CHAPTER 20 Directing Musicals
UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MUSICALS AND STRAIGHT PLAYS
The staging of musicals offers a number of unique challenges and rewards for the director. Musicals are the direct theatrical descendants of opera and operetta and have retained much of their form from these early roots. They were originally referred to as musical comedies, but as the genre evolved, many musicals began to take more serious overtones. West Side Story is a prime example. In fact, some modern musicals are extremely dark. Musicals are by nature highly presentational. Today, musical theatre runs the gamut from farce to tragedy, but the essentially presentational framework remains a standard. Conventions in musicals allowing characters ...
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