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Musical Theater

Terms in this set (130)

Oklahoma! premiered in THIS YEAR...
1943
Oklahoma! was created by THIS LEGENDARY COMPOSER and LYRICIST TEAM
Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein
Oklahoma! was once described by author Tim Carter as " a ________ in the Broadway musical, because it is a glorious show, and because it raises important issues about the genre, the theater, and its times."
Landmark
THIS GENRE was designated for Oklahoma! when it made it's Broadway premiere at the St. James Theatre
Musical Drama ***** Musical Story
After Oklahoma! the old practice of interpolating a musical number for the mere purpose of showcasing a performer's special talent or plugging a song to boost sheet-music sales came to be seen as a violation of the new musical theater ________. Writers began to pay closer attention to how songs function within the ________. Suddenly, the musical numbers had to grow organically from the ________ situation and relate directly to the ________.
Aesthetic... story... dramatic... characters
One of Oklahoma!'s greatest achievements is its integration of ________ and ________ into the story.
Song/Dance
THIS CHOREOGRAPHER of Oklahoma! proved to be an early pioneer of dance in the integrated musical
Agnes de Mille
Technically speaking, the ________ of a musical refers to the spoken dialogue
Script **** Libretto
People who disparage musical theater are bothered by the fact that the characters, unlike real people, break out into song at any time and any place. They do not allow themselves the ________ that is a prerequisite for all forms of music theater and therefore are unable to experience or appreciate the genre's full emotional sweep
Suspension of Disbelief
TRUE or FALSE: In fully integrated musicals, the songs and dances grow naturally, organically, from the spoken dialogue, and they either advance the plot or reveal the emotional life of the characters.
True
The historic boulevard called Broadway (originally the Wickquasgeck Trail) slices diagonally across the entire length of Manhattan. In the early twentieth century, the Broadway Theater District - "________" - as Shep Friedman dubbed it in 1902 - ran along Broadway between 14th Street and 34th Street. Today, all but a few Broadway theaters, the majority of them erected during a theater construction boom that ended with the Great Depression, lie within an area circumscribed by 42nd Street and 52nd Street at the south and north ends, respectively, and by 8th Avenue and Broadway on the west and east sides.
The Great White Way
For years, ________ (1866) had the dubious distinction of being called the first musical
The Black Crook
The genre satirized popular plays and novels, and music usually played a dominant role in the proceedings. Like The Black Crook, ________ exploited the female body in order to lure a large male clientele. ________ rose to great popularity following the Civil War. The craze began with British actress and entrepreneur Lydia Thompson and her "British Blondes" ... In the early twentieth century, the growing middle class sought family-oriented entertainment with less risqué content. As mainstream musical theater became more respectable, ________ filled the void, thereby relegating itself to adult, mostly male, entertainment. Since the thirties, the term "________" has connoted little more than striptease.
Burlesque
One of the first works billed as a 'musical comedy' was a more homegrown and more chaste example of burlesque. '________' epitomizes the amalgam of dance, comic business, and specialty acts that were typical of burlesque entertainment.
Evangeline
________ and ________ specialized in burlesque entertainment and German dialect comedy (also called "Dutch" comedy). They were a popular comedy team in vaudeville, and later on Broadway. They specialized in ethnic humor, with an emphasis on German-Jewish stereotypes. Their contrasting physiques - (one) was short and dumpy and (the other) was tall and bearded - gave their act a degree of visual humor.
Weber and Fields
The "________" article in the New Grove Dictionary of Music begins: "A light opera with spoken dialogue, songs and dances. Emphasizing music rich in melody and based on 19th century operatic styles." (This genre had its origins in France... Gilbert and Sullivan rethought the French genre in English terms, satirizing British society and spoofing Italian operatic conventions such as coloratura passages and contralto villainesses... Viennese versions favored stories of romance. Both the English and Viennese schools modeled their music on operatic practices and incorporated spoken dialogue.
Operetta
Toward the end of the century, farcical story-centered musicals began to appear with increasing frequency. As Gilbert and Sullivan were delighting American audiences with stories about British upper-class society, Edward Harrigan was entertaining immigrant working-class audiences with stories about themselves... Harrigan is best known for a series of musicals written between 1879 and 1881 collectively called '________'. They represent an important step in the direction of the modern musical comedy genre... Harrigan's musicals are devoid of the romantic plots of latter-day musical comedy. Instead, they focus on urban life, politics, and social mores. He strove to capture the social milieu of tenement neighborhoods on the Lower East Side. The dramatic conflicts reflect real-life situations of immigrant enclaves and typically involve Irish and German rivalries or other intra-immigrant squabbles.
The Mulligan Guard Plays
The '________' is arguably the most immediate precursor to the modern American musical comedy... (This) provided decent-quality family entertainment. The writers interpolated vernacular songs, eccentric dances, and jokes - the same sort of material found in variety shows.
Farce-Comedy
The institution of 'blackface' emerged from theatrical lampoons of the dress, speech, and mannerisms of black slaves and free blacks. White America could not get enough of such caricatures, as well as the harmonies, banjo playing, and shuffle dancing associated with black music... The earliest professional troupes consisted entirely of white performers... They performed satirical skits, songs, and dances, claiming to depict urban African Americans as well as rural plantation life.

The Theatrical Institution that best completes this description is...
Minstrelsy
Before long, variety began to emphasize risqué, male-oriented entertainment. Tony Pastor - a former variety performer - responded by presenting 'family entertainment'... His efforts to "bourgeoisify" variety (make it more appealing to middle-class audiences) led to the professionalization of the genre and eventually gave rise to ________ ... (this genre) was the most popular form of entertainment in America at the turn of the twentieth century, playing in nearly 3,000 theaters nationwide. Being the most democratic and racially integrated show business institution, ________ introduced the country to a wide and diverse range of talent, including George M. Cohan (Irish), Bert Williams (African American), and Al Jolson (Jewish).
