Themes and Approaches

Abstract

Musical comedy is often understood as a phase in the development of musical theatre. It takes position after ballad opera, burlesque, vaudeville, the minstrel show and, in some accounts, operetta and revue as a stage in what many see as the ‘maturation’ of musical theatre. In this teleology the musical is formed by an aesthetic process that reaches a climax, if not an ‘end’, with the great ‘book’ musicals, or musical plays, in the tradition of Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma (1942), South Pacific (1949) and West Side Story (1957). These are the shows characterized by their ‘unprecedented integration of song and story’ and also by their capacity to extend well beyond the signifying range of ‘light’ and comic musical theatre.1 Very different from the hotchpotch assemblage of song, dance and sketches that typified the early musical stage, they are the master texts of musical theatre often recognized as the grand accomplishment of what the form had been promising since the earlier Golden Age of Gilbert and Sullivan and the Viennese operettas of Johann Strauss. Indeed, they have been seen as nothing less than confirmation of modernity’s capacity to produce a genuinely ‘serious’ popular art form. Whatever doubts might be expressed about the versions of musical theatre that followed – the ‘concept’, ‘rock’ and ‘mega’ musicals sometimes presented as postmodern pastiches or hybrid versions of the ‘real’ thing – these great book musicals, although originally very much part of the culture industry and without exception huge commercial successes, are now rescued from the ephemeral and securely positioned as part of the canon. Often revived by national theatres and supported by subsidy, this one-time ‘popular’ culture is now routinely considered ‘highbrow’. In some accounts it possesses a status to rival that of opera and indeed is sometimes understood, quite misleadingly, as a species of opera.2KeywordsPopular CultureCultural FormDepartment StoreModern CultureCulture IndustryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.