Musicals VS Music Theatre

 

Discussion on the key similarities and differences between Musicals and Musical Theatre.

 

According to Ryan Green ‘Music Theatre’ as a term, emerged in the 1960s and was created as a response to Opera, while Musicals appeared earlier and more related to mass culture and entertainment than erudite art.

 

There are many similarities and no doubt as many differences between Musicals and Music Theatre, since shape, message, target and even budget, although I may consider their biggest difference is a Musical always relies on songs with lyrics that follow a linear narrative and tell us its story but Music Theatre in many cases does not follow this rule.

 

In fact, a Music Theatre piece doesn’t need songs at all, because there are more aspects around musicality that can be approached into a piece of theatre. For example, a performance of a real musician pretending to play an instrument in complete silence is a well-known piece of music theatre, like Green mentioned on his essay, or a piece including live performances of musicians while they are also acting, with monologues or dialogues, and interacting with the main actors.

 

The piece Misty by Omar Elerian where the musicians, playing their instruments live, besides the performance of being playing an instrument had, in fact, at some points of the piece, embodied a character during the narrative. The genius and widely diverse work of the actor Arinze Kene in this piece using tools like acting, dance, singing, rap or physical theatre resulting in a mix that calls a big range of our senses, making us laugh, cry, think and question the problems of today's society.

 

Musicals are an older, far more commercial and commonly less intellectually deep. They are more focused on escapism and entertaining the public and making a profit financially, while Music Theatre can be more unpredictable in terms of shape and content, since ‘it’s not stylistically a form of theatre’ (Green, 2014), and it’s more related with experimentalism of breaking boundaries between different ‘mediums including film, radio and other audio-visual effects’ (Green, 2014), and creatively feeding the critical thinking of its creators, performers and public.

 

Not that Musicals can’t have interesting messages or that Music Theatre is not entertaining, they are just created for different purposes through different processes and often aimed at different audiences. Musicals being aimed far more at family audiences who attend the theatre far less, more commonly taking less of financial risk of what they choose to see.

 

‘Music Theatre tends to be small-scale theatrical work’ (Green, 2014) because they are harder to understand than big-scale musicals and there are way fewer people devoted to more experimental and intellectual art, while the majority rather go enjoying a musical to entertain themselves. That is also why a musical is way higher budgeted because it’s more profitable since there are more people interested and attending them.

 

  There are contemporary Music Theatre productions that push even further boundaries, transforming ‘the playing of musical instruments into theatrical action’ (Green, 2014). Those experiments in breaking artistic roles and merging them changed ideas and were crucial to bringing us today what we call the Performance Artist because such ‘ideas merged the lines between singer, dancer, musician and actor.’ (Green, 2014).

 

Even fields or disciplines of study that are totally different can influence each other, so why shouldn’t Musicals influence Music Theatre or other kinds of contemporary performance expressions?

 

I’ve always heard since the preparatory school that to be against something you first need to understand it. And in the performing arts field is not any different. Not that I mean that for producing a contemporary erudite performance art piece we need to do the opposite rules of what it means to create a Musical. Or that there aren't Music Theatre productions with a big budget such as Musicals, there are, although rarer, they're always exceptions to the rules.

 

For example, the piece I'm a Pheonix, Bitch! by Bryony Kimmings which was started with the performer appearing from nowhere on a sequin dress in a very a humorous and satirical tone, breaks exactly of what you expect to see on a serious contemporary piece about postnatal depression.

 

This couldn’t be more purposely inspired by Musicals, and while we are still thinking that she was making fun of it, Bryony starts describing her life events with a live recording camera on tiny sets, like a pop song music video that she projects on the big screen behind her. Using this tool over and over, and every time reaching a deeper level of emotion, reveals us her truth in a very wise and pleasing way.

 

Nowadays, with the multiplicity of new technologies, techniques and languages that can be used on stage, either to educate or to entertain, with a low or high budget, what it means to be a theatre maker and a performance artist has a limitless range of options.