Vaudeville
New York at the turn of the twentieth century was poised to become America's cultural capital and main economic engine. In 1898, the FIVE BOROUGHS that make up New York City today ________ came together to form a single metropolis with a population of nearly three and a half million people.
Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island
"Hero of the footlights" ... "Yankee Doodle Boy" ... "ultimate showman" ... "first auteur of the American musical" ... "Yankee Doodle Comedian" - these are just some of the honorifics ascribed to
George M Cohan
'You're a Grand Old Flag' ... 'Over There' ... 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' ... and 'Give My Regards to Broadway' are examples of the legendary songs and anthems written by ________, with many of his songs still popular today.
George M Cohan
Operetta suffered a decline in popularity at the turn of the century, but the downturn reversed itself in 1907, the year in which Franz Lehar's '________' made its American debut. Set in Paris, this popular Viennese operetta... mixes international diplomacy and romance... Of the few operettas still regularly performed today, (this show) counts among the most beloved.
The Merry Widow
Producers, hoping to capitalize on The Merry Widow's success, began to look for similar works. Filling the void was the Irish-born composer ________ ... He grew up in London and studied music in Germany, but he immigrated to America in 1886 at the age of twenty-seven... Despite his birth in Ireland, the literature treats him as an American composer. He had his first Broadway hit with Babes in Toyland (1903). His next major triumph, Naughty Marietta (1910), was one of the first operettas with an American setting. Waltzes and marches dominate his scores, but the composer was not averse to writing music in the American vernacular, such as ragtime and comedy songs.
Victor Herbert
Literature of the ________ genre emphasizes its mixture of songs, dances, and comic skits, but several early examples were unified by an overriding theme, or at least the sense of purpose... As the word implies, (this genre) incorporated topical humor and centered on current events.

The genre that best completes this description is...
Revue
________ produced his first Follies in 1907. He took his inspiration from a series of annual Parisian revues, the Folies-Bergere, which featured titillating displays of feminine beauty and satirized the preceding year's cultural, social, and political highpoints with a myriad of specialty acts.
Florenz Ziegfield
Songwriters such as ________ were among the luminaries who furnished songs for the Follies.
Irving
Ziegfeld originally produced his Follies as summer entertainment for a mostly male clientele. The first edition of the Follies starred his wife, Anna Held, and boasted a book by Harry B. Smith. Having discovered his niche, Ziegfeld produced a new Follies almost every season until 1931, for a total of twenty-one editions... He brought a sense of balance to the revue format. The Follies paraded beautiful women in the latest fashions, but it also featured top-notch ________ such as Eddie Cantor and W. C. Fields.
Talent
The year ________ was a seminal time for American musical theater. Ziegfeld brought respectability and popularity to the revue. The Merry Widow ignited a renewed passion for operetta, and Little Johnny Jones played on Broadway for the third time and reaffirmed George M. Cohan's preeminence in the musical comedy domain. By the end of the decade, musical comedy, operetta, and revue, were all enjoying great popularity. However, musical comedy was beginning to suffer again from formulaic plots and songs, and it took a new generation of writers led by Jerome Kern to advance the genre toward greater sophistication.
1907
By 1910, musical comedy was once again suffering from formulaic plots, bland songs, and stale jokes... Operetta fared no better than musical comedy... On the other hand, it was a favorable time for revues. Ziegfeld continued to produce his annual Follies, and competitors inaugurated their own yearly series. Ziegfeld's comic headliners, opulent scenery and costumes, and displays of feminine beauty - epitomized by the 'Ziegfeld Girls' - continued to delight audiences. The Ziegfeld name became synonymous with the motto "________".
Glorifying the American Girl
The 1910 edition of the Follies featured the Jewish comedian ________, whose life later provided the basis for the 1964 musical Funny Girl...
Fanny Brice
________ began his stage career in minstrel shows, but he moved on to Vaudeville and Broadway. His comic talents are legendary, and he is remembered for his self-deprecating signature song 'Nobody'. At a time when few black entertainers appeared on Broadway, he performed alongside white actors.
Bert Williams
Vernon Blythe and Irene Foote met in 1910 and married the next year. As the husband-and-wife dance team known as '________', they popularized ballroom dancing in America and Europe...
Vernon and Irene Castle
The avuncular ________ built a lasting legacy as a humorist and folk philosopher. Part Cherokee, he began his stage career performing cowboy tricks in a Wild West show. Ziegfeld featured him in the Follies between 1916 and 1924. He also performed on the radio, wrote a newspaper column, and appeared in films.
Will Rogers
It was during this period that ________ emerged as the preeminent Broadway composer of his generation. He had written songs that were interpolated into shows by other composers, but by the late teens his talents became increasingly in demand. His first publicly acknowledged Broadway credit came in 1914 when he and the lyricist Herbert Reynolds wrote five songs for The Girl from Utah... One of their contributions to the show, the immortal 'They Didn't Believe Me', popularized a new type of song...
Jerome Kern
Jerome Kern's first opportunity to rid musical comedy of its worst practices came when producers Ray Comstock and Elisabeth Marbury asked him to compose the score for a new type of musical that they planned to produce at ________. Their endeavor coaxed the American musical out of its infancy and moved it in the direction of a mature art form.
