If an opera is defined as a stage work with sung dialogue, one may wonder why stage musicals do not fall under the opera category. The line between opera and musical, in fact, is not always easy to draw; George Gershwin was adamant about placing Porgy and Bess in the former category, but presenters have sometimes treated it otherwise. (read more)

If an opera is defined as a stage work with sung dialogue, one may wonder why stage musicals do not fall under the opera category. The line between opera and musical, in fact, is not always easy to draw; George Gershwin was adamant about placing Porgy and Bess in the former category, but presenters have sometimes treated it otherwise. Still, we can observe that the musical is primarily an American form, even if it showed clear evidence of influence from European operetta. Unlike most operas, musicals usually feature spoken dialogue; its songs are set pieces rather than advances in the action. Much more than most twentieth-century operas, musicals make use of popular styles; in fact, during their golden age in the first half of the twentieth century, musicals served partly as vehicles for popular songs. The musical grew as two streams converged: operetta with its old-world romance, and vaudeville with its zippy comedy and thoroughly popular roots. From the former tradition came such works as Irish-born Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta and Hungarian-American Sigmund Romberg's The Student Prince, while the figure who effectively unified vaudeville and other earlier stage forms in cohesive stage musicals was George M. Cohan, the composer of "The Yankee Doodle Boy" (better known as "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" and originally part of a show called Little Johnny Jones) and the World War I anthem "Over There." Perhaps the composer who brought the two streams together was Jerome Kern, whose Show Boat (1927) told a story of riverboat gamblers and interracial romance through a score that was a virtual compendium of American song types; its most famous number, "Ol' Man River," is a quasi-African-American spiritual. Though George Gershwin had classical ambitions that showed themselves in the instrumental Rhapsody in Blue and later in Porgy and Bess, it was his jazz-tinged musicals, co-written with his brother Ira, that ruled the stage in the 1920s and early 1930s. Girl Crazy (1930) contained two of Gershwin's most subtly syncopated songs, "Embraceable You" and "I Got Rhythm. Irving Berlin, born Israel Baline in a small Russian village, was more associated with the revue, a song-and-dance extravaganza, than with the full-length musical although Annie Get Your Gun (1945, containing such evergreen numbers as "There's No Business Like Show Business" and "Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)") was a major contribution. Berlin's hits of the 1910s and 1920s, like "Blue Skies" and "Easter Parade," were mostly written for revues. The prime creators of musical stage hits in the 1940s and 1950s were the composer-lyricist pair of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, whose wartime hit Oklahoma! was populated by lovable American archetypes. The flipside of that work among the Rodgers and Hammerstein oeuvre was Carousel, with its theme of spousal abuse and its grim plot component of suicide. As the musical began to lose its overall popularity to movies, television, and rock and roll, the serious and the experimental came to the fore. West Side Story (1961), with music by Leonard Bernstein and text by Stephen Sondheim, adapted Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to the world of New York's street gangs. Probably the best-loved musical theater composer of the last third of the century was Britain's Andrew Lloyd Webber, who showed a knack for transforming unorthodox ideas into popular successes in works such as Jesus Christ Superstar and Cats.(collapse)