Gilbert and Sullivan and the earlier composers.[8] The legacy of G&S and these operetta composers continued to serve as an inspiration to the next generation of composers, such as Rudolf Friml, Irving Berlin, Sigmund Romberg, George Gershwin, and Noel Coward, and these, in turn, influenced the musicals of Rodgers, Sondheim and many others, later in the century.[9]
The motion picture mounted a challenge to the stage. At first, films were silent and presented only a limited challenge to theatre. But by the end of the 1920's, films like The Jazz Singer could be presented with synchronized sound, and critics wondered if the cinema would replace live theatre altogether. The musicals of the Roaring Twenties, borrowing from vaudeville, music hall and other light entertainments, tended to ignore plot in favor of emphasizing star actors and actresses, big dance routines, and popular songs (throughout the first half of the twentieth century, popular music was dominated by theater writers). Many shows were revues with little plot. For instance, Florenz Ziegfeld produced annual spectacular song-and-dance revues on Broadway featuring extravagant sets and elaborate costumes, but there was no common theme tying the various numbers together. In London, the Aldwych Farces were similarly successful.
Typical of the decade were lighthearted productions like Sally; Lady Be Good; Sunny; Tip Toes; No, No, Nanette; Oh, Kay!; and Funny Face. Their books may have been forgettable, but they produced enduring standards from George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Vincent Youmans, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, among others, and stars like Marilyn Miller. Audiences tapped their toes to these musicals on both sides of the Atlantic ocean while continuing to patronize the popular operettas that were continuing to come out of continental Europe and also from composers like Noel Coward in London and Sigmund Romberg in America. Clearly, cinema had not killed live theatre.
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Leaving these lighthearted entertainments behind, and taking a cue from Herbert and operetta, Show Boat, which premiered on December 27, 1927 at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York, was a complete integration of book and score, with dramatic themes, as told through both the music and dialogue, woven seamlessly together. Show Boat, with a book and lyrics adapted from Edna Ferber's novel by Oscar Hammerstein II and P. G. Wodehouse, and music by Jerome Kern, presented a new concept that was embraced by audiences immediately. Despite some of its startling themes - miscegenation among them - the original production ran a total of 572 performances. In addition, in 1920, The Beggar's Opera began an astonishing run of 1,463 performances at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, England.
Encouraged by the success of Show Boat, creative teams began following the "format" of that popular hit. Of Thee I Sing (1931), a political satire with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Morrie Ryskind, was the first musical to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The Band Wagon (1931), with a score by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, starred dancing partners Fred Astaire and his sister Adele. While it was primarily a revue, it served as the basis for two subsequent film versions that were "book" musicals in the truest sense. Porter's Anything Goes (1934) affirmed Ethel Merman's position as the First Lady of musical theatre - a title she maintained for many years.
Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) was a step closer to opera than Show Boat and the other musicals of the era, and in some respects it foreshadowed such "operatic" musicals as West Side Story and Sweeney Todd. The Cradle Will Rock (1937), with a book and score by Marc Blitzstein and directed by Orson Welles, was a highly political piece that, despite the controversy surrounding it, managed to run for 108 performances. Kurt Weill's Knickerbocker Holiday brought to the musical stage New York City's early history, using as its source writings by Washington Irving, while good-naturedly satirizing the good intentions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The Great Depression affected theatre audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, as people had little money to spend on entertainment. Only a few shows exceeded a run on Broadway or in London of 500 performances. Still, for those who could afford it, this was an exciting time in the development of musical theatre. The musical had finally evolved beyond the gags and showgirls musicals of the Gay Nineties and Roaring Twenties, integrating dramatic stories into the earlier comic forms (e.g., burlesque and farce), and building on the romantic and musical heritage that it had received from operetta.
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The Golden Age of the Broadway musical is generally considered to have begun with Oklahoma! (1943) and to have ended with Hair (1968).
Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! had a cohesive (if somewhat slim) plot, songs that furthered the action of the story, and featured dream ballets which advanced the plot and developed the characters, rather than using dance as an excuse to parade scantily-clad women across the stage. It defied musical conventions by raising its first act curtain not on a bevy of chorus girls, but rather on a woman churning butter, with an off-stage voice singing the opening lines of Oh, What a Beautiful Morning. It was the first "blockbuster" Broadway show, running a total of 2,212 performances, and remains one of the most frequently produced of the team's projects. The two collaborators created an extraordinary collection of some of musical theater's best loved and most enduring classics, including Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and The Sound of Music (1959).
Americana was displayed on Broadway during the "Golden Age", as the wartime cycle of shows began to arrive. An example of this is "On The Town" (1944), written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, composed by Leonard Bernstein and choreographed by Jerome Robbins. The musical is set during wartime, where a group of three sailors are on a 24 hour shore leave in New York. During their day, they each meet a wonderful woman. The women in this show have a specific power to them, as if saying, "Come here! I need a man!" The show also gives the impression of a country with an uncertain future, as the sailors also have with their women before leaving.