The princess theater
________, as they are collectively called, merit attention because they mark an important step in the advancement of the genre. They portrayed the rarefied world and reflected the refined tastes of the upper-class audience for which they were intended. The books were smart, with modern characters, crisp and urbane dialogue, and swift-moving action set in a respectable and prosperous milieu. These musicals employed a small orchestra (some sources put the number of musicians at eleven). Most important, the songs in these musicals relate to the plot to a degree unheard of in earlier musical comedy.
George White's Scandals
________, ________, and ________, deserve much of the credit for the high artistic quality of the Princess Theatre repertory, although only one participated in the enterprise from its inception. Scholars put the total number of Princess Theatre musicals at seven, but the size and makeup of the repertory are complicated by two factors. First, due to various logistical complications, some of the musicals originally scheduled for the Princess Theatre were forced to play elsewhere. Second, not every musical that did play at the Princess Theatre was of the sort envisioned by Marbury.
Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Florenz Ziegfeld***
During the final years of the decade, postwar prosperity produced a flood of original musical comedies. A new generation of composers was getting its first hearing on Broadway, including Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and George Gershwin. Jerome Kern inspired these budding composers, and he continued to influence writers for decades to come.
True
Musicals from this period (The Twenties) boasted exuberant dancing, memorable music, and diverting if mindless scripts. These shows did not attempt to tax the mind, stir up deep emotions, or strive to literary refinement, and few of them made any cultural impact whatsoever beyond their original Broadway run. However, many ________ from these shows became standards and left a lasting legacy on American popular music...
Songs
One musical from the twenties towers over all the rest: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's '________'. Not only was (this show) the major musical theater event of the decade, but it also marks a milestone in the history of the genre. It is the oldest work in the standard performing repertory.
Show Boat
Irene opened in late 1919 and set a trend that lasted throughout the twenties... it was the first of several musicals from the period with a modern-day story based on the ________ archetype: a young, attractive, and often impoverished woman discovers her Prince Charming and marries upward in class.
Cinderella
George Gershwin built his reputation in the twenties with a different type of musical comedy. His first, Lady, Be Good! did for musical theater what his Rhapsody in Blue did for concert music. Lady, Be Good! made the ____-inflected score fashionable on Broadway at a time when operetta was enjoying its last hurrah.
jazz
The script for Lady, Be Good!, by Guy Bolton and Fred Thompson, epitomizes the zany antics and anything-for-a-laugh plots of the era. The story centers on Dick and Susie Trevers, siblings played by ________, who find themselves living on the street after their landlady, whom Dick has spurned, evicts them.
Fred and adele Astaire
The two most successful operettas during the twenties opened in 1924 within three months from each other: Rudolf Friml's '________' (book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein and Otto Harbach) and Sigmund Romberg's '________'.
Rose Marie / The Student Prince
Jerome Kern's selection of ________ over other lyricists was hardly an act of blind faith. He recognized in him, with whom he had collaborated with on Sunny in 1925, a desire to raise the standards for musical theater and to work with more sophisticated dramatico-musical structures. Indeed, Show Boat prefigures themes, styles, and concerns of his later musicals and was instrumental in his maturation as a dramatist and lyricist.
Oscar Hammerstein
Name the Producer of Show Boat...
Florenz ziegfeld
For all its historical importance, Show Boat did not precipitate immediate major changes in musical comedy... For years, Good News! was a favorite of amateur and high school drama clubs. It boasted several hit songs, including 'The Best Things in Life Are Free'... Good News! was the first of four hit musical comedies by the writing team of B. G. "Buddy" De Sylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson (DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson). Their musicals captured the aura and exuberance of the "________".
The Flapper Age
'________' reflects the preoccupation in the twenties with material wealth and power. (The titular character) is not really happy until she has some of it... In 1971, a hit revival of (this show) proved that nostalgia sells. Supervised by Busby Berkeley and featuring a top-notch cast headed by old-timers Ruby Keeler and Patsy Kelly, the production inaugurated the revival craze that continues to this day.
No, No, Nanette
The ________ (in America) and the rise of ________ in Europe cast a pall over Broadway for most of the thirties.
Great Depression / Fascism
With George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers in their prime, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin still in top form, and Cole Porter hitting his stride, American popular song reached a new level of ________.
Sophistication
Thirties musicals benefited from two major artistic developments. ________ began to play a more intrinsic dramatic role, and technical advances in scenic design (in particular, the mechanized revolving stage) allowed the action to unfold with greater fluidity.
Dance
Musical comedy continued to dominate Broadway, but it responded to the sour mood of the country in two distinct ways. Whereas musical comedy in the twenties expressed the unchecked euphoria of America after the war, thirties musicals either provided an escape from the dire realities of daily life or satirized important issues of the day, including the war industry, labor rights, political corruption, and racism. Cole Porter's '________' and George Gershwin's '________', the two longest-running musicals of the decade, epitomize these two trends, respectively.
Anything Goes / Strike Up the Band
________ delighted in pushing the envelope of poetic decorum, but he showed off his erudition by quoting French, Italian, German, and Spanish idioms. He felt just as comfortable writing songs about elevator operators as about the champagne-quaffing crowd. Indeed, he could quote Shakespeare and Shelley in one breath and Mae West and Josephine Baker in the next. His expressions of love encompass a diverse range of possibilities, from flights to ecstasy to sadomasochism.
Cole Porter
Its racy humor, topicality, mixing of social classes, and sassy music make '________' a quintessential thirties musical.
????
