Musical Theatre

Musical Theatre Classes

Musical theater is a form of theatre, the branch of the performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound and spectacle - indeed any one or more elements of the other performing arts. In addition to the standard narrative dialog style, theatre takes such forms as opera, ballet, mime, kabuki, Chinese opera, mummers' plays and pantomime.

Musical theater is a form of combining music, songs, dance routines, and spoken dialogue. It is closely related to opera, being distinguished by the use of popular music of various forms, and the use of non-sung dialogue (though some musicals are entirely sung, and some operas have spoken dialogue, such as Carmen), and the avoidance of many operatic conventions.

Musical theater has been the basis for a number of successful musical movies. Efforts to adapt musical theater to television have been more problematic. Some successful television adaptations include Cinderella, and Peter Pan.

Some popular televisions series have set one single episode in the style of a musical as a play on their usual format. (Examples include episodes of Ally McBeal, Buffy The Vampire Slayer's episode "Once More with Feeling", or Oz's "Variety").