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Performers compete for a musical theatre role in the BBC's 'Any Dream Will Do'

These are all held together by the plot.

Musicals are usually performed in theatres, most famously on Broadway and in the West End of London. Broadway is also used as a general term to refer to American musicals.

Every musical has a:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the Ziegfeld Follies Broadway shows. For the film, see Ziegfeld Follies (film).

Promotional artwork for 1912 Ziegfeld Follies

Sheet music for a song from the 1919 Ziegfeld Follies

Mlle. Dazie 1908

The Ziegfeld Follies was a series of elaborate theatrical revue productions on Broadway in New York City from 1907 through 1931, with renewals in 1934 and 1936. They became a radio program in 1932 and 1936 as The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air.

The "Tableau vivants" were designed by Ben Ali Haggin from 1917 to 1925. Joseph Urban was the scenic designer for the Follies shows starting in 1915.^[4]

New Amsterdam Theatre, New York

In 1937, at the 9th Academy Awards, the MGM film, The Great Ziegfeld produced the previous year won the Best Picture, starring William Powell as the master showman and co-starring Myrna Loy (as Ziegfeld's second wife Billie Burke), Luise Rainer (as Anna Held, which won her an Academy Award for Best Actress), and Frank Morgan. Featuring numbers by Ray Bolger, Dennis Morgan, Virginia Bruce, and Harriet Hoctor, the film gave a glimpse into what the Follies were really like. The MGM blockbuster's show-stopper was the Irving Berlin-composed, A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody", which, by itself, cost more to produce than one of Ziegfeld's entire stage shows.

The Ziegfeld Follies were also famous for their display of many beautiful chorus girls, commonly known as Ziegfeld girls who "paraded up and down flights of stairs as anything from birds to battleships."^[3] They usually wore elaborate costumes by designers such as Erté, Lady Duff Gordon and Ben Ali Haggin.

 

 

 

 

 

Within these two formats, different song types can be found including:

Although most musicals use dialogue some are through-composed. There is little or no dialogue, nearly everything is sung.

Many show songs use verse and chorus form.

The chorus:

The verse usually has different words with each repetition.

 

 

 

 

Thomas D. Rice from sheet music cover of "Sich a Getting Up Stairs", 1830s

Minstrel shows were popular before slavery was abolished, sufficiently so that Frederick Douglass described blackface performers as "...the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens." Although white theatrical portrayals of black characters date back to as early as 1604, the minstrel show as such has later origins. By the late 18th century, blackface characters began appearing on the American stage, usually as "servant" types whose roles did little more than provide some element of comic relief.