by Paisley Place

Created on: May 30, 2007

The history of musical theater in Europe dates back to the theater of the ancient Greeks, who included music and dance in stage comedies and tragedies as early as the Fifth Century B.C. Aeschylus and Sophocles composed their own music to accompany the plays. During the Third Century BC, Roman comedies of Plautus included song and dance routines performed with orchestrations. In order to make dance steps more audible in large open-air theaters, Roman actors attached metal chips called "sabillia" to their stage footwear hence creating the first known tap shoes. The Twelfth and Thirteenth Century BC , religious dramas such as The Play of Herod and The Play of Daniel taught the liturgy, set to church chants. It was this type of play that developed into an autonomous form of musical theater, with poetic forms, sometimes alternating with the prose dialogues and liturgical chants. The poetry provided modified or completely new melodies.

By the Renaissance period, these forms had evolved into commedia dell'arte, an Italian tradition where raucous clowns improvised their way through familiar stories, and from there, opera buffa, Moliere turned several of his comedies into musical entertainments with songs provided by Jean Baptiste Lully in the late 1600s.

The 1700s brought two forms of musical theater to the area of Britain, France, and Germany. The ballad operas, as John Gay's The beggar's Opera in 1728 including lyrics written to the tunes of popular songs of the day often spoofing opera. Romantic plots became popular such as Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl in 1845.

These sources opened the door to the vauldville days, British music hall, melodrama, and burlesque. Melodrama's popularity, in particular fed on the fact that many theaters' licensed only as music halls and none allowed such present plays without music.
The first recorded long running play of any kind was The Beggar's Opera, which ran for 62 successive performances in 1728. It would take almost a century before the first play broke 100 performances, with Tom and Jerry, based on the book Life in London written in 1821. The record soon reached 150 in the late 1820s. New York did not have a significant theater presence until approximately 1750. By the 1840s, P.T. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in lower Manhattan. The theater in New York moved from downtown gradually to midtown beginning around 1850, seeking less expensive real estate prices, and did not arrive in the Times Square area until the 1920s and 1930s.

Broadway's first long-run musical record was a 50-performance hit called The Elves in 1857. New York runs continued to lag far behind those in London, but Laura Keene's musical burletta Seven Sisters in 1860 shatter previous New York Records with a run of 253 performances.
Broadway musicals began to run rampant with new performances taken over when others completed their runs. Later greats such as Between You, Me, The Post, The Mulligan Guard Picnic, and others would bring stardom to the streets of Broadway. It brought singing sensations such as Lillian Russell and Fay Templeton to the theaters. Time would bring greats such as The HMS Pinafore, Our Boys, Dorothy, A Trip to Chinatown, El Capitan, and The Geisha to the silver theatrical stage.

The style of musicals changed but the high society class attending the theater would never change. Centuries removed from the days of the original theater, most commoners still find it difficult to obtain excellent seats at some of the best theatrical performances; however, today it is much easier to get into the door of the theater houses by purchasing seats that are less in price and further from the stage.

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