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16th Century: Pantomime

Pantomime, or panto, is a musical comedy that was designed for family entertainment. It was originally developed in England and was performed throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland, most often during the Christmas and New Year season. Modern pantomime productions include songs, gags, slapstick comedy, and dance and utilizes gender-crossing and topical humor to tell well-known fairytales and folk tales. Pantomime is participatory and encourages audiences to sing along and shout out throughout the show. Through created in the middle ages as a breakout of 16th century com media dell’arte, pantomime continues as a popular form of theater today with Scottish comedian Craig Fergurson describing it as a combination of “Mamma Mia! featuring the Three Stooges but with everyones back catalogue, not just ABBAs, and furthermore including audience participation reminiscent of showings of the film The Rocky Horror Picture Show” in his 2020 memoir.

MC

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In 18th century Italy, a Burletta was a small comedic operatic performance played between the main acts of the performance. In Italian the word literally means little joke, and served as a comedic relief during the classically bloody Italian Operas. In the 1760's in England, the term Burletta was used to describe a play mocking and satirizing Opera without musical parody.

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The Beggar's Opera (1728), composed by John Gay, marks the first great success of the ballad opera format in England, making satirical comments on the politics and society of the time. This work laid the groundwork for the development of musical theatre by blending spoken dialogue with songs.

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Genre of light or comic opera, which is a dramatic performance that has singing in addition to spoken elements and dancing. The operetta was created as an alternative to the more serious form of Opera, opéra comique. The term first appeared in mid-18th century Italy, but it was first acknowledged as a musical/theatrical genre in Paris, 1850.

Notable composers:

Hervé (1825-1892) - wrote the one act opérette L'Ours.

Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) responsible for making the operetta popular. He opened a theater company, and it became very successful. So much so that it changed the duration of these shows from sketches to full length evening productions. Offenbach encountered some trouble with the police over the form of his operettas. He wrote Orphée aux enfers

La Belle Hélène - She used greek mythology as a theatrical mirror for life in Paris.

-By Aviva and Lucy

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- English equivalent to Vaudeville

-They were a cultural phenomenon of the Victorian era

-Found its roots in taverns and coffee houses that offered entertainment for its patrons

-Connections to modern dinner theatre

-Music hall theaters dedicated to only entertainment came around the 1850s

-Acts included gymnastics, acrobatics, singing, and dancing

-English Music Hall performances were highly affordable for the emerging working class in the context of the Industrial Revolution

-These halls were often raucous, rowdy, and laid back

-At they’re height, there were around 375 music halls operating in the greater London area

-The music halls hosted charity events for WWI

-The music halls would eventually be forced to close with the development of the film industry as the public’s favored form of entertainment

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Charles M. Barras was an American actor and playwright born in 1826, best known for writing The Black Crook, a melodrama that was adapted onto the Broadway stage as the first popular piece that conformed to the modern musical format. It opened to great success, earning Barras around $250,000 (about $5,000,000 today) and ran for a record-breaking 474 performances.

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1870- 1885: Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart

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1870- 1885: Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart

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Edward Harrigan was born in New York City in 1844. He began his career in minstrel shows, writing and performing in skits that appealed to immigrants and the working class. Around 1870 he partnered with Tony Hart. Born Anthony Cannon (1855), Tony Hart was an Irish-American singer and actor. He was much smaller than average and became known for playing the female parts in the Harrigan and Hart plays. Their most notable work was the "The Mulligan Series" as series of plays that featured not only music, but a recurring cast of characters, similar to the modern sitcom. Notably, Harrigan and Hart became known for not only incorporating music into their plays, but using the music to advance the story- a defining characteristic of the contemporary musical.

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1871-1898: W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

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1871-1898: W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

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William Shewenck Gilbert, born November 18th, 1836, in Southampton, London, was an English playwright and humorist best known for his collaboration with Arthur Sullivan in comic operas. Gilbert is outstanding not only because of his gift for handling words and casting them in musical shapes but also because, through his words, he offered the composer opportunities for burlesquing musical conventions.

Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) was born in London, England and was a composer who, with W.S. Gilbert, established the English form of operetta.

Sullivan was known for his resourcefulness and work in parody.

Sullivan’s first operetta was the Contrabandista but the first work that he collaborated with Gilbert on was Thespis (1871) and was not very successful.

It wasn’t until 1875 that the two collaborated again on Trial by Jury which was very popular and ran for more than a year.

The Comedy Opera Company was formed by Carte with the goal of presenting many more full length operettas by the two men.

