Musical theater originated in ancient Greece around 2,500 years ago. It is believed that the ancient Greeks staged comedies and tragedies that included music and dance, which they performed in open air amphitheaters. Aeschylus and Sophocles composed their own music to accompany their plays. In the third century BCE, Roman comedies included song and dance routines performed with orchestras. In medieval times, traveling entertainers sang songs and performed comedies. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, church chants were used to teach religious dramas.
By the 1700s a new form of musical theater became popular. Operas, or the use of singers and orchestras to tell a story, could be funny, romantic, or tragic. They gained attention especially in Great Britain, France, and Germany. There were two forms of operas; ballad operas and comic operas. Ballad operas had songs with lyrics written to the tunes of popular songs. Comic operas had original scores and usually had romantic plot lines.
In America, the first musical theater performance was Flora, and English opera. Flora was performed in America in 1735 before the United States even became its own country. It was performed both in America and Europe and is still a popular opera today. After the United States became independent, burlesque became popular. Burlesque was a new type of musical theater with fancy costumes and large dance numbers in which famous people or plays were made fun of.
Modern musical theater began in the mid to late 1800s when major social and technical changes became prevalent. Transportation, jobs, and salaries were increasing, and the invention of electricity made streetlights possible and made it safer to go out at night.
Some historians consider The Black Crook to be the first musical to ever be performed that conforms to the idea of modern musical theater. It was performed in New York in 1866 and was about 5.5 hours long, but nevertheless ran for 474 performances. Around the same time, musical comedies started to gain popularity as Broadway hired high quality singers to perform in shows written by comedians.
Sources cited:
New World Encyclopedia. 2022. Musical Theater. [online] Available at: <https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Musical_Theater#History>
“History of Musical Theatre: Lesson for Kids.” Study.com, 17 July 2019, study.com/academy/lesson/history-of-musical-theatre-lesson-for-kids.html
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