lyrics written to the tunes of popular songs of the day (often spoofing opera), and comic operas, with original scores and mostly romantic comedy type plot lines.  During  this  time  other  musical  theatre  forms  also  developed, such as music hall, melodrama, burlesque, and vaudeville.  Around 1850, the French composer Hervé was experimenting with a form of comic musical theatre that came to be called opérette, which is a type of 'light' opera that has popular and/or 'catchy' music and light subject matter. 

 

In America, the first original theatre piece in English that conforms to the modern conception of a musical (i.e., adding dance and original music that helped to tell the story) is generally considered The Black Crook, which premiered in New York in 1866. The production was a staggering five-and-a-half hours long, but despite its length, it ran for a record-breaking 474 performances. 

 

In the late 1870s, comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart produced and starred in musicals on Broadway, which were called 'musical comedies'.  These musical comedies featured characters and situations taken from the everyday life of New York's lower classes.  Hundreds of musical comedies were staged on Broadway in the 1890s. 

 

In the 1920s most musicals had a similar format to vaudeville, music hall and musical comedies, which tended to emphasize star actors and actresses, big dance routines, and popular songs at the expense of plot.  It was not until 1927, with the production of Show Boat, that modern Musical Theater as we know it today was 'born'.  As one historian explains, '[With Show Boat] came a completely new genre - the musical play as distinguished from musical comedy - which had complete integration of song, humor and production numbers into a single and inextricable artistic entity'.

 

The 1940s through the 1960s marked the 'Golden Age' of the Musicals.  Two major developments happened during this time that advanced the art form.  The first was Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, which tightly integrated all the aspects of musical theatre with a cohesive plot, songs that furthered the action of the story, and dances that advanced the plot and developed the characters (rather than using dance as an excuse to parade scantily clad women across the stage).  Rodgers and Hammerstein hired ballet choreographer Agnes de Mille, who used everyday motions to help the characters express their ideas. It defied musical conventions by raising its first act curtain not on a bevy of chorus girls, but rather on a woman churning butter, with an off-stage voice singing the opening lines of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' unaccompanied.

 

The second development was the 'musical film'.  The musical film was a natural development of the stage musical after the emergence of sound film technology.  Typically, the biggest difference between film and stage musicals is the use of lavish background scenery and locations that would be impractical in a theater. Musical films characteristically contain elements reminiscent of theater with performers often treating their song and dance numbers as if there is a live audience watching, especially when the performer looks directly into the camera.  Many 'classic' Musicals we know today are because we have seen the film version.

 

The 1980s saw the influence of European 'mega-musicals', or 'pop operas'. These typically featured a pop-influenced score, had large casts and sets, and were identified by their notable effects – a falling chandelier (The Phantom of the Opera), a helicopter landing on stage (Miss Saigon) – and big budgets. Furthermore, many of these mega-musicals were based on novels or other works of literature. The most important writers of mega-musicals include the French team of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, responsible for Les Misérables, and the British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, responsible for Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Evita.

 

Within Musical theatre, the story and emotional content - humor, pathos, love, anger - are communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Although musical theatre overlaps with other theatrical forms, like opera, it may be distinguished by the use of mostly spoken dialogue and popular music.