Musical Theatre

1. Musical Theatre An American Tradition

2. The American Musical • First plays set to music in 1920s with George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and others • Called Musical Comedies • Featured a slightly silly story, plenty of tuneful melodies and chorus of dancers • In 1927, Showboat by Jerome Kern changed everything • Dealt with serious subject matters (racism, spousal abuse and abandonment) • Tied songs into the plot of the play as a way of telling the story

3. Famous Composers • Musicals are not referred to by their author but by their composer • Famous Composers of Musicals are: • Gilbert and Sullivan • Rodgers and Hammerstein • Andrew Lloyd Webber • Stephen Sondheim • Stephen Schwartz

4. Rodgers and Hammerstein • Richard Rodgers (1902 – 1979) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895 – 1960) were a well-known American songwriting duo, usually referred to as Rodgers and Hammerstein. • They are most famous for creating a string of immensely popular Broadway musicals in the 1940s and 1950s, during what is considered the golden age of the medium. • They first began writing together as students at Columbia University, where they met working on the Varsity Show.

5. In Oklahoma territory in 1906, cowboy Curly McLain looks forward to the beautiful day ahead as he wanders into Laurey Williams's yard. There will be a box social dance that night, which includes an auction of lunch baskets prepared by the local girls (to raise funds for a schoolhouse). The man who wins each lunch basket will eat the lunch with the girl who prepared it. Curly asks Laurey to go with him, but she refuses. The sinister and dark-hearted farm hand Jud Fry has set his sights on Laurey and asks her to the dance. She accepts to spite Curly, despite being afraid of Jud. At the social, the menfolk join in an upbeat barn dance. Jud confronts Laurey about his feelings for her. When she admits that she doesn't return them, he threatens her. She then fires him as her farm hand, screaming at him to get off of her property. Jud furiously threatens Laurey before he departs. Laurey bursts into tears and calls for Curly. She tells him that she has fired Jud and is frightened by what Jud might do now. Curly, seeing that she has turned to him for guidance and safety, reassures her and proposes to her, and she accepts Three weeks later, a drunken Jud reappears the morning after Curly and Laurey's wedding. He attacks Curly with a knife. As Curly dodges a blow, Jud falls on his own knife and dies on the spot. At Aunt Eller's urging, the wedding guests hold a makeshift trial for Curly. The judge, Ado Annie's father, declares the verdict: "not guilty!" and everyone rejoices Oklahoma! (1943)

6. The King and I (1951) • Mrs. Anna Leonowens and her son Louis arrive in Bangkok, where she has contracted to teach English to the children of the royal household. She threatens to leave when the house she had been promised is not available, but falls in love with the children. • A new slave, a gift of a vassal king, translates "Uncle Tom's Cabin" into a Siamese ballet, expressing her unhappiness at being with the King. She attempts to escape with her lover. • Anna and the King fall in love, but her British upbringing inhibits her from joining his harem. She is just about to leave Siam when she hears of the King's imminent death, and returns to help his son, her favorite pupil, rule his people.

7. The Sound of Music (1959) • In 1930's Austria, a young woman named Maria is failing miserably in her attempts to become a nun. When the Navy captain Georg Von Trapp writes to the convent asking for a governess that can handle his seven mischievous children, Maria is given the job. The Captain's wife is dead, and he is often away, and runs the household as strictly as he does the ships he sails on. • The children are unhappy and resentful of the governesses that their father keeps hiring, and have managed to run each of them off one by one. When Maria arrives, she is initially met with the same hostility, but her kindness, understanding, and sense of fun soon draws them to her and brings some much-needed joy into all their lives--including the Captain's. • Eventually he and Maria find themselves falling in love, even though Georg is already engaged to a Baroness and Maria is still a postulant. The romance makes them both start questioning the decisions they have made. • Their personal conflicts soon become overshadowed, however, by world events. Austria is about to come under the control of Germany, and the Captain may soon find himself drafted into the German navy and forced to fight against his own country.

8. Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber • Born 22 March 1948 • Lloyd Webber began writing his own music at a young age. • He wrote his first published suite of six pieces at the age of nine. He also put on "productions" with brother Julian and his aunt Viola in his toy theatre • Knighted in 1992

9. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968) • The story is based on the Biblical story of Joseph in Egypt, found in the book of Genesis. It is set in a frame in which a narrator is telling a story to children, encouraging them to dream. She then tells the story of Joseph, another dreamer.

10. Evita (1976) • Based on the life of Argentine political leader Eva Perón, the second wife of Argentinean president Juan Perón. The story follows Evita's early life, acting career, rise to power, charity work, feminist involvement and eventual death.

11. Cats (1981) • Based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. • The cats gather on stage and explain the Jellicle tribe and their purpose. The cats spot the human audience and explain how the different cats of the tribe are named. This is followed by a dance from Victoria the White Cat that signals the beginning of the Jellicle Ball and Munkustrap tells us that tonight is the night when Old Deuteronomy will choose a cat to be reborn into a new life on the Heaviside Layer.

12. The Phantom of the Opera (1986) • Tells the story of a chorus girl, Christine, in Paris’s Opera house, who is trained to sing by a mysterious phantom who torments the theater. • The Phantom is in love with Christine but she falls in love with her childhood sweetheart and must choose between the man she loves and the man who inspired her to sing.