The struggling economy and rumblings in Europe spurred several writers to move beyond the safe limits of romantic musical comedy and into the realm of satire. Strike Up the Band was the first of three political satires by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and George and Ira Gershwin. '________' and its sequel Let 'Em Eat Cake take aim at the American political system. (This show) has the distinction of being the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Of Thee I Sing
Whereas Of Thee I Sing radiates a musical comedy spirit, '________' invokes a darker, more Juvenalian form of satire... Marc Blitzstein, who wrote the work, was under the sway of the German composer Kurt Weill and dramatist Bertolt Brecht... (This show) evokes the bleakness, political relevance, and dissonance of Brecht and Weill's works, but it ends on a positive note...
The Cradle Will Rock
Whereas Cole Porter dominated the first half of the decade, ________ produced an impressive array of hits in the late thirties, most of which incorporated dance in various novel ways.
Rodgers and Hart
In 1937 George Gershwin was struck down by a brain tumor at the age of thirty-eight. The enormous strides in Gershwin's creative growth during the thirties make his premature death particularly tragic and an immeasurable loss to American music and Broadway. One need only compare his first work of the decade, Girl Crazy (1930) with his last, his magnum opus, '________' (1935) ... Gershwin's score blends musical theater and operatic idioms, and contains several extended passages and choruses.
Porgy and Bess
'________' is Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's most mature work... (this show) pushed musical theater further away from the happy-ending prerogative of musical comedy and toward greater realism. (this show) defied expectations and did not try to smooth the edges of its seedy characters.
Pal Joey
After 1943, the practice of interpolating songs into a musical without a logical reason or dramatic justifications was primarily used by older musical comedy writers who were out of step with the new artistic standards introduced by Rodgers and Hammerstein, which demanded that songs, dances, and dialogue be fully ________.
Integrated
Richard Rodgers endowed each of his scores with a distinct sound evocative of the ________ and ________ in which the story occurs without slipping into pure pastiche.
Time / place
No musical theater writers from this period (the forties) emulated Rodgers and Hammerstein more than ________ and ________.
Alan Jay Lerner / Frederick Loewe
When the Jewish composer ________ fled the rising tide of Nazism in Germany in 1933, he first went to Paris and in 1935 immigrated to America. From the moment he arrived in New York, he immersed himself in the world of Broadway musical theater. He successfully assimilated the American popular music vernacular into his musical vocabulary, and he wrote several innovative musicals.
Kurt Weill
The Buffalo-born ________ is best known for the songs he composed for the movie The Wizard of Oz, including the classic "Over the Rainbow", but he wrote over fourteen Broadway musicals, two of them in the forties. This son of an Orthodox Jewish cantor was one of the most influential songwriters of his generation, yet, ironically, none of his Broadway musicals has achieved canonical status.
Harold Arlen
________ stands out for his classical pedigree and sophisticated composition characterized by complex textures, cross-rhythms, counterpoint, and inventive harmonies. He juggled conducting and composing throughout this career. That he excelled in both worlds is a testament to his formidable talents. Although he wrote fewer musicals than most Broadway writers of his stature, the quality of his output is consistently high.
Frederick Loewe***
________ and ________ began working together in 1939, writing comic material and performing at a Greenwich Village nightclub. Their signature zaniness served them well in both Hollywood and on Broadway. Their screenplays include Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, and Auntie Mame. They felt most comfortable writing stories set in their native city of New York. A typical musical by them features a madcap plot and a strong dose of silliness. They attempted a few serious musicals, most of which came up short, the main exception being Applause which won the Tony Award for 'Best Musical'.
Betty Comden / Adolph Green
________, whose theatrical career spanned nearly eight decades, witnessed firsthand the early formation of the modern Broadway musical, its Golden Age, and its decline. He started out as an actor in the teens and turned to playwriting in the twenties. In the forties, he served as the director, book writer, producer, or some combination thereof for nine Broadway musicals (plus many spoken plays), including Pal Joey. In the fifties and sixties, he was even more prolific. His scripts are structurally sound and dramatically logical, but they lack psychological depth. He himself once boasted, "I helped bring plot and common sense into the musical."
George Abbott
The artistic reputation of ________ is unsurpassed. He made his Broadway debut in 1939 as a member of the cast of Your Eyes. Before long, he was directing and choreographing musicals, beginning with On the Town in 1944. His career includes The King and I, The Pajama Game, Gypsy, West Side Story, and Fiddler on the Roof.
Jerome Robbins
The Broadway and Hollywood choreographer ________ is best remembered for infusing his/her dances with a sense of athleticism... In 1942, he/she joined what is now the American Ballet Theatre and was a featured solo dancer in several works, including Leonard Bernstein's Fancy Free (choreographed by Jerome Robbins) in 1946. He/She made their Broadway debut in 1947 as the choreographer of Finian's Ranibow, choreographed and/or directed over seventeen other Broadway musicals, including Guys and Dolls and Can-Can. Film credits include Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Hello, Dolly! His/Her work earned a total of five Tony Awards and an honorary Academy Award in 1997.
Agnes De Mil***
His score for Guys and Dolls is still among the most beloved in the repertory. Guys and Dolls is a romantic comedy without serious pretension, but it is also an artistic gem, the type of show that Larry Stempel calls "literate musical comedy." It is based on stories by Damon Runyon. Runyon virtually invented the paradoxical Hollywood gangster argot, a mixture of proper grammatical syntax and street slang. Loesser's score has a beguiling eclectic range of styles. His penchant for mixing the profane and the sacred is on full display.
Frank Loesser
Exposure to the seedy side of show business during his impressionable years made a profound impact on his career. He became a highly successful television, film, and stage choreographer and director. He began as a performer, appearing in Broadway musicals in the mid-forties and in Hollywood musicals in the fifties. In 1954, he made his Broadway debut as a choreographer with The Pajama Game. The hallmarks of his style - sexually provocative poses and steps, isolated body movements, heightened theatricality - were present early on. He turned to directing beginning with Redhead in 1959. In 1973, he became the first choreographer or director to win an Emmy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award, for Liza with a Z!, Cabaret, and Pippin, respectively. (Note: and to this day, he remains the only artist to win all of these awards in the same year!) ... Altogether he choreographed, directed, or both choreographed and directed thirteen Broadway musicals including Sweet Charity (1966) and Chicago (1975).
