Popular Opera in Eighteenth-Century France

This is the first book for a century to explore the development of French opera with spoken dialogue from its beginnings. Musical comedy in this form came in different styles and formed a distinct genre of opera, whose history has been obscured by neglect. Its songs were performed in private homes, where operas themselves were also given. The subject-matter was far wider in scope than is normally thought, with news stories and political themes finding their way onto the popular stage. In this book, David Charlton describes the comedic and musical nature of eighteenth-century popular French opera, considering topics such as Gherardi's theatre, Fair Theatre and the 'musico-dramatic art' created in the mid-eighteenth century. Performance practices, singers, audience experiences and theatre staging are included, as well as a pioneering account of the formation of a core of 'canonical' popular works.

Gents and Working Girls

Tommy Tune’s earliest work as a director-choreographer engaged with issues of gender, sexuality, culture, and politics. The Club was an evening of songs and jokes set in an exclusive Victorian-era men’s club that featured all roles played by women. Tune led the cast in creating a stylized body language that approximated male behavior but, as performed by women, blurred gender lines in ways both challenging and exhilarating. The cross-gender performance of this material laid bare its misogyny without overstatement, and The Club was a long-running off-Broadway hit. Tune next joined the creative team of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, based on a true story about the closing of a bordello prompted by a crusading television personality. As choreographer and co-director, with Peter Masterson, Tune injected a burst of musical comedy brightness into the homey musical. His creativity was boundless, and numbers featuring macho, clog-dancing football players and a female drill team made up of both live dancers and life-size sex dolls were crowd pleasers that also contributed to the show’s sly skewing of culture and politics.

Development of the dance-rock opera genre in the creative content of ‘Mykhailo Vodianoi’ Academic Theatre of Musical Comedy, Odesa

Background. Staging of rock opera began in Ukraine simultaneously in theaters of drama, opera and musical comedy in the mid-80s. The first drama and ballet performances were based on the works of Russian authors. From 1986 to 1993 Kharkiv Theater of Musical Comedy made stage production of rock operas based on the works of Alexander Zhurbin, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alexey Rybnikov leaders of its repertoire policy. Since the 2000s, Odessa Theater of Musical Comedy has staged a dance-rock opera as a new modification of stage play with rock opera. The relevance of the article. Stage performances of dance-rock operas have not yet been sufficiently studied in Ukraine. Such Ukrainian musicologists as Olga Verkhovenko, Iryna Palkina, Halyna Filkevych fragmentarily have studied genre features and performance forms of dance-rock operas. In addition, some periodicals have covered these productions in their critical reviews. Methods. The work is based on a typological method, which made it possible to classify performances as a rock opera genre. The biographical method has also been applied to determine the artistic influences on the choreographer Heorhii Kovtun. The comparative method made it possible to separate the dancerock opera from other productions related to the genre of rock opera, as well as from apologetic performances that exploit already invented forms. When analyzing the performances, some elements of the reconstruction method were used. Results of the study. Odessa Musical Comedy Theater presented four performances in the genre of dance-rock opera, three of which were staged by Heorhii Kovtun. The first (and most successful) production with a new performance approach was the play “Romeo and Juliet” based on Shakespeare’s tragedy with music and libretto by Yevhen Lapeiko (Odessa). A new type of leading performers (selected at casting) appeared in the play. The type of rock opera artist represented by Kyryl Turychenko is characterized by freedom from musical comedy clichés. A pop singer with appropriate acting, athletic and dance training, he could sing when falling, climbing a two-story stage tower, or during a dynamic dance. Scenography by Stanislav Zaitsev showed a tendency towards brevity, constructiveness and simultaneous development of action in three stage dimensions. Other productions of Heorhii Kovtun – “The Canterville Ghost” and “Silicon Silly Woman.net” based on the works of Russian authors D. Rubin, A. Ivanov, O. Pantykin and K. Rubinsky developed rock opera principles invented by the choreographer rather than deepened them. The director of “The Canterville Ghost” did not quite clearly indicate the vector of the main idea. This led to the breakup of stage action into spectacular theatrical attractions with pyrotechnics and impressive stage design transformations. In fact, it is still not clear what the director was trying to recreate – a melodrama, a comedy with elements of satire or Guignol. The play “Tristan and Isolde” based on the works of the Ukrainian composer Alexander Nezhigai and playwright Serhii Piskuriov was staged by the theater director Vladimir Savinov. His ignorance of musical theater specifics contributed to the vocally and musically weak performance. Most of the action in the stage production was organized by the choreography of Anatolii Bedichev. Contrary to expectations, V. Savinov’s performance was also significantly inferior to Н. Kovtun’s performances in relation to libretto adaptation, stage design and tempo-rhythm of the performance. All rock-dance opera performances were aimed at teenage and youth audiences. Conclusions. Unlike rock operas of the previous decades, the production proposed by choreographer H. Kovtun is characterized by a synthesis of modern choreography, spectacular show, performance universalism and dynamс crowd scenes. As a choreographer, he did not pay much attention to the actors’ work on the characters. Vocally the singers gravitated towards the pop style (using microphones). Unlike earlier productions of rock operas in Ukrainian theater (with phonograms or symphonic jazz instrumentation of the theater orchestra), the troupe of Odessa Musical Comedy Theater performed rock operas with combined accompaniment (studio phonogram, theater orchestra, rock band). Further study of the multiple issues identified in the article requires a deep analysis of the repertoire, types of rock opera in the theater of musical comedy in Ukraine and the distinctive vocal and acting performance features.

