In the spotlight
When comedy and music meet
Whether in Paris at the foot of Notre Dame, or surrounded by dancing cats, or even on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, songs from musicals have been hummed into everyone’s ears. Whether we like it or not, this genre of musical theater is one of the most popular, and we can all name at least one work in this style. A term that first appeared in the 20th century in the United States, the genre itself, like Rome, was not built in a day. It is a series of theatrical and musical evolutions spanning several centuries.
The association between music, dance and theater has existed since the 16th century. In Italy “ Commedia dell’arte “, England’s “English operas” and Molière’s comédies-ballets in France. What these styles have in common is that performances are interspersed with musical theater interludes, adding a comic or even satirical touch to the play.
But it was in the 19th century that everything began to accelerate, with the emergence of numerous artistic forms linked to musical theater. These included comic opera, burlesque, music hall, vaudeville and minstrel shows, racist spectacles in which white actors blackened their faces. It should be noted, however, that even if these different arts (music, theater, dance) coexist within a performance, there is not necessarily any real coherence between them.
In 1866, New York saw the appearance of the first play that can be considered the origin of “the modern conception” of the musical: The Black Crook, by Charles M. Barras. The show was accompanied by “a troupe of one hundred French dancers in tights, with magnificent costumes, spectacular sets and impressive stage machinery”(Universalis). The show proved a great success, running for 474 performances over a sixteen-month period.
Today
The beginning of the 20th century brought its share of innovations, particularly in American productions, with the introduction of ragtime and jazz. In 1927, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein proposed “Show Boat ”, in which songs were used to advance the story. Kern also innovated by proposing the use of different musical styles to suit the personality of each character (black folklore, operetta arias, waltzes, etc.).
It was in 1943 that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein really popularized the genre with their musical Oklahoma!. The work was so successful that it ran for over five years! Here, the ballets are no longer mere interludes, but key moments in the story.
At the same time, the advent of talking pictures played a major role in the evolution of the style. Even though composers were exiled to Hollywood because of the Great Depression of 1929, they succeeded in giving the genre a whole new twist by adapting old theatrical works into musical films.
Like jazz a few decades earlier, rock’n’roll was also to drive the style forward in the 1960s. It was during this period, for example, that “Hair” and then “Grease” appeared, as well as “The Rocky Horror Show” in the early 1970s.
Whether in terms of technique, visuals or storytelling, the genre has never ceased to reinvent itself, and has never run out of steam. In the 21st century, ” production costs are skyrocketing: a huge chandelier has already fallen on stage in the 1980s (The Phantom of the Opera, 1986), or a helicopter has landed (Miss Saigon, 1989), but this time, characters are fighting over the spectators’ heads (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, 2011) “(Universalis). As proof of this ongoing success, since the 1990s, Disney has also slipped into the breach, transforming its classics into musicals and, in some cases, musical films in the 2000s.
This is the story of …
Even if the themes have changed over the years to reflect the issues of the day, librettists have always found ways to make people dream by taking up stories that are ancient, or even thousands of years old. For example, the plot of “Rent ” is inspired by Puccini’s La Bohème, West Side Story takes up the story of Romeo and Juliet, and “Wicked ” offers an original story inspired by The Wizard of Oz. As the saying goes, the best soup comes from the old, and this seems to be true of musicals.
The BCU (Riponne) is rich in documents, whether scores, books or DVDs on musicals and musical films. So, as the year draws to a close, we invite you to come and discover the library’s treasures, and why not sing along to the hit songs that are part of a rich and complex musical history. And if you’d like to learn more about musicals, we invite you to consult the online article in theEncyclopedia Universalis.