Bob Fosse
Television also entered the musical theater business in the fifties. Rodgers and Hammerstein's '________' marks the pinnacle of the fifties television musical. First aired live on CBS in 1957 with Julie Andrews as, it reached an unprecedented 107 million viewers. Two subsequent television remakes of (1965 and 1997) were also successful.
Cinderella
When musicals addressed social and political themes, they usually did so in lighthearted ways. However, as cultural texts, even musical comedies have something to say about the times. For instance, '________' expresses nostalgia for a simpler, less complex age. The protagonist, an outsider named Harold Hill, threatens to unravel the moral fabric of the quaint homogenous Iowan town in which the story takes place. The scenario resonated with the country's xenophobia and fear of the growing Soviet threat.
The Music Man
The stage and screen star ________ is best known for her performance in the title role of the movie Mary Poppins (1964) and as Maria in the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music (1966). She was born in Walton-on-Thames, England, to theatrical parents. Her mature soprano voice was so impressive that she was appearing professionally in London by the age of twelve. She came to America in 1954 to appear on Broadway in the English musical The Boy Friend. Two years later, she won the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, which brought her instant stardom.
Mary Martin
Because The Music Man and '________', with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, opened during the same theatrical season and completed for the Tony Award in several categories, comparison of the two shows, however different from each other they may be, is unavoidable. Together these two disparate shows tell us something about the xenophobic climate in America during the fifties. Each show deals in its own unique way with American youth, a growing problem in the fifties, when juvenile delinquency was on the rise. Viewed side by side, (this show) and The Music Man highlight the dichotomy between urban and rural life... However, The Music Man relied on nostalgia. By contrast, (this show) confronted the violence and transformed city streets into war zones in the mid-fifties.
West side story
________, a nearly ubiquitous presence on Broadway in the fifties, is best remembered for his last musical of the decade, Gypsy (1959), which had lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
Jule Stein
________ who hailed from Texas, became a Broadway star just in time to benefit form the improved standards of musical theater. She was known for her high-spirited performances, especially in the roles of Nellie Forbush in South Pacific (1949), the gravity-defying title character in Peter Pan (1954), and Maria in The Sound of Music (1959).
Julie Andrews
________ and ________, native New Yorkers both, were ideal collaborators. However, their budding partnership ended tragically when (one collaborator) died at the young age of twenty-nine... The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees were state-of-the-art musical comedies, with clever scores, legendary performances, inventive choreography, and the best production teams that Broadway had to offer.
Richard Adler / Jerry Ross
In the early sixties, musical theater experienced a precipitous decline in popularity... Some writers experimented with form and content in the hope of reinvigorating the musical theater genre. They created a more ironic, commentative, and self-reflexive form of musical theater, the "________", so called because it is governed by a central theme or directorial concept.
Concept Musical
________, whose career in the theater spanned nearly five decades, earned the reputation of being a nefarious, divisive, and manipulative operator on Broadway, traits not uncommonly ascribed to theatrical producers but in his case particularly pronounced. His only major biography (unauthorized) is titled The Abominable Showman, one of his nicknames. "The Undertaker" was another... His infamy notwithstanding, he achieved the best hit-to-flops ratio in the business, 60:40, far better than the century's rough average of 20:80.
David Merrick
_______, ... is one of the few successful Broadway composers of his generation without formal music training... He never had any pretensions about his music: he favored direct, memorable melodies and uncomplicated harmonies and eschewed complex formal structures. His lyrics are rarely fussy or belabored. Indeed, he intentionally sought to recapture the days when songs by theater composers such as Irving Berlin, his professed model, were the popular music of the day. He succeeded to a certain extent... "Hello, Dolly!" is one of the most performed songs of the twentieth century.
Jerry Herman
Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick's magnum opus, '________', has an endearing score and engaging script, by Joseph Stein, but it owes much of its success to the director-choreographer Jerome Robbins. Robbins' visual style and thematic approach to the material have led several commentators to call (this show) a concept musical, but the plot and integrated score essentially follow the Rodgers and Hammerstein model.
Fiddler on the Roof
________ was a jazz musician before becoming a musical theater composer. His most effective scores are those composed for stories that lend themselves to his jazz background. Although not his longest-running musical, Sweet Charity features one of his best scores.
Cy coleman
was as innovative in structure as its subject matter was shocking, and it is as relevant today as when it opened in 1966. The plot intertwines two parallel love stories, both of which unravel amid the early rumblings of Nazism in thirties Germany. Harold Prince, who produced and directed (this show) initially conceived of a traditional book musical, but he eventually came up with the idea of alternating traditional book scenes and expressionistic scenes set in a Berlin cabaret called the Kit Kat Klub.
Cabaret
________ and ________ first met in 1962... and only (one collaborator's) death in 2004 ended their partnership, making theirs the longest composer-lyricist collaboration in the history of musical theater. The settings in their musicals range from Depression-era New York to the island of Crete. They viewed the modern world through the lens of theater and more often than not adopted a play-within-a-play format. Their scores reflect their different personalities and artistic predilections; the composer is well known for their romantic sensibilities and lyrical tendencies, whereas the lyricist's reputation is built on cynicism and an acerbic sense of humor. The opposing qualities that they bring to the table produce the dramatic tension of their scores.
