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The Ancient Greeks incorporated song and dance on stage.

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Saw two predecessors to musical theater:  commedia dell'arte, where raucous clowns improvised familiar stories, and later, opera buffa.

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Opera was born. It became incredibly fashionable with the upper class society of Europe.
We'll go into operas in detail later.

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New York's first-known professional musical production was a five performance run of John Gay's satirical British ballad opera The Beggar's Opera, at the Nassau Street Theatre.

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Around 1850, the French composer Hervé was experimenting with a form of comic musical theatre he called opérette.

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The first musical was The Black Crook by Charles M. Barrs and Giuseppe Operti which premiered in New York ran for a record breaking 474 performances. Keep in mind that this baby was five-and-a-half hours long!

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The first musical theatre piece to exceed 500 consecutive performances was the French operetta The Chimes of Normandy.

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In America, half of the population was in towns and cities, working jobs that left them with both extra money and leisure time.  In a world where film, and TV didn't exist yet, vaudeville shows filled the gap.

Vaudeville was also instrumental in bridging the social gap that had divided American audiences.

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Florenz Ziegfeld introduces the Ziegfield Follies. The Follies were a series of lavish revues, something between later Broadway shows and the more elaborate high class variety show. These shows were filled with what was known as Ziegfield Girls who were beautiful chorus girls dressed in lavish costumes.

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Saw the debut of Broadway composing legends Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the Gershwins. Their works are beloved and still put on today. Let's check out this clip from the latest revival of Cole Porter's Anything Goes.

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Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical, Oklahoma!, premiered on Broadway. This musical was one of the first to make every song and dance to develop the characters or the plot. Musical theater was heavily impacted by this and was never the same.

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The music of Broadway was the popular music of the western world. Every season brought a fresh crop of classic hit musicals that were eagerly awaited and celebrated by the general public. Great stories, told with memorable songs and dances were the order of the day, resulting in such unforgettable hits as The King and I, My Fair Lady, Gypsy and dozens more.

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Broadway turning out record setting hits (Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof). But as popular musical tastes shifted, the musical was left behind. The rock musical "happening" Hair (1968) was hailed as a landmark, but it ushered in a period of confusion in the musical theatre. We see this with the movie musical as well.

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Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince introduced the concept musical (A Little Night Music, Company). This is when a musical's book and score are structured around conveying a theme or message, rather than emphasizing a narrative plot. The concept musical peaked with A Chorus Line by Michael Bennett. By decade’s end, the battle line was drawn between serious new works (Sweeney Todd) and heavily commercialized British mega-musicals (Evita).

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Angela Lansbury "Sweeney Todd" Tony Awards

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We started seeing BIG, MEGA-MUSICALS like Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, and Les Miserables. One sight described these types of musicals as "light on intellectual content and heavy on special effects and marketing."

HOWEVER - Cats, Phantom and Les Mis are some of the longest running musicals in Broadway history.

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Moulin Rouge: The Musical won Best Musical at the Tony's.