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Oklahoma! inspired others to continue the trend. Irving Berlin used sharpshooter Annie Oakley's career as a basis for his Annie Get Your Gun (1946, 1,147 performances); Burton Lane, E. Y. Harburg, and Fred Saidy combined political satire with Irish whimsy for their fantasy Finian's Rainbow (1944, 1,725 performances); Cole Porter found inspiration in William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew for Kiss Me, Kate (1948, 1,077 performances); Damon Runyon's eclectic characters were at the core of Frank Loesser's and Abe Burrows' Guys and Dolls, (1950, 1,200 performances); and the Gold Rush was the setting for Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's Paint Your Wagon (1951).
My Fair Lady Playbill with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison
The relatively brief run—289 performances—of that show didn't discourage Lerner and Loewe from collaborating again, this time on My Fair Lady (1956), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, which at 2,717 performances held the long-run record for many years. Popular Hollywood movies were made of these musicals.
As in Oklahoma!, dance was an integral part of West Side Story (1957), which transported Romeo and Juliet to modern day New York City and converted the feuding Montague and Capulet families into opposing ethnic gangs, the Sharks and the Jets. The book was adapted by Arthur Laurents, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by newcomer Stephen Sondheim. It was embraced by the critics but failed to be a popular choice for the "blue-haired matinee ladies," who preferred the small town River City, Iowa of Meredith Willson's The Music Man to the alleys of Manhattan's Upper West Side. Apparently Tony Award voters were of a similar mind, since they favored the former over the latter. West Side Story had a respectable run of 732 performances (1,040 in the West End), while The Music Man ran nearly twice as long, with 1,375. Laurents and Sondheim teamed up again for Gypsy (1959, 702 performances), with Jule Styne providing the music for a backstage story about the most driven stage mother of all-time, stripper Gypsy Rose Lee's mother Rose. The original production ran for 702 performances, but proved to be a bigger hit in its three subsequent revivals, with Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, and Bernadette Peters tackling the role made famous by Ethel Merman.
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The first project for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962, 964 performances), with a book based on the works of Plautus by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, and starring Zero Mostel. Sondheim moved the musical beyond its concentration on the romantic plots typical of earlier eras; his work tended to be darker, exploring the grittier sides of life both present and past. Some of his earlier works include Anyone Can Whistle (1964, which - at a mere nine performances, despite having star power in Lee Remick and Angela Lansbury - is a legendary flop), Company (1970), Follies (1971), and A Little Night Music (1973). He has found inspiration in the unlikeliest of sources - the opening of Japan to Western trade for Pacific Overtures, a legendary murderous barber seeking revenge in the Industrial Age of London for Sweeney Todd, the paintings of Georges Seurat for Sunday in the Park with George, fairy tales for Into the Woods, and a collection of individuals intent on eliminating the President of the United States in Assassins. Critics have argued that the unusual lyrical sophistication and musical complexity of his works have led to some of Sondheim's musicals receiving relatively little popularity among the general public. But critics have praised these features of his work, as well as the interplay of lyrics and music in his shows. Some of Sondheim's notable innovations include a show presented in reverse (Merrily We Roll Along) and the above-mentioned "Anyone can whistle", in which Act 1 ends with the cast informing the audience that they are mad.
Jerry Herman, played a significant role in American musical theater, beginning with his first Broadway production, Milk and Honey (1961, 563 performances), about the founding of the state of Israel, and continuing with the smash hits Hello, Dolly! (1964, 2,844 performances), Mame (1966, 1,508 performances), and La Cage aux Folles (1983, 1,761 performances). Even his less successful shows like Dear World (1969) and Mack & Mabel (1974) have had memorable scores (Mack & Mabel was later reworked into a London hit). Writing both words and music, many of Herman's showtunes have become popular standards, including "Hello, Dolly!", "If He Walked Into My Life", "We Need a Little Christmas", "I Am What I Am", "Mame", "The Best of Times", "Before the Parade Passes By", "Put On Your Sunday Clothes", "It Only Takes a Moment", "Open a New Window", "Bosom Buddies", "I Won't Send Roses", and "Time Heals Everything", recorded by such luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Eydie Gorme, Barbra Streisand, Petula Clark and Bernadette Peters. Herman's songbook has been the subject of two popular musical revues, Jerry's Girls (Broadway, 1985), and Showtune (off-Broadway, 2003). Jerry Herman is to traditional musical comedy what Stephen Sondheim is to the avant-garde.
The musical started to diverge from the relatively narrow confines of the 1950s. Rock music would be used in several Broadway musicals, beginning with Hair, which featured not only rock music but also nudity and controversial opinions about the Vietnam War. Other important rock musicals of the 1960s and 1970s included Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. In fact, some of these rock musicals began with "concept albums" and then moved to film or stage, such as Tommy. Some of these had no dialogue or were otherwise reminiscent of opera, with dramatic, emotional themes, and were styled rock operas.
