Outline the main changes and developments in American Stage Music from “Showboat” to “West Side Story”.

The first 200 words of this essay...

Outline the main changes and developments in American Stage Music from "Showboat" to "West Side Story".

Choose appropriate musicals to support your argument.

The modern musical has been an important form of entertainment throughout the 20th century, still enjoying a good degree of popularity now. In its earlier days, a musical was often simply viewed as "something to fill the void between dinner and the call for last orders at the bar". There was no link between each piece of music; the shows were structured more like variety shows than actual stories. It was in the mid 1920's that significant change in American stage music began. In a genre so great in its content, it is difficult to pinpoint which shows really changed the direction of the American musical, but in order to answer this question I will identify and examine which productions were principally responsible for altering the audiences' perception of issues that affected them at the time, and also the shows that revolutionised musical content and appear years later, as fresh as they were when first drafted. These will be examined later in the essay, along with other productions that changed the direction of the musical in