1. A History of the Musical
Intro clip featuring
Julie Andrews/Carol Burnett

2. musical (noun):
a stage, television or film production utilizing popular-style songs - dialogue optional - to either tell a story (book musicals) or showcase the talents of the writers and/or performers (revues)

3. Book musicals have gone by many names:
Comic operas -- a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature with some of the text spoken, usually with a happy ending also Opera bouffe or Opera buffa (Italian)
Operettas -- Light-hearted musical entertainment containing dance, spoken dialogue, practical jokes, and mistaken identities. Operettas were especially popular in the late 19th century.

4. Book musicals (cont.)
Burlesque -- a humorous theatrical entertainment involving parody and sometimes grotesque exaggeration. In 20th century America, the form became associated with a variety show in which striptease is the chief attraction
Burletta -- (Italian, meaning little joke), also sometimes burla or burlettina, is a musical term generally denoting a brief comic Italian (or, later, English) opera.

5. Book musicals (cont.) Extravaganza Musical comedy
a literary or musical work (often musical theatre) characterized by freedom of style and structure and usually containing elements of burlesque, pantomime, music hall and parody
sometimes also has elements of cabaret, circus, revue, variety, vaudeville and mime
Musical comedy
chief form of popular musical theatre in the English- speaking world
developed from comic opera and burlesque in London in the late 19th century and reached its most durable form in the 1920s and 30s, particularly in the USA.

6. Revues Vaudeville Music Halls
theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada
early 1880s until the early 1930s
made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill
Music Halls
British theatrical entertainment
popular between 1850 and 1960.
variety entertainment involving a mixture of popular song, comedy and specialty acts.

7. Revues (cont.) Minstrel Shows
American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music,
performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface.

8. Middle Ages Europe 12th and 13th centuries
traveling minstrels and roving troupes of performers that offered popular songs and slapstick comedy
12th and 13th centuries
religious dramas, such as The Play of Herod and The Play of Daniel
Intended as liturgical teaching tools set to church chants, these plays developed into an autonomous form of musical theatre.

9. Renaissance
Commedia dell'arte, an Italian tradition where raucous clown characters improvised their way through familiar stories.
Clowns included Harlequin, Pulcinella and Scaramouche (personas that became basic elements in Western stage comedy for centuries to come).

10. 1700s
Two forms of musical theater were common in Britain, France and Germany
Ballad operas like John Gay's The Beggars Opera (1728) that borrowed popular songs of the day and rewrote the lyrics
Comic operas, with original scores and mostly romantic plot lines, like Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl (1845).  

11. American Musical Flora Burlesque
The first musical production in the Colonies
February 8, 1735
A ballad opera imported from England.
Burlesque
Became popular after the Colonies had become a nation (1776)
Included parodies of famous plays, performers or dancers--in song, dance, pantomime and dialogue.

12. The Black Crook
Prototype of modern “book musical” – was an extravaganza
Produced in New York in 1866 (toured, total of 474 performances)
The most successful theatrical production in America up to that time
Written by Americans
Included elements identifying American musical comedy: chorus girls, ornate production numbers, elaborate costuming, songs provocative with sexual innuendos, large dance numbers etc.

13.
American stage was flooded with foreign operettas (i.e. Gilbert & Sullivan)
American composers and librettists imitated this style
The first successful American-written operetta--Willard Spencer's The Little Tycoon in 1886

14. The Pirates of Penzance (1879)
Gilbert and Sullivan
Partnership of librettist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900).
Collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896
The Mikado (1885)
H.M.S. Pinafore (1878)
Chipmunks