John Kander / Fred Ebb
Throughout the sixties, Jule Styne maintained the feverish pace that he had set for himself in the fifties... Styne collaborated with Bob Merrill on the 1964 hit Funny Girl, the musical that transformed ________ into a bona fide star.
Barbra Streisand
________ is associated in one way or another with many seminal musicals from the second half of the twentieth century, including Fiddler on the Roof and Phantom of the Opera, not to mention no fewer than ten Stephen Sondheim musicals. He began his illustrious theater career as a stage manager for George Abbott... In the mid-fifties, he started producing musicals... In 1962, it was an inauspicious directorial debut.
Harold Prince
The Rodgers and Hammerstein brand of musical theater, which had dominated Broadway for nearly two decades and espoused a utopian view of the world, could not accommodate the uncertainty and anxiety caused by the Cold and Vietnam wars, and ________ was replacing Broadway music as the primary popular musical idiom. With few exceptions, established composers and lyricists at the time were not about to start writing (this) music. It fell to younger writers to transform the musical theater genre into a relevant art form for the postmodern age. (Note: No show made this more evident that the phenomenon known as Hair in 1968).
rock
There is one notable exception that complicates the idea that musical theater in the seventies was in a state of decline: ________ established his preeminence of Broadway. Between 1970 and 1979, Broadway played host to five of his musicals... each one critically acclaimed.
Stephen Sondheim
'________' was a daring musical because it rejected the romantic ideal of commitment at a time when cultural, economic, and societal forces were weakening the institution of marriage. It deals with the difficulty of "making emotional connection in an increasingly dehumanized society," as Sondheim has described the show. (This show) also qualifies as a landmark work... (This show) is plotless.
Company
________ came from a working-class family in Buffalo, where he began taking dance lessons at an early age. He dropped out of high school and went on tour with West Side Story. In the sixties, he appeared in several Broadway musicals... 1966 marks the beginning of his career as a Broadway choreographer... and 1973 was the first year that he both directed and choreographed. His most successful project was A Chorus Line, which he followed with Ballroom, which did poorly. He rebounded in 1981 with Dreamgirls. His death from AIDS in 1987 dealt a severe blow to the Broadway community.
Michael Bennett
Michael Bennett's '________' was the first Broadway musical to hit 4,000 performances. As the choreographer of Company and Follies, Bennett learned how to employ movement to develop character and create fluid stage transitions. Indeed, (this show) owes its character-driven orientation and plotless format to these earlier concept musicals... Bennett developed the show over the course of several workshops during which he conducted interviews with a group of professional dancers. He and his scriptwriters then molded this material into a cohesive book.
A Chorus Line
Rock and Roll continued to be an albatross around the necks of musical theater composers and producers. Many writers tried to capitalize on Hair's success, but few succeeded... The twenty-something wunderkind ________ took Broadway by storm with three rock-oriented musicals: Godspell (1971), Pippin (1972), and The Magic Show (1974).
Stephen Schwartz
Stephen Sondheim's Broadway debut as the lyricist of West Side Story is the stuff of musical theater legend, but the experience, however positive for his career, did not alter his ultimate goal of writing both lyrics and music... The first time Broadway audiences heard Sondheim's music as well as his lyrics was for '________' (1962), a farce based on the comedies of the Roman playwright Plautus. Directed by George Abbott and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, (this show) was a hit.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Stephen Sondheim rose to great prominence with a series of six musicals that he developed with Harold Prince between 1970 and 1981... The Sondheim-Prince musicals, as they are called, represent the ________ at its most mature state. They deal with human relationships but reject the romantic idealism that defined musical theater for over half a century.
Concept Musical
Stephen Sondheim spent his formative years in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, not far from the country home of ________. His parents had divorced in 1940, and his mother, a fashion designer, kept him from seeing his father, a successful dress manufacturer, by moving with her son from New York to Pennsylvania. By the age of fourteen, Sondheim had discovered an interest in musical theater. From the start, he wrote both words and music. Over a six-year period, (this man) mentored Sondheim in the art of musical theater writing. It was an informal apprenticeship but a profoundly influential one on the young Sondheim.
Oscar Hammerstein
'________' is based on Ingmar Bergman's film Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), a deft comedy of manners. In an attempt to write a musical of waltzes, Sondheim composed every song in three-quarter time or triple meter (6/8, for example).
A Little Night Music
Stephen Sondheim himself initiated '________', as opposed to his earlier collaborations with Harold Prince. It is a macabre tale of a barber who, having been wrongfully convicted of a crime and sent to Australia to serve a long prison sentence, returns to London to seek vengeance on his accusers.
Sweeney Todd
Critics and scholars adopted the term "megamusical" during the eighties for a specific type of work originating in England and attributed to the composer ________ and the lyricist ________... who had gained quick notoriety for three musicals that they wrote in the seventies: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita.
Andrew Lloyd Webber / Tim Rice
The onslaught of megamusicals on Broadway was dubbed "________".
The British Invasion
Befitting the term "megamusical", the music, sets, costumes, marketing campaigns, merchandising, reception history, and hype associated with the genre reach mega-proportions. ________ the designer of Cats, Starlight Express, Les Miserables, and Sunset Boulevard, established visual hugeness as a requisite of the megamusical. Indeed, megamusicals have relied on lavish, complex, computerized, and automated scenery.
John Napier
The British producer ________ deserves much of the credit for putting the "mega" into megamusical. Borrowing marketing techniques form other industries, he branded his production with a distinct, easily recognizable logo. Broadway marquees and posters spelled out titles of musicals with a distinct font and bold color scheme... but he imprinted the titles of his musicals on the collective consciousness of theatergoers and non-theatergoers alike with a simple wordless image that became an internationally recognized icon for the show.