The musical also went in other directions. Shows like Raisin, Dreamgirls, Purlie, and The Wiz brought a significant African-American influence to Broadway. More and more different musical genres were turned into musicals either on or off-Broadway. Automotive companies and other types of corporations hired Broadway talent to write corporate musicals, private shows which were only seen by their employees.
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1976 brought one of the great contemporary musicals to the stage. A Chorus Line emerged from recorded group therapy-style sessions Michael Bennett conducted with Gypsies - those who sing and dance in support of the leading players - from the Broadway community. From hundreds of hours of tapes, James Kirkwood, Jr. and Nick Dante fashioned a book about an audition for a musical, incorporating into it many of the real-life stories of those who had sat in on the sessions - and some of whom eventually played variations of themselves or each other in the show. With music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Edward Kleban, A Chorus Line first opened at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in lower Manhattan. Advance word-of-mouth - that something extraordinary was about to explode - boosted box office sales, and after critics ran out of superlatives to describe what they witnessed on opening night, what initially had been planned as a limited engagement eventually moved to the Shubert Theater uptown for a run that seemed to last forever. The show swept the Tony Awards and won the Pulitzer Prize, and its hit song, What I Did for Love, became an instant standard.
Clearly, Broadway audiences were eager to welcome musicals that strayed from the usual style and substance. John Kander and Fred Ebb explored pre-World War II Nazi Germany in Cabaret and Prohibition-era Chicago, which relied on old vaudeville techniques to tell its tale of murder and the media. Pippin, by Stephen Schwartz, was set in the days of Charlemagne. Federico Fellini's autobiographical film 8˝ became Maury Yeston's Nine. At the end of the decade, Evita gave a more serious political biography than audiences were used to at musicals, and Sweeney Todd was the precursor to the darker, big budget musicals of the 1980s like Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, and The Phantom of the Opera, that depended on dramatic stories, sweeping scores and spectacular effects. But during this same period, old-fashioned values were still embraced in such hits as Annie, 42nd Street, My One and Only, and popular revivals of No, No, Nanette and Irene.
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The 1980s and 1990s saw the influence of European "mega-musicals" or "pop operas," which typically featured a pop-influenced score and had large casts and sets and were identified as much by their notable effects - a falling chandelier, a helicopter landing on stage - as they were by anything else in the production. Many were based on novels or other works of literature. The most important writers of mega-musicals include the French team of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, responsible for Les Misérables and, in collaboration with Richard Maltby, Jr., Miss Saigon (inspired by Madame Butterfly); and the British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote Evita, based on the life of Argentina's Eva Perón, Cats, derived from the poems of T. S. Eliot, The Phantom of the Opera derived from the novel "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra" written by Gaston Leroux , and Sunset Boulevard (from the classic film of the same name). Several of these mega-musicals ran (or are still running) for decades in both New York and London. The 90's also saw the influence of large corporations on the production of musicals. The most important has been The Walt Disney Company, which began adapting some of its animated movie musicals—such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King—for the stage, and also created original stage productions like Aida, with music by Elton John. Disney continues to create new musicals for Broadway and West End theatres, most recently with its adaptation of its earlier film, Mary Poppins.
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The growing scale (and cost) of musicals led to some concern that musicals were eschewing substance in favor of style. The 1990s and 2000s have seen many writers create smaller scale musicals (Falsettoland, Passion, Little Shop of Horrors, Bat Boy: The Musical, and Blood Brothers). The topics vary widely, and the music ranges from rock to pop, but they often are produced off-Broadway (or for smaller London theatres) and feature smaller casts and generally less expensive productions. Some of these have been noted as imaginative and innovative.[10]
There also had been a concern that the musical had lost touch with the tastes of the general public, that the cost of musicals was escalating beyond the budget of many theatregoers, and that the musical was increasingly doomed to be viewed by a smaller and smaller audience. Jonathan Larson's musical Rent (based on the opera La Bohčme) attempted to increase the popularity of musicals among a younger audience. It features a cast of twentysomethings, and the score is heavily rock-influenced. The musical became a hit, even with its composer dying of an aortic aneurysm on the night of the final dress rehearsal at New York Theatre Workshop, before he could see it reach Broadway. A group of young fans, styled RENTheads, line up at the Nederlander Theatre hours early in hopes of winning the lottery for $20 front row tickets, and some have seen the show more than 50 times. Other writers who have attempted to bring a taste of modern rock music to the stage include Jason Robert Brown, and the UK's Komedy Kollective whose musical Restart combines urban dance with non-traditional music scores.
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Another trend has been to create a minimal plot to fit a collection of songs that have already been hits. These have included Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story (1995), Movin' Out (2002, based on the tunes of Billy Joel), Good Vibrations (the Beach Boys), All Shook Up (Elvis Presley), Jersey Boys, (2006, The Four Seasons), Daddy Cool - The Boney M Musical, and many others. This style is often referred to as "jukebox musicals". Similar but more plot-driven musicals have been built around the canon of a particular pop group including Mamma Mia! (1999, featuring songs by ABBA), Our House (based on the songs of Madness), and We Will Rock You (based on the works of Queen).
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