Development of musical theatre refers to the historical development of theatrical performance combined with music that culminated in the integrated form of modern musical theatre that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. Although music has been a part of dramatic presentations since ancient times, modern Western musical theatre developed from several lines of antecedents that evolved over several centuries through the 18th century when the Ballad Opera and pantomime emerged in England and its colonies as the most popular forms of musical entertainment.
In the 19th century, following the development of European operetta, many of the structural elements of modern musical theatre were established by the works of Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain and those of Harrigan and Hart in America. These were followed by the Edwardian musical comedies, beginning in the 1890s in England, and the musical theatre works of American creators like George M. Cohan early in the 20th century. The Princess Theatre musicals in New York City during the First World War, and other smart shows like Of Thee I Sing (1931) were artistic steps forward beyond revues and other frothy entertainments of the early 20th century and led to the modern "book" musical, where songs and dances are fully integrated into a well-made story with serious dramatic goals that is able to evoke genuine emotions other than laughter.Everett 2002, p. 137Rubin, p. 438
Early antecedents: antiquity to Middle Ages
The antecedents of musical theatre in Europe can be traced back to the theatre of ancient Greece, where music and dance were included in stage comedies and tragedies during the 5th century BCE.Goodwin, Noël. "The history of theatrical music", Britannica.com, accessed August 4, 2021; and Blakeley, Sasha and Jenna Conan. "History of Musical Theatre: Lesson for Kids – Early Musicals", Study.com, accessed August 4, 2021 The dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles composed their own music to accompany their plays and choreographed the dances of the chorus.Lawrence (1957), pp. 280–281Easterling, pp. 62–67 and passim The 3rd-century BCE Roman comedies of Plautus included song and dance routines performed with orchestrations. The Romans also introduced technical innovations. For example, to make dance steps more audible in large open-air theatres, Roman actors attached metal chips called sabilla to their stage footwear, creating the first tap shoes.Flinn 1997, p. 22. The music from all of these forms is lost, however, and they had little influence on later development of musical theatre.Kenrick, John. "A Capsule History", Musicals101.com, 2003, accessed October 12, 2015
By the Middle Ages, theatre in Europe consisted mostly of travelling minstrels and small performing troupes of performers singing and offering slapstick comedy.Kenrick, John. "History of Stage Musicals", Musicals101.com, 2003, accessed May 26, 2009 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. Later "mystery plays" were created that told a biblical story in a sequence of 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. 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.Hoppin 1978, pp. 180–181
Renaissance to the 1800s
The European Renaissance saw older forms evolve into commedia dell'arte, an Italian tradition where raucous clowns improvised their way through familiar stories, and later, opera buffa. In England, Elizabethan and Jacobean plays frequently included music, with performances on organs, lutes, viols and pipes for up to an hour before and during the performance.Lord 2003, p. 41 Plays, perhaps particularly the heavier histories and tragedies, were frequently broken up with a short musical play, perhaps derived from the Italian intermezzo, with music, jokes and dancing, or were followed by an afterpiece known as a jigg, often consisting of scandalous or libellous dialogue set to popular tunes (anticipating the Ballad Opera).Lord 2003, p. 42 Court masques also developed during the Tudor period that involved music, dancing, singing and acting, often with expensive costumes and a complex stage design, sometimes by a renowned architect such as Inigo Jones, presented a deferential allegory flattering to a noble or royal patron.Buelow 2004, p. 26 Ben Jonson wrote many masques, often collaborating with Jones. William Shakespeare often included masque-like sections in his plays.Shakespeare 1998, p. 44.
The musical sections of masques developed into sung plays that are recognizable as English operas, the first usually being thought of as William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes (1656), originally given in a private performance.Buelow 2004, p. 328 In France, meanwhile, Molière turned several of his farcical comedies into musical entertainments with songs (music provided by Jean Baptiste Lully) and dance in the late 17th century. His Psyche was the model for an English opera by Thomas Shadwell, The Miser produced in 1672.Carter and Butt 2005, p. 280 Davenant produced The Tempest in 1667, which was the first Shakespeare plot set to music, and was then adapted by Shadwell into an opera in 1674 (composed by Matthew Locke and others). About 1683, John Blow composed Venus and Adonis, often considered the first true English-language opera.Parker 2001, p. 42. Blow was followed by Henry Purcell and a brief period of English opera. After the death of Charles II in 1685, English opera began to fall out of fashion.
By the 18th century, the most popular forms of musical theatre in Britain were ballad operas, like John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), that included lyrics written to the tunes of popular songs of the day (often spoofing opera), and later the developing form of pantomime and comic operas with original scores and mostly romantic plot lines, like Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl (1845). Meanwhile, on the continent, singspiel, comédie en vaudeville, opéra comique and other forms of light musical entertainment were emerging. Other musical theatre forms developed by the 19th century, such as music hall and melodrama. Melodramas and burlettas, in particular, were popularized partly because most London theatres were licensed only as music halls and not allowed to present plays without music. Some unlicensed theaters avoided the legal restrictions by providing supposedly free musical shows while serving tea at wildly inflated prices. In 1820, a new ordinance restricted all unlicensed theater productions to no more than six songs, which had to be an organic part of the play rather than a break or digression.Cullen (2007), p. 810 In any event, what a piece was called did not necessarily define what it was. The Broadway extravaganza The Magic Deer (1852) advertised itself as "A Serio Comico Tragico Operatical Historical Extravaganzical Burletical Tale of Enchantment."
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 (1821), and the record soon reached 150 in the late 1820s. Colonial America did not have a significant theatre presence until 1752, when London entrepreneur William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager.Wilmeth and Miller, p. 182. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad-operas such as The Beggar’s Opera and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. By the 1840s, P.T. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in lower Manhattan.Wilmeth and Miller, p. 56 Other early musical theatre in America consisted of British forms, such as burletta and pantomime. Theatre in New York moved from downtown gradually to midtown from around 1850, seeking less expensive real estate prices, and did not arrive in the Times Square area until the 1920s and 1930s. 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 (1860) shattered previous New York records with a run of 253 performances.Allen 1991, p. 106
1850s to 1880s
Around 1850, the French composer Hervé was experimenting with a form of comic musical theatre that came to be called opérette.Lubbock, Mark. "The Music of 'Musicals'". The Musical Times, Vol. 98, No. 1375 (September, 1957), pp. 483–85, Musical Times Publications Ltd., accessed 17 August 2010 The best known composers of operetta were Jacques Offenbach from the 1850s to the 1870s and Johann Strauss II in the 1870s and 1880s. Offenbach's fertile melodies, combined with his librettists' witty satire, formed a model for the musical theatre that followed. In 1957, Mark Lubbock traced the development of musical theatre from Offenbach to Gilbert and Sullivan and eventually to Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein, writing: "Offenbach is undoubtedly the most significant figure in the history of the 'musical'.Lubbock, Mark. "The Music of 'Musicals'", The Musical Times, Vol. 98, No. 1375 (September 1957), pp. 483–485 In the mid-19th century in England, musical theatre consisted of mostly of music hall, adaptations of the French operettas (played in bad, risqué translations) and musical burlesques (the culmination of which were seen at the Gaiety Theatre beginning in 1868). In reaction to these, a few family-friendly entertainments were created, such as the German Reed Entertainments.Bond, Jessie. Introduction to The Life and Reminiscences of Jessie Bond, reprinted at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed March 4, 2011