Cultural Characteristics Of Musical Theater

During this period, musicals (which were labeled “musical comedies” at the time) were in the form of acceptable of guilty pleasures - the appeal of women and their sexuality, silly characters that made fools of themselves, or the goofy country girl dancing through the chores of the day. Ziegfeld’s Follies, Marx brother shows, and Al Jolson playing his character in blackface are great examples of these shows that focused on showing off the stars and gave little care to the

What is the background of this art form? (where does it originate from? What important political, cultural and/or environmental things were occurring in this part of the world that would affected the creation of this art form?)

Theatre and Musical Theatre has been a form of entertainment since before North America was “discovered”. Broadway shows have been dated back to the early 1920’s and 1930’s. By 2016, over 25,000 tickets are sold to Broadway shows in a week. Thousands of people enjoy the shows that are featured on Broadway but have no idea the work and process that brought it to life. The process of getting a show on to Broadway can be broken down into three phases: pre-production, staging, and performance/promotion.

Minstrelsy is an American acting performance show, popular from the early 19th to the early 20th century, that was created on the amusing representation of racial stereotypes of African Americans. Minstrel performers were white males who painted their faces black and performed. Minstrelsy in America, started off as something humorous and quickly exploded into popularity, as a form of musical theater entertainment that depicted African Americans stereotypes, during the 19th and 20th century in a degrading way. Nevertheless, the portrayals of African Americans in minstrel performances were degrading and badly portrayed. Jim Crow became the main minstrel character in performances and a term for laws used to oppress African Americans in the year’s minstrelsy came

Vaudeville, the forgotten type of theatre. During the mid-1800’s, people from across the world were starting to settle in the United States. The newly found ‘spike’ of the diversity of cultures and population, vaudeville quickly became the central point for the American cultural life.

Broadway Theater is a form of entertainment that has been around since the mid 1700s beginning with operas and skits, progressing to modern musicals that we still enjoy today. Most scholars believe that 1866 marked the beginning of musical comedy, bringing the theater out of the era of skits and operas. Today's musicals still contain elements of these first musical comedies Before we get to that however, let's start with the beginning of Broadway... II

Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America and M. Alison Kibler’s Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville explore and question how various forms of art became stratified and a hierarchy developed between the art and the audience. The specific chapters assigned from these texts confront various forms of art and entertainment presented to audiences during the nineteenth century in American variety, or Vaudeville, theaters and traveling theatrical troupes. What they both discuss is a period of time when people from all classes, though not always different races or ethnicities, attended the same theater and watched performances that contained Shakespeare, classical and opera music.

In the 1840’s, minstrel shows were developed from the European traditions of masks and carnival (Guarnino and Oliver). The blackface phenomenon was known as the white and African Americans performers dressed up wearing black masks (Guarnino and Oliver). They would impersonate the African American dance forms; minstrel shows were the “…First emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture” as well as the heart of the nineteenth century (Guarnino and Oliver). Vaudeville was first a

The very first musical production in the colonies was Flora. Performed in a courtroom in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 8,1735, it was an england imported ballad opera, that stayed in high demand in the Colonies for decades. When the colonies became a nation,a new type of stage production began getting popular the burlesque. Burlesque was made up of travesties on or parodies of famous plays,performers or dancers--in songs,dance,pantomime,and dialogue. Hamlet was considered one of the earliest form of burlesque. La Mosquitas in or about 1838, satirized the celebrated Viennese dancer, Fanny Elssler, in her performance in Tarantella. Burlesque were for the most part foreign imports that crowded New York’s stages just before and right after the Civil

The term Burlesque is usually thought of as slightly naughty theatre produced and performed between the 1890s and World War II. Webster defines it as a literary or dramatic work that seeks to ridicule by means of grotesque exaggeration or comic imitation, mockery usually by caricature or theatrical entertainment of a broadly humorous often earthy character consisting of short turns, comic skits, and sometimes striptease acts. Today Burlesque has no meaning as a contemporary phenomenon to most Americans. Burlesque is far from the commonplace twentieth century definition. The background, rise and fall of American Burlesque takes place in less then forty years. The entertainment known as

Two great writers of American musical theatre, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, had one idea in common. They wanted to present to the American public a new and revolutionary musical that would stand out above the rest. They wanted to make an impact on the societies of the era. They wanted to be creative and do something that was considered rebellious. When they finally combined their ideas together they created an American masterpiece in musical theatre: Oklahoma!. It was the first Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration, starting the most successful creative partnership in the history of American musical theatre.

Through its dynamic directing and acting the show captured the audience and took us to the 1920s City of Chicago. All performs in the production were wearing costumes of black color and the style in the 1920s, along with a simple orchestra in the background, this made clear the setting in which the story takes place. The production is unlike others in that the whole production is made of many smaller simpler acts based of the theater genre called “vaudeville acts”.

Expanding on the popular traditions of vaudeville, burlesque and incorporating ideas from aspects of minstrel shows, musicals, presented as entertainment for the masses throughout the twentieth century, dramatized, reflected upon, and confronted society’s cultural attitudes and values. Many musicals address social issues and attempt to persuade the audience to think differently, or validate their existing ideals. Musicals both reflect the social aspects of history and provide the history itself, as a theatrical vehicle that intends to change, not just comment upon, the views of the times. Certain decades appeared to produce shows with little to no social significance, but even these shows prompt important questions regarding why

“It is the constant aim of the management to prevent the use of a single word, expression, or situation that will offend the intelligent, refined and cultured classes” (Stein 23). This is the motto of ‘Mr. Chase’s Original Idea: Polite Vaudeville,’ a then unheard of yet soon widely popular subcategory of vaudeville theater in the early 1900s until the 1930s. In many places and in many time periods in the world, it is found that theater is not only considered prominent in culture but is often integral. This can be seen especially in ancient Roman and Greek culture, as the combination of theater, music, and dance were significant.

English Renaissance theatre, also known as early modern ENGLISH THEATRE, Or as Elizabethan theatre, refers to the theatre of England between 1562 and 1642.