Musical Theatre
Modern stage music that drives a story through songs, dialogue and dance
Related
Musical theatre is the English-language stage music drama of the twentieth century: song, dialogue, dance and scenery share the storytelling, usually with amplification and popular vocal styles, and a band ranging from piano to full orchestra.
It formed where operetta, variety theatre and jazz met; Show Boat brought race and family into the musical, Oklahoma! made songs carry the plot, and Sondheim took linear narrative apart. Some shows are sung through from start to finish.
It is not "a play with songs", nor a popular version of opera: the test is its use of popular idioms and amplified sound, and whether dance and song do narrative work. Its difference from operetta lies more in twentieth-century production than in form alone.
Sources
- 音乐剧的歌舞整合、扩声美学与二十世纪代表作品，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Musical theatre"；本文为原创表述
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.