{"id":19598,"date":"2023-05-25T13:37:46","date_gmt":"2023-05-25T18:37:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/takenote\/?p=19598"},"modified":"2025-10-08T16:00:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T21:00:10","slug":"a-brief-history-of-musical-theater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/online.berklee.edu\/takenote\/a-brief-history-of-musical-theater\/","title":{"rendered":"Musical Theater: A Brief History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How Did Musical Theater Begin? A Look at Its Global Roots and Enduring Traditions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The following information on musical theater is excerpted from the Berklee Online course Script Analysis for Theater<\/a><\/em>, written by David Valdes<\/a>, and currently enrolling.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Theater has always been based on crafting stories and images meant to yield emotional experiences for an audience, whether to enlighten, educate, persuade, or entertain. It is a live mirror on society that each viewer holds singly. Your experience as a human informs your experience of a play in text or onstage. In that regard, it resembles all other literature: there is no subjectively \u201cright\u201d way to feel about what you read and see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is one way in which theater is the most distinct of literary genres: its full expression depends on more than its creator. Whereas fiction or poetry are complete works of art by the time they reach the reader, the finished text of a play is only half the product of theater. Theater is crafted specifically with the notion of performance for a live audience. A great play on the page is literature; a great play on the stage is theater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This changes the equation from other genres in two ways: it\u2019s never the same play twice and it inherently requires community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musical Theater and Community<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Though I prefer to think of plays in artistic terms instead of corporate ones, if literature is a product and the audience is the consumer, theater is the only product which is changed every time<\/em> it reaches consumers (often by the consumers themselves). The size and make-up of the audience, the conditions of the performance, the skill of those involved in the production\u2014all of these factors will shape how the play lands, night after night. One night an audience might be vocal in their enjoyment of the show; the next night, the same cast and crew might face the proverbial crickets. The staging of A Raisin in the Sun<\/em> at your high school might make you cry, while the regional theater production makes you sleepy. Because theater is the only live genre, this will always be true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While this means not having control over the end product that a novelist might, it also highlights the second difference, one not definitive of other mediums: the making of theater necessarily fosters community. This has always been true. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historical and Global Context<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The earliest forms of drama in Africa were performances at festivals, often masked and incorporating dance, that brought the audiences stories of spirits and ancestors they already knew. In parts of western Africa, whole villages would take part, blurring the line between performer and player. Hunting parties would reenact their kills, with spectators providing the rhythm and music. Similar dramatic rituals were common across the ancient Inca, Mayan, and Aztec worlds in the Americas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is also as old as theatrical expression is the incorporation of music into the proceedings. Dig into the history of most cultures and you will find that the use of music and instruments for pageantry is nearly as old as the culture itself. Classical Indian musical theater dates to at least 400 BCE, with Chinese opera taking off in the third century. Around that same time, in the Mayan classic period, feast days were celebrated with elaborate musical pageants dramatizing the reign of the current rulers, with performers often wearing headdresses that would put the costume designers of Gypsy<\/em> to shame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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