Imagine the Duchess’ Feelings

This chapter looks at the work of Noël Coward, and presents a list of his musicals. Perusing the list, we can note that Bitter Sweet (1929) is the only classic. This is so more for its superb score than its functional book, which was full of snobby folk fussing over etiquette. The elements that are most memorable about Coward's musicals, are the songs, especially the witty lyrics. This chapter argues that no one in the world of the West End theatre besides W. S. Gilbert rivals Coward for his lyrics. Ironically, there is little wit in the scripts of Coward's musicals, the wit is to be found only in the lyrics and some of the revue sketches. Coward's revue songs emphasize his musical-comedy side, while his story shows tilt toward operetta in whole or part. This irony could be a result of Coward's musical illiteracy: he composed but could not write anything down. For most of his career, he used hired secretaries to help organize the music.

Toy Town

This chapter examines the emergence of the musical comedy. Musical comedy was invented by George Edwardes, famed for being the manager of the Gaiety Theatre. Therefore, the dawn of musical comedy became known as the Gaiety Era. This was a period that lasted roughly from the 1890s to about 1915. Interestingly, though, Edwardes' first such production, In Town (1892), did not quite fit in with this new genre. In Town, was a hit, lasting some thirty-five weeks. Next, A Gaiety Girl (1893) was a smash at 413 performances, and this one at least had a plot. It soon became a favorite on the English-speaking musical comedy scene and was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. The chapter then considers the move toward the modern story musical, looking at librettist Owen Hall, who wrote the books for two of the most successful Edwardian shows: The Geisha (1896) and Leslie Stuart's Florodora (1899).

A Little Bit Naughty

This chapter considers the British musical over the last thirty years. As pop operas continued to appear, Chess (1986), Tim Rice's collaboration with Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaes (from the Swedish pop group ABBA), was considered a classy example, centered on a rivalry of chess champions. ABBA's catalogue in the jukebox show Mamma Mia! (1999) creates a line-up of point numbers fitted into an innocuous story. In comparison, Chess tells of globally dangerous affairs of state and is very precisely musicalized with just one incongruous number, “One Night In Bangkok,” which would seem to have been created solely to guarantee a big hit song. Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, understanding that the proper launching site for an international success was London or New York, gave the West End Miss Saigon (1989) and Martin Guerre (1996). With such serious musicals as Girl From the North Country (2017) and the pop-opera cycle commanding the scene, musical comedy as such started to become scarce, though Spamalot (Broadway 2005; West End 2006) showed the comedy musical is still capable of claiming smash hit status.

Class Act and Challenge

This chapter gives a historic explication of the Nicholas Brothers’ style of jazz tap dancing that was simultaneously a class act—a precision-style dancing of impeccable execution—and a mode of call-and-response interplay in which the brothers challenged each other in playful camaraderie to “up” each other in steps. At the turn of the century, concurrent with musical comedy dance teams working in the blackface tradition, an elite group of black performers rejected the minstrel show stereotype of the grinning-and- shuffling blackface clown, insisting upon the perfection of sound, step, and manner. Such pioneering class-act teams as Cole and Johnson, Johnson and Dean, and Greenlee and Drayton aspired to a purely artistic expression that was driven by the desire for respectability and equality on the American concert stage. The Nicholas Brothers transformed the fierce competition of the challenge dance by combining their specialties in building their routine to a climax; and trading rhythms back and forth in a lively and witty dialog that developed complex rhythmical ideas.

All-Colored Comedy

Musical comedy films made by the Nicholas Brothers bring to light the staggering racist stereotyping that existed in Hollywood in the thirties. In the Minstrel Night scene in Kid Millions (1934), star Eddie Cantor in blackface sings “I Want to be a Minstrel Man,” with close-ups on the clean, bright face of Harold Nicholas, singing the same lyrics, and the brothers having to play end men to the star. Nicholas Brothers continue to defy racial stereotyping, demonstrating their virtuosic brilliance in song and dance in Jealousy (1934), American Wife (1936), Big Broadcast of 1936, Black Network (1936), and The All-Colored Vaudeville Show (1935).

‘Do Mormons think The Book of Mormon is funny?’

Public ridicule of a minority typically predicts a defensive response from the target of that humor. This is because public ridicule provides a polarizing spectacle, where the majority enjoys a humorous face reward, and solidarity, at the expense of that minority. Logically, we could expect a faith-based minority to be especially sensitive to public ridicule, since their face investment is greater, in inverse proportion to their social position and power, and because their group (and personal) identity is linked inextricably to what would normally be inviolable: a sacred text, a prophet, or deity. However, the official response from the LDS Church to the musical comedy The Book of Mormon defies this expectation. This paper analyses this response, in order to understand why a religious minority chose to creatively engage with what should have been a highly face-threatening satire.