Ads
related to: Musical theater musicGet Best Deals On All London West End Shows. Book Your Tickets Now. Great deals on London West End shows & musicals. New arrivals available. Best price online
Best Deals on Musical Resale Tickets. Order Today, Musical Resale Tickets Up To 10% Off.
- Summer Sale: 10% off 2024 Events
- ·Valid Jun 1 - Aug 31
Search results
Mar 29, 2024 · An expert ranking of the best Broadway songs in the history of musical theater, from Show Boat to Hamilton and beyond.
Dec 24, 2020 · Return to the world of Musicals from the 1957 hit West Side Story to the 2015 smash hit Hamilton! Enjoy and sing a long to these unforgettable songs of Broadway and West End Musical Theatres!...
- 154 min
- 544K
- Music Avenue
Mar 14, 2021 · Top 100 Musical Theater Songs. 76 shows featured in total, with Hamilton and Les Miserables tied at 4 songs each, Wicked following behind at 3, as well as 16 other shows having 2. ...more.
- 46 min
- 42.2K
- Cassidy Gage
Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole.
- Overview
- Stage musicals
When, in the 1930s and ’40s, dancing became an integral element in a genre governed chiefly by song—instead of being merely a diversion—the “musical” established itself as the legitimate theatrical heir to “musical comedy” and a form of popular theatre art that dominated the latter half of the 20th century. It has been challenged by the newer “rock musical,” using a variation of the common musical vernacular and techniques related more to the recording studio than to the theatre, the effect of which is not yet determined. Meanwhile, what originally started as a democratic counterpart to aristocratic opera reached its fruition as the theatrical association of sentiment with illusion.
The sentiment is usually dispensed by the narrative; the illusion is created by the music. The most potent narratives in stage musicals have often been adaptations of classical drama and literature—for example, Romeo and Juliet transformed into West Side Story; The Taming of the Shrew into Kiss Me, Kate; Don Quixote into Man of La Mancha; and Oliver Twist into Oliver—or the many variations on the Cinderella-Pygmalion legend by which rags are transformed into riches (from The Shop Girl in 1894 to My Fair Lady in 1956). A distinction was at one time drawn between the frivolous musical comedy and the “musical play,” denoting a dramatically serious or even tragic narrative, but both are now equally defined as musicals.
Their specifically musical character is born from a marriage of convenience between first- and second-generation descendants of European operetta and music-hall variety, on the one hand, and American jazz and American music hall, on the other—plus the romantic balladry of both continents. An English musicologist, Wilfred Mellers, asserts that, although most successful stage songs contain subtleties unappreciated by the nonmusical listener, they all reflect “an illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions” and that “the world of musical comedy never gets beyond, or wants to get beyond, this illusion.”
The first musical comedy to be called so was A Gaiety Girl, staged in 1893 by George Edwardes at the Gaiety Theatre, London. A romantic farce adorned by the songs of Sidney Jones, it was successfully exported to New York in the same year. John Hollingshead (Edwardes’ predecessor at the Gaiety Theatre) wrote in 1903:
The invention or discovery of musical comedy was a happy inspiration of Mr. George Edwardes’s. It provided a new form of entertainment for playgoers who go to a theatre for amusement and recreation, which was more elastic in plot or story than the old burlesque . . . [It] exhibited a little of the old burletta and vaudeville, most of the best elements of farce, a dash of the French revue . . . and much that would not have been out of place in Parisian opéra-bouffe.
Some 50 years of development in musical theatre are reflected in the contrast between the foregoing remarks and the following comment in 1952 by Jack Burton, American theatre historian, on Oklahoma! (1943), an epoch-making musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein:
When, in the 1930s and ’40s, dancing became an integral element in a genre governed chiefly by song—instead of being merely a diversion—the “musical” established itself as the legitimate theatrical heir to “musical comedy” and a form of popular theatre art that dominated the latter half of the 20th century. It has been challenged by the newer “rock musical,” using a variation of the common musical vernacular and techniques related more to the recording studio than to the theatre, the effect of which is not yet determined. Meanwhile, what originally started as a democratic counterpart to aristocratic opera reached its fruition as the theatrical association of sentiment with illusion.
The sentiment is usually dispensed by the narrative; the illusion is created by the music. The most potent narratives in stage musicals have often been adaptations of classical drama and literature—for example, Romeo and Juliet transformed into West Side Story; The Taming of the Shrew into Kiss Me, Kate; Don Quixote into Man of La Mancha; and Oliver Twist into Oliver—or the many variations on the Cinderella-Pygmalion legend by which rags are transformed into riches (from The Shop Girl in 1894 to My Fair Lady in 1956). A distinction was at one time drawn between the frivolous musical comedy and the “musical play,” denoting a dramatically serious or even tragic narrative, but both are now equally defined as musicals.
Their specifically musical character is born from a marriage of convenience between first- and second-generation descendants of European operetta and music-hall variety, on the one hand, and American jazz and American music hall, on the other—plus the romantic balladry of both continents. An English musicologist, Wilfred Mellers, asserts that, although most successful stage songs contain subtleties unappreciated by the nonmusical listener, they all reflect “an illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions” and that “the world of musical comedy never gets beyond, or wants to get beyond, this illusion.”
The first musical comedy to be called so was A Gaiety Girl, staged in 1893 by George Edwardes at the Gaiety Theatre, London. A romantic farce adorned by the songs of Sidney Jones, it was successfully exported to New York in the same year. John Hollingshead (Edwardes’ predecessor at the Gaiety Theatre) wrote in 1903:
The invention or discovery of musical comedy was a happy inspiration of Mr. George Edwardes’s. It provided a new form of entertainment for playgoers who go to a theatre for amusement and recreation, which was more elastic in plot or story than the old burlesque . . . [It] exhibited a little of the old burletta and vaudeville, most of the best elements of farce, a dash of the French revue . . . and much that would not have been out of place in Parisian opéra-bouffe.
Some 50 years of development in musical theatre are reflected in the contrast between the foregoing remarks and the following comment in 1952 by Jack Burton, American theatre historian, on Oklahoma! (1943), an epoch-making musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein:
Top Broadway Songs of all time in one musical playlist! CLICK SAVE and share the beautiful broadway songs from the 50s until today!
Nov 6, 2023 · Whether you’re looking for good musical songs to dance to, popular musical theatre hits to belt out in the car, or broadway songs that will make you tap your toes, our lists of will help you find the perfect song for any occasion.
