Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 241
Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta, The Pirates
of Penzance, is as popular today as when it
premiered—in New York of all places—in 1879,
and with its brilliantly witty lyrics (Gilbert) and
lovely tunes (Sullivan), it has never stopped
being performed by schools, colleges,
community and regional theatres around
the world (here, with Opera Australia) along
with the occasional Broadway revival.
© Keith Saunders/ArenaPal/The Image Works
as well as those of his contemporaries, ended with fullstage
company dances.
In the seventeenth century, English dramatist Ben
Jonson wrote musical masques (dance-dramas) for the
court of King James I, and in France, Molière wrote
comédie ballets for King Louis XIV. Each of the five acts
of The Bourgeois Gentleman, for example, ends with a
fully orchestrated and choreographed mini-opera. And
virtually all major Asian dramatic forms involve singing,
dancing, and instrumental music—sometimes continuously
throughout the performance.
While spoken text predominates in modern Western
drama, singing and dancing make frequent appearances
there, too, certainly in the antirealistic theatre. Most of
the plays in Bertolt Brecht’s theatre of alienation involve
songs (his The Threepenny Opera, Happy End, and The
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny are fully orchestrated
musical works), and brief songs are included in the
texts of Samuel Beckett’s theatre of the absurd dramas
Waiting for Godot and Happy Days.
Musical theatre as a distinct genre, though, has gained
popularity over the last century in the American theatre.
Its creation was calculated—at first, anyway—to provoke
audience merriment. The original incarnation of
musical theatre absorbed elements of light opera, operetta
and ballet, and even more significantly nineteenthcentury
entertainments such as England’s music hall
acts and America’s minstrel and variety shows. Today’s
American musical theatre has become its own unique—
and immensely popular—form that brings to the stage a
sense of exciting entertainment with a truly global commercial
appeal.
Nowhere is that commercial and entertainment success
better known than in the Broadway district in
New York, which remains the international capital of the
world’s musical theatre—although London, Toronto, and