The popularity of theatre declined somewhat in the Roman Empire, but some innovations were made: to make the dance steps more audible in large open air theatres, Roman actors attached metal chips called "sabilla" to their stage footwear – the first tap shoes. During the middle Ages, performers travelled from town to town trying to find an audience. At times, they were barred, as it was feared that they brought the plague. In the 12th and 13th centuries, religious dramas, such as The Play of Herod and The Play of Daniel taught the liturgy, set to church chants. To teach the Latin bible to illiterate masses, cycle plays were created that told a biblical story divided into entertaining parts.
Several pageant wagons (stages on wheels) would move about the city, and a group of actors would tell their part of the story. Mystery plays and Miracle plays are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song. They developed from the 10th to the 16th century, reaching the height of their popularity in the 15th century before being rendered obsolete by the rise of professional theatre. Once finished, the group would move on with their wagon, and the next group would arrive to tell its part of the story. These plays developed into an autonomous form of musical theatre, with poetic forms sometimes alternating with the prose dialogues and liturgical chants. The poetry was provided with modified or completely new melodies. The picture below is of a pageant wagon this is more a recent photo however the general idea still lives today. This is a performance where the act will take place while moving grabbing the attention of people passing by.
1700s
In the 1700s they was the most famous years to performing arts because this is where some of the most remembered types and styles of acting was found such as commedia dell'arte an Italian tradition where raucous clowns improvised their way through familiar stories, and from there, opera buffa. Molière turned several of his farcical comedies into musical entertainments with and dance in the late 1600s. Arts of all kinds became widely popular, including musical theatre. The first recorded long running play of any kind was The Beggar's Opera, which ran for 62 successive performances in 1728. It would take almost a century before the first play broke 100 performances, with Tom and Jerry, based on the book Life in London. Broadway's first "long-run" musical was a 50 performance hit called The Elves in 1857. New York runs continued to lag far behind those in London, but Laura Keene's "musical burletta" Seven Sisters shattered previous New York records with a run of 253 performances.
How Musical Theatre Developed Comedy
The first theatre piece that conforms to the modern conception of a musical, adding dance and original music that helped to tell the story, is generally considered to be The Black Crook, which premiered in New York on September 12th 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. This was to become the longest performances on stage for some time.
At that time, in England, musical theatre consisted of mostly of music hall, adaptations of risqué French operetta and burlesques, notably at the Gaiety Theatre beginning in 1868. I have experience in Music Hall I have been to see a performance which was in November 2007 at Leeds City Variety which I thought was a brilliant performance and a good show to watch. After this running up to Christmas last year we had a performance unit in our course which we did music hall which was a brilliant and fun performance to create for an audition was very successful.
In reaction to these a few family-friendly entertainments were created, such as the German Reed Entertainments. Comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart produced and starred in musicals on Broadway between 1878 and 1885, 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 (Lillian Russell, Vivienne Segal, and Fay Templeton) instead of the ladies of questionable repute who had starred in earlier musical forms.
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 play to achieve 500 consecutive performances was the London which was not a musical but a comedy Our Boys, opening in 1875, which set an astonishing new record of 1,362 performances. This run was not equalled on the musical stage until World War I, but musical theatre soon broke the 500 performance mark London, most notably by the series of long-running Gilbert and Sullivan family-friendly comic opera hits. Charles Hoyt's A Trip to Chinatown was Broadway's long-run champion, running for 657 performances. Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas were both pirated and imitated in New York by productions such as Reginald DeKoven's Robin Hood and John Philip Sousa's El Capitan.
Meanwhile, musicals had spread to the London stage by the Gay Nineties. George Edwards had left the management of Richard D'Oyly Carte's Savoy Theatre, perceiving that theatregoers' tastes had turned away from Savoy-style comic operas and their intellectual, political, absurdist satire. This also happens such as the High School musical theatre production and hairspray.
The Golden Age
Rodgers and Hammerstein is possible the most famous name in musical theatre they both composed and wrote the lyrics to so many songs. One of the songs they both composed and wrote the lyrics for is Another Opening, Another Show. We are currently going to be performing this is our FMP. The Golden Age of the Broadway musical is generally considered to have begun with Oklahoma! The 1940s would begin with more hits from Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Weill and Gershwin, some with runs over 500 performances as the economy rebounded, but artistic change was in the air.
Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! Had a cohesive 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. Gemma from our performing arts group is also performing a solo song from the musical. This just shows how popular they where and how talented they where and what we wouldn’t have without them.
Rodgers and Hammerstein hired ballet choreographer Agnes de Mille, who used everyday motions to help the characters express their ideas. 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 was made into a hit film. It remains one of the most frequently produced of the team's projects.
Rodgers and Hammerstein have the some of the most recognised and famous musicals of all time. The two collaborators created an extraordinary collection of some of musical theatre's best loved and most enduring classics, including…
- Carousel
- South Pacific
- The King and I
- The Sound of Music
Some of these musicals treat more serious subject matter than earlier shows they created. 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.
The Boy Friend ran for 2,078 performances in London, briefly becoming the third-longest running musical in West End or Broadway history (after Chu Chin Chow and Oklahoma!), until it was demoted by Salad Days. It marked Julie Andrews American debut. Another record was set by The Three penny Opera, which ran for 2,707 performances, becoming the longest-running off-Broadway musical until The Fantastic’s.
As in Oklahoma!, dance was an integral part of West Side Story, 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. 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 performances. However, the film of West Side Story was extremely successful.
The history of Musical theatre is a powerful history and has been a very challenging career option. Some people would have made it to the top through the right contracts and sometime that was famously talented. My conclusion to this report is musical theatre started in the middle Ages and has been creating ever since!
Bibliography
These are the website I used to get al the information that I required to do this report.
www.msn.com
Performances that I have seen analyse forward to this report.