Chapter 9 - Music theatre

Summary

In this and the next chapter, we shall apply some of the principles discussed in the previous chapters to music and dance theatre. From the perspective of traditional dramatic theatre, we may be entering terra incognita. Yet, gradually, there is an increasing awareness that these aspects of theatre should be integrated into theatre studies, as we emphasized in the introduction. This broadening of perspectives is especially urgent in light of the challenges posed by postdramatic theatre forms, which often cross traditional genre boundaries. The following pages will outline a number of points of contact – author, text, theatrical context, staging – that have already been discussed in reference to dramatic theatre.

Elements

As pointed out in the introduction (see p. 5), the term ‘music theatre’ is used here to refer to three main theatrical genres: opera, operetta and musical. From a theatre studies perspective, the analysis of these genres poses the same set of problems as any other kind of theatrical text, except that the musical ‘track’ (the score) adds an extra expressive dimension, and with it an additional degree of complexity. In music theatre, we find the same basic division between a written text (the score and libretto) and the staged work. We also encounter the same initial questions: what ‘work’ are we talking about: the text or the production? How can the relationship between the work and the production be grasped analytically?