Musical and Popular Theatre
Musical and popular theatre cover forms that join drama with music, song, and spectacle—the musical, operetta, variety, melodrama, vaudeville, and other commercially popular entertainments.
Definition
The study of theatrical forms combining drama with music, song, and spectacle, and of commercially popular theatre more broadly.
Scope
This topic studies theatrical forms in which music and popular appeal are central: the Broadway and West End musical and its history, operetta and the integrated book musical, and earlier and adjacent popular forms such as melodrama, burlesque, vaudeville, music hall, and revue. It examines their conventions, their relationship to commerce and mass audiences, and their long marginalization in scholarship that privileged literary drama.
Core questions
- How did the modern musical develop and integrate song, dance, and story?
- What conventions distinguish musical and popular theatre forms?
- How do commerce and mass audiences shape popular theatre?
- Why was popular theatre long neglected by scholarship?
Key concepts
- the musical
- operetta
- integrated book musical
- melodrama
- vaudeville and music hall
- popular entertainment
Key theories
- The musical and cultural identity
- Raymond Knapp's argument that the American musical has served as a key site for articulating and contesting national identity, reading musicals as cultural as well as entertainment works.
- Rereading popular theatre history
- Jacky Bratton's case for taking popular and commercial theatre seriously as historical subjects, challenging the literary bias that long marginalized melodrama, music hall, and related forms.
History
Popular musical entertainment runs from ballad opera and nineteenth-century melodrama, operetta, music hall, and vaudeville to the rise of the integrated American book musical in the twentieth century, exemplified by Rodgers and Hammerstein and elaborated by later composers; once dismissed as mere entertainment, these forms are now studied as major cultural and theatrical phenomena.
Debates
- Art versus entertainment
- Scholars debate whether commercially popular forms such as the musical and melodrama merit the same critical attention as literary drama, challenging long-standing hierarchies of theatrical value.
Key figures
- Raymond Knapp
- John Kenrick
- Jacky Bratton
Related topics
Seminal works
- knapp2005
- kenrick2008
- bratton2003
Frequently asked questions
- What is an 'integrated' musical?
- An integrated musical is one in which songs and dances advance the plot and develop character rather than functioning as detachable numbers, a model strongly associated with Rodgers and Hammerstein's mid-twentieth-century works.
- Why was popular theatre neglected in scholarship?
- Academic theatre study long privileged literary playwrights and high art, treating commercial and musical forms as mere entertainment; recent scholarship has reversed this, studying popular theatre as culturally significant.