-Lyla and Emma

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1880's - Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, PG Wodehouse

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1880's - Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, PG Wodehouse

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Jerome Kern was born in New York City in 1885 and worked as a composer of musical theatre and Hollywood film.  His most notable innovation in music was employing melody to further the plot or develop characterizations, which was new at the time. He would join the Princess Theatre and worked with numerous lyricists, including Wodehouse and Bolton.

Guy Bolton was born in England in 1884. He was an Anglo-American playwright who specialized in musical comedies. He is best known for his collaborations with PG Wodehouse and composer Jerome Kern. Instead of traditional operatic musical productions popular in Europe, Bolton and his buddies wrote smaller shows that often told witty stories.

PG Wodehouse was born in Guildford, England in 1881 and is iconic for his humorist writing in novels, plays, and short stories. As a friend of Kern, he was introduced to Bolton and the three worked together on various successful shows.

Kern, Bolton, and Wodehouse are famous for their transformative approach to musicals nicknamed “Princess Musicals” after the less than 300 seat Princess Theatre. Their most known works consist of Have a Heart, Oh, Boy!, Leave It to Jane, Oh, Lady! Lady!!, and Sitting Pretty.

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Franz Lehar (born 4/30/1870-died 10/24/1948) was a Hungarian Composer and Conductor most known for most his operetta The Merry Widow. He studied at the Prague Conservatory where he received mentorship from Antonín Dvořák. He is credited with creating a new style of Viennese operetta, introducing waltz tunes and imitations of the Parisian cancan dances as well as a certain satirical element. His notable works include: The Man with Three Wives (1908), The Count of Luxembourg (1909), Gypsy Love (1910), and The Land of Smiles (1923), and Giuditta (1934)

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George M. Cohan was born in July 3, 1878. He wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan began writing original skits (over 150 of them) and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy". From 1904 to 1920, Cohan created and produced over 50 musicals, plays and revues on Broadway together with his friend Sam H. Harris. Aside from the plays Cohan wrote or composed, he produced with Harris, among others, many of which were adapted for film, It Pays to Advertise (1914) and the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year. His shows ran simultaneously in as many as five theatres. One of Cohan's most innovative plays was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, which baffled some audiences and critics but became a hit. Cohan further adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was adapted for film six more times, as well as for TV and radio.

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Florenz Ziegfield Jr. was an American Broadway producer and director. He created the musical revues known as the Ziegfield Follies. Ziegfield was born in Chicago and learned about music from his father who ran the Chicago Musical College. After traveling to England and meeting Polish singer Anna Held, he began working with her to create his first revue. Held became the first singer Ziegfield would direct to fame. His Follies developed a distinct style of having a cast full of talented young women in elaborate costumes. The musical Funny Girl is based off the life of Fanny Brice, a performer in the Ziegfield Follies. Ziegfield's revues featured music from composers like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. Ziegfield ended his career by producing his only "typical" musical in 1932 before going bankrupt during the Great Depression.

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Rogers and Hammerstein were a famous composer-lyricist duo that helped define modern American musicals. Their first musical was Oklahoma! in 1943. They also created Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and the Sound of Music.

Richard Rogers was born in June 28, 1902 and started his career writing musicals with Lorenz Hart in Broadway and London, but temporarily worked in Hollywood during the Depression. When Hart declined in health, Rogers started working with Hammerstein. Rogers was the first entertainer to win an EGOT, and he died in 1979.

Oscar Hammerstein was born July 12, 1895. He quit law school to pursue theater and worked with Frank Mandel to create operas. He is known as an experimental playwright, and changed the musical genre by putting focus on characters and stories, rather than light entertainment.

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"West Side Story" (1957), with music by Leonard Bernstein and book by Arthur Laurents, revolutionizes musical theatre with its serious approach to storytelling and integration of music, dance, and script, reflecting the social issues of the era.

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"Hair" (1968), the American tribal love-rock musical, breaks new ground by engaging with the counter-culture and civil rights movements, showcasing the power of musical theatre to comment on contemporary society and politics.

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The British invasion of musical theatre begins with "Cats" (1981), composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It introduces a new era of spectacle and technical innovation in musical theatre, making it one of the longest-running shows in both London and Broadway history.

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"Les Misérables" (1985), also from Andrew Lloyd Webber, transforms musical theatre with its epic scale and complex narratives, drawing from historical events to create a powerful and emotionally engaging spectacle.

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"Hamilton" (2015), created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, marks a revolutionary moment in musical theatre history, blending hip-hop, R&B, and traditional show tunes to tell the story of American founding father Alexander Hamilton, appealing to a new generation of audiences.

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This musical is happening at Pomona April 25-27th or something.