13. Stephen Sondheim • Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born March 22, 1930 in New York City • In 1940, his parents divorced and he moved to Pennsylvania with his mother, making friends with his neighbor Oscar Hammerstein • His first “musical” was written in 1945 in high school called By George • He went to college to major in mathematics and during his summer vacation in 1947, became a gopher on the set of Rodgers' and Hammerstein's Allegro • In 1956, he is chosen to write the lyrics for West Side Story with music by Leonard Bernstein

14. West Side Story (1957) • Based on William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet • Set in Manhattan's West Side in the mid-1950s, the musical explores the rivalry between two teenage gangs of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds (the "American" Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks). • The young protagonist, Anton ("Tony"), who belongs to the White gang, falls in love with Maria, the sister of the leader of the rival Puerto Rican gang. • In the end, Tony is killed by Chino and Maria puts an end to the gang’s violence. She goes to shoot herself but can’t pull the trigger and lives.

15. Gypsy (1959) • Rose and her two daughters, Baby June and Louise, play the vaudeville circuit around the United States during the Great Depression. Rose, the archetype of a stage mother, is aggressive and domineering, pushing her children to perform. • While June is an extroverted, talented child star, the older girl, Louise, is shy. The kiddie act has one song, "Let Me Entertain You", that they sing over and over again, with June always as the center-piece and Louise often as one of the "boys". Rose has big dreams for the girls but encounters setbacks • As the girls grow up, June, now billed as Dainty June, tires of life on the road and her mother's smothering pushiness, and she runs away with one of the boys in the act. Rose optimistically vows that she will make Louise a star • Louise grows into a young woman, and Rose has built a pale imitation of the Dainty June Act for her. With no vaudeville venues left, Louise and her second rate act wind up at a burlesque house in Wichita, Kansas. Rose is anguished, as she sees what a booking in burlesque means to her dreams of success. • Ultimately, Louise becomes a major burlesque star and does not need her mother any longer. Rose, sad and feeling useless, asks "Why did I do it? When is it my turn?" She fantasizes about her own lit up runway and cheering audience, but finally admits "I did it for me." Mother and daughter tentatively step toward reconciliation in the end.

16. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) • it tells the bawdy story of a slave named Pseudolus and his attempts to win his freedom by helping his young master woo the girl next door. The plot displays many classic elements of farce, including puns, a two-tiered set with many doors, cases of mistaken identity (frequently involving characters disguising themselves as one another), and satirical comments on social class. • The musical centers around the denizens of three adjacent houses in ancient Rome. In the center is the house of Senex, who lives there with wife Domina, son Hero and several slaves, including head slave Hysterium and the musical's main character Pseudolus, who wishes to buy, win, or steal his freedom. He is the slave of young Hero, son of Senex and Domina. One of the neighboring houses is owned by Marcus Lycus, who is a buyer and seller of beautiful women; the other belongs to the ancient Erronius, who is abroad searching for his long-lost children (stolen in infancy by pirates).

17. Sweeny Todd (1979) • In the play, Sweeny Todd was known as Benjamin Barker, a middle class barber, married to Lucy Barker with an infant daughter Johanna. The villainous Judge Turpin exiles Barker to Australia on false charges in order to have Lucy to himself. Mrs. Lovett tells Todd that Lucy poisoned herself after Turpin raped her, and that Turpin adopted baby Johanna as his ward. By the time Todd returns to London, Johanna has become a young woman and falls in love with a sailor, Anthony, with whom she plans to elope. • Mrs. Lovett takes in an orphan boy, Tobias Ragg, after Sweeney kills Toby's previous guardian, (a former assistant of Todd who tries to blackmail him). After Turpin escapes his grasp, Todd swears revenge upon the entire world, resolving to kill as many people as he can; Mrs. Lovett then suggests they turn his victims' remains into pies. With this plan in action, both Todd and Mrs. Lovett become incredibly successful. • In the musical's climactic scene, Todd finally kills Judge Turpin, as well as an insane beggar woman — who turns out to be none other than Lucy, Todd's long-lost wife. When Mrs. Lovett confesses that she hid Lucy's identity in order to have Todd to herself, he throws her into a furnace to burn to death. As he grieves over his wife's body, Toby — who wants revenge for the murder of the only mother he's ever known — sneaks up behind him. Todd lifts his head, willingly allowing Toby to slit his throat. He dies with his wife's body in his arms.

18. Into the Woods (1987) • The musical intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm fairy tales and follows them further to explore the consequences of the characters' wishes and quests. The main characters are taken from the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella, tied together by a more original story involving a Baker and his wife and their quest to begin a family, most likely taken from the original story of Rapunzel by the Brothers Grimm. It also includes references to several other well-known tales.

19. Stephan Schwartz • Born March 6, 1948 in New York City and grew up in the area of Williston Park, where he attended Mineola High School. • He studied piano and composition at the Juilliard School of Music while in high school and graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1968 with a B.F.A. in Drama.

20. Godspell (1971) • The structure of the musical is that of a series of parables, taken primarily from the Gospel of Matthew. These are then interspersed with a variety of modern music set primarily to lyrics from traditional hymns, with the passion of Christ treated briefly near the end of performance.

21. Wicked (2003) • Wicked tells the story of Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West and her relationship with Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. • Their friendship struggles through their opposing personalities and viewpoints, rivalry over the same love-interest, their reactions to the Wizard's corrupt government, and, ultimately, Elphaba's public fall from grace. • The plot is set mostly before Dorothy's arrival from Kansas, and includes several references to well-known scenes and dialogue in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz as a backstory.

22. Other Famous Musicals • Annie Get Your Gun (1946) by Irving Berlin • Kiss Me Kate (1948) by Cole Porter • Guys and Dolls (1950) by Frank Loesser • My Fair Lady (1956) by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe • Hello, Dolly (1964) by Jerry Herman • Fiddler on the Roof (1964) by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick • A Chorus Line (1975) by Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban