People have been singing and dancing on stage since the first Ancient Greek choruses. However, the modern Broadway/West End musical grew out of many disparate influences over more than two centuries.
Operas and Comic Operettas
As the Renaissance gave way to the Baroque and Rococo periods, so too did oratorios give way to full-blown operas. Even if you’ve never seen The Barber of Seville, Don Giovanni, Carmen, La Boheme, and countless more operatic masterpieces, you’ve almost certainly heard music from them.
While these more “serious” operas were making their mark, a niche for comic operettas emerged, from early examples such as John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera to Mozart’s marriage of operatic music with comedic themes in pieces such as The Magic Flute. The big game-changers here, however, were Gilbert and Sullivan, whose legendary Savoy Theatre comic operettas such as HMS Pinafore and Pirates of Penzance laid the groundwork for much of the modern musical. Arthur Sullivan’s scores were catchy yet simple enough to allow W.S. Gilbert room to write memorable lyrics.
Minstrelsy and Vaudeville
Black America has a rich musical tradition and a painful legacy of having their artistry reappropriated by White artists who then achieved more monetary success and mainstream recognition. It happened with jazz, it happened with Elvis, and yes, it happened with Black folk music traditions, which White American performers would eventually appropriate in blackface for minstrelsy shows.
A milder, sometimes less overtly racist, and more improvisation-heavy variant of this could be found in vaudeville acts. The vaudeville circuit also became a way for working-class people and immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe to make some extra money via folk entertainment. Comedic acts such as the Marx Brothers got their start on the vaudeville circuit. Their song and dance routines combined these immigrant musical traditions with American jazz and dance styles.
When that fusion of comic operettas with memorable lyrics and characters was fused with vaudeville’s focus on jazzy scores, dancing and acrobatics, and audience engagement via improvisation, the foundation for the modern musical was firmly in place.
Early composers such as Rogers and Hammerstein and George Gershwin and early performers such as Paul Robeson and Ethel Merman took the stage in shows like 1927’s Show Boat and 1930’s Girl Crazy – and the rest is musical history.