Cameron Mackintosh
________ charts the rise and fall of the infamous First Lady of Argentina. The show treats her life as a rags-to-riches story, using the metaphor of a rainbow that eventually fades to nothing. Her anthem "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" was released as a single on the MCA label in 1976. A two-disc concept album of (this show) followed in short order, and soon a stage version was planned.
Evita
The eighties marked the beginning of a new phase in Andrew Lloyd Webber's career. He stopped working exclusively with Tim Rice and wrote what became the two longest-running musicals in Broadway history: '________' (1982), which did not require a lyricist, and '________' (1988), which required two.
Cats / The Phantom of the Opera
The extraordinary success of Cats, Les Miserables, and The Phantom of the Opera overshadowed most homegrown musical theater during the eighties. With a few exceptions, notably '________', American musicals reflected reactionary thinking, a bankruptcy of original ideas, and the aversion of American producers to bankrolling risky projects and unproven writers.
Sunday in the park with George
'________' a musical about race politics in the music industry, centers on an African American female vocal trio... Their meteoric rise from the ghetto to the national stage causes pain and heartbreak.
Dreamgirls
David Merrick's production of '________' directed and choreographed by Gower Champion, reimagined the 1933 Busby Berkeley movie classic for a nostalgia-crazed eighties audience. Champion died on the day of opening night. In what many perceived as the latest example of Merrick's brazen opportunism and heartlessness, the producer withheld the news of Champion's death until after the thunderous ovation at the end of the show that evening, infamously appearing center stage and announcing the news to both the audience and cast. A media circus ensued, as did a monumental run of 3,486 performances.
42nd street
'________' is the most successful megamusical not by Andrew Lloyd Webber... (but rather by) the show's lyricist, Alain Boublil, and composer, Claude-Michel Schonberg. The original production of (this show)... ran just over sixteen years (1987-2003). Since it closed, the show has continued to play around the world and returned to Broadway in 2014. A long-awaited film version was released in late 2012.
Les Miserables
Jonathan Larson, the creator of '________', was a middle-class Jewish kid from White Plains, New York. In high school, he played in band, sang in choir, and acted in theater productions. He admired singer-songwriters such as Elton John and Billy Joel, but he fell in love with theater and the works of Stephen Sondheim... The subsequent events surrounding the production of (this show) stand out as one of the most tragic stories in the annals of musical theater history... In late 1995, Larson quit his restaurant job and prepared to enjoy the fruits of his labors. A few days before dress rehearsals, however, he experienced chest pains, which persisted up to the night of the final dress rehearsal... Sometime after midnight, he collapsed and died from an aortic aneurysm. (This show) opened the next evening to great acclaim and, partly because of the tragedy associated with it, became the musical that everyone wanted to see.
Rent
More than any other American composer, ________ has affiliated himself with the megamusical. His career on Broadway peaked in the late nineties with Jekyll & Hyde (1997) and The Scarlett Pimpernel (1997). Since 1997, though, he has racked up a long list of critically disparaged and unprofitable musicals. His last two shows on Broadway, Wonderland (2011) and Bonnie and Clyde (2009), played a combined total of sixty-seven performances.
Frank Wildhorn
________, a product of the Off-Broadway scene, writes offbeat musicals, often of a semi-autobiographical nature and with mature themes... His so-called Marvin Trilogy propelled him into the spotlight in the early eighties... Falsettos tells the story of a married man and father who one day realized that he prefers to be with men. With a book by James Lapine and (this composer), and directed by Lapine, Falsettos was revolutionary in that its protagonist is not the clichéd suffering or exuberantly campy homosexual of earlier, closeted days... After surviving a brain disorder in 1992, he wrote about his experience in A New Brain (1998). The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (premiered Off-Broadway in 2004), his most commercially successful work, ran on Broadway for 1, 136 performances. His musical adaptation of the film Little Miss Sunshine opened Off-Broadway in 2013.
William Finn
Whereas earlier revues such as the Ziegfeld Follies mostly incorporated original music by multiple songwriters, today's revue-retrospectives feature the back catalogue of a single songwriter, singer, vocal group or band. These shows drop the pretense of having a narrative or plot and simply present the music in an entertaining way. In the nineties, these three types of musicals proliferated to such an extent that the term "________", which had only been used sporadically, became almost universally adopted by critics to describe them.
Jukebox Musical
The lyricist ________ and composer ________ arguably the most successful and artistically conservative writers of their generation, met in 1983... They garnered considerable attention for the musical comedy Lucky Stiff which played Off-Broadway in 1988. Their first Broadway musical, Once on This Island, began at Playwrights Horizons in 1990... Their Ragtime premiered in 1997 (for which they won the Tony Award for Best Score).
Lynn Ahrens / Stephen Flaherty
Family dynasties are rare on Broadway. ________ is a third-generation Broadway composer, the grandson of Richard Rodgers, and the son of Mary Rodgers. In the nineties, he established himself with the first of two major book musicals. His first, Floyd Collins (1996), is based on an actual event from 1925. His score emulates the folksiness of Appalachian music without sounding derivative. He blends bluegrass, musical theater, and art music influences. His second, The Light in the Piazza (2003), is the musical retelling of the romantic 1962 film. The lush score, evoking a romance between an American girl with a young Italian man in Florence, is further complicated by a complex mother-daughter relationship. For his efforts, he won the Tony Award for Best Score in 2005.
Adam Guettel
________ studied music at the Eastman School of Music. A friendship with Harold Prince's daughter, Daisy, led to an introduction with the famous director, and eventually the assignment to compose Parade (1988)... His The Last Five Years played Off-Broadway in 2002 and has since developed an enthusiastic following. An Off-Broadway revival opened in 2013, and a film version was released in 2015. His The Bridges of Madison County opened on Broadway in 2014 and earned him Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations. His latest Broadway musical, Honeymoon in Las Vegas, opened less than a year later.
Jason Robert Brown
Like the other performing arts genres, musical theater has historically relegated women to the stage. The credit line "music by" has only rarely been followed by the name of a woman; and women lyricists on Broadway have been only slightly more numerous than women composers... ________ stands out as the most prominent woman composer to emerge in the nineties... Her career took off in the new millennium. She received the assignment for writing the songs for Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002) and Shrek the Musical (2008)... In 2015, her musical Fun Home opened on Broadway to rave reviews and won five Tony Awards, including for Best Original Score and Best Musical.
Jeanine Tesori
The Disney Corporation surprised the Broadway establishment with its stage incarnation of '________', which opened at the newly refurbished New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street and thereby became identified with the renewal of the Times Square District.
The Lion King
Unlike Disney's previous stage adaptations, The Lion King did not try to replicate the animated film with live actors. Instead, the company gave the director and puppeteer ________ freedom to bring her unique artistic vision to the material. (This Director), who hailed from the nonprofit avant-garde theater world, employed puppets, African-based music, exotic costumes, and an all-black cast.
Julie Taymor
Musicals based on films date back to the early fifties, but in recent years they have propagated to the point of becoming a distinct genre. Martin Kohn coined the term "________" to describe this category of musical. A major boon for producers, these musicals come with a built-in "marketing bonanza", a developed storyline, and sometimes a preexisting score.
Movical
Turning John Waters' campy 1988 film '________' into a commercially successful musical comedy required little rethinking. Given the film's exuberant dancing, youthful appeal, and upbeat message, the only surprise is that the musical took nearly fifteen years to materialize. It boasts a Tony Award-winning score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and book by Thomas Meehan and Marc O'Donnell. (This show) tells the story of breaking the racial barrier on television. Behind the integrationist theme, however, lies a subversive critique of white America's sense of female beauty and attitudes about gender.
Hairspray
'________' rolled into New York like a tidal wave in early 2001. The prospect of seeing a musical based on Mel Brooks 1967 cult film sent new Yorkers into a ticket-buying frenzy. Today (this shows) brand of satire is practically the default mode on Broadway...
The Producers
'________' (2005) brings form and content together into almost perfect harmony. It is a smart biomusical detailing the true story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and featuring many of the songs that they made famous, such as 'Sherry'. (This show) targeted baby boomers but also appealed to younger fans of classic rock.
Jersey Boys
Musical theater ________ experienced a renaissance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The works in this category, however, have'________' examines contemporary life, especially that of its target audience - young, urban, college-educated professionals. The action, as it were, takes place in New York City in a fictional residential area far from New York's high-rent neighborhoods. The characters struggle with very real social and economic concerns, especially sexual orientation and unemployment. The pleasure of (this show) - with a score by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx - derives from hearing adult dialogue emanating from the mouths of Muppet-inspired puppets who interact with human actors as well as with each other... a markedly different stamp from those of the thirties. These seem to want it both ways, simultaneously targeting and celebrating the musical theater genre itself. One trend is to ridicule the intrinsic contradictions and idiosyncratic conventions of musical theater. The other is to employ a parody of musical theater to draw attention to a controversial issue
Satire
'________' examines contemporary life, especially that of its target audience - young, urban, college-educated professionals. The action, as it were, takes place in New York City in a fictional residential area far from New York's high-rent neighborhoods. The characters struggle with very real social and economic concerns, especially sexual orientation and unemployment. The pleasure of (this show) - with a score by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx - derives from hearing adult dialogue emanating from the mouths of Muppet-inspired puppets who interact with human actors as well as with each other...
Avenue Q
'________' is a satire... the work of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of the sardonic television series South Park, and Robert Lopez, one of the songwriters of Avenue Q... (This show) has the trappings and structure of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical but with the snarky attitude of a postmodern satire, and therein lies its phenomenal popularity.
The Book of Mormon
'________' is based on Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel... which pits a misunderstood Elphaba against the self-righteous Glinda... The musical received mixed notices, but it has done blockbuster business on Broadway, on the road, overseas, and it is currently the eleventh-longest running musical in Broadway history. Young women in particular relate to the contemporary girl-girl friendship that lies at the core of (this show).
Wicked
'________' won six Tony Awards, including for Best Original Score, and five Drama Desk Awards, but with only 504 performances, a respectable run even in the twenty-first century, it does not quality as a major hit. However, the work has since entered the standard musical theater repertory. Based on a novella by Elizabeth Spencer - and a 1962 film by the same name - (this show) stands out for its disability theme, richly detailed book by Craig Lucas, and lush score by Adam Guettel, Richard Rodger's grandson.
The Light in the Piazza
'________' (2008) takes place in a Dominican American neighborhood in the upper reaches of Manhattan and depicts a family crisis that unfolds over the course of three days... (This show) provided an alternative to popular culture's essentialist depictions of Latino Americans as poor laborers, Roman Catholic, superstitious, having a tendency toward criminality, and excelling on the dance floor... In any case, (this show) appealed to a broad demographic because, like Fiddler on the Roof, it explored the universal themes of family, community, and self-determination... Directed by Thomas Kali, Choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler, and with Words and Music by the phenomenal Lin-Manuel Miranda, the musical received thirteen Tony Award nominations and won four... This same 'dream team' would go on to create an even bigger hit in 2016 known as Hamilton, which is still currently receiving unprecedented critical and audience praise.
In the Heights
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