The COncept Musical  - "SIde By Side"

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Concept musicals do not necessarily tell a story and they do not follow a linear progression from beginning to end. Their purpose is to explore a theme and/or convey a message.

Musical Comedy / Vaudeville = No theme

Revue = Uses a theme to connect disparate acts

The Integrated Musical = Contains a theme

The Concept Musical = Embodies a theme

The COncept Musical  - "SIde By Side"

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Modern critics disagree as to the exact definition of the concept musical. It is generally agreed upon that in a concept musical, emphasis is placed upon style, message, and thematic metaphor rather than on the plot itself. Thus, the show's structure is rarely cohesive or linear. Critics agree that the most defining aspect of a concept musical is its use of theme.  This holistic approach to each show, which focuses on the truthful representation of the theme in every aspect of the final production, sets it apart from other musical theatre forms.

The COncept Musical  - "SIde By Side"

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

The concept musical can also be defined by its structural characteristics and common staging techniques. Its songs "punctuate rather than flow out from the story," serving as a means of self-reflection for the character and acting as commentary upon the theme.

 The message of the show often spurs within its director a "renewed emphasis on the visual aspects of the performance leading to a more abstract, unrealistic, non-representational staging"

The attention paid to visual presentation has led many critics to recognize the concept musical as the most expressive and imagistic form of musical theatre.

Allegro [1947, Rodgers & Hammerstein]

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Without the inventions of “Allegro,” we may never have had, not only “Company,” but Michael Bennet’s “A Chorus Line” and “Dreamgirls,” Tommy Tune’s “Nine,” many Harold Prince productions, from “Cabaret” to “Evita,” and including Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.”

The musical received mixed reviews following its opening night. The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson opined that Rodgers and Hammerstein had "just missed the final splendor of a perfect work of art".

 Robert Coleman of the New York Daily Mirror stated that "Allegro is perfection", and added that it was "a stunning blending of beauty, integrity, intelligence, imagination, taste and skill ... it lends new stature to the American musical stage".

 Ward Morehouse of The Sun wrote that Allegro was "distinguished and tumultuous. It takes its place alongside of Oklahoma! and Carousel as a theatrical piece of taste, imagination, and showmanship."

Cabaret [1966, Kander & Ebb]

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Cabaret’ is an exquisitely sculpted milestone in the history of the film musical,” wrote Times film critic Charles Champlin. “It is the most thrilling I have ever seen, the most adult, the most intelligent, the most surpassingly artful in its joining of cinema, drama and music to evoke the mood and events of a turning point (and turning place) in history. … [It] is the kind of achievement — at once singular and collaborative — which the musical movie will have to be measured against hereafter.”

The movie “Cabaret” was nominated for 10 Oscars and won eight of them, including the director prize for Fosse, who famously beat out Francis Ford Coppola for “The Godfather.”

Times drama critic Cecil Smith in 1968 wrote after “Cabaret” won eight Tonys: “This is not a play about individuals but of amoral human rot.”

Cabaret

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Its 1972 film adaptation, directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli, featured drastic changes — character names and backstories altered, numerous songs completely cut and replaced. With such an overhaul, the stage show and the movie only have five songs (plus the finale, a reprise) in common (its newly written songs were added into later stage versions). Still, the integrity of the concept remained largely uncompromised, and challenged the form of the movie musical in the same way the stage show did in its debut.

Cabaret proved that it’s possible to turn a hit concept musical into a hit movie. Directed by Harold Prince and featuring music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, the 1966 stage musical is framed as an evening inside a Berlin nightclub during Hitler’s rise. Its characters — an aspiring novelist, a self-destructive singer, a boarding house owner, a shopkeeper, etc. — act out scenes of a linear narrative, while the club’s emcee leads numbers commenting on the topic at hand: how ordinary German citizens could get caught up in Nazi ideology.

Sweet CHarity [1966, Coleman & Fields]

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

If you're being taken along for a ride in a Broadway star vehicle, there'd better be at least one thing onstage that you can't take your eyes from. The revival of Sweet Charity certainly has that: The Foot.

 

Bob Fosse's first film, a musical based on Felini's Nights of Cabiria, shows a lot of promise, which he will fulfill with the 1972 Cabaret. It was nominated for 3 Oscars, including Best Score.

Sweet CHarity [1966, Coleman & Fields]

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Sweet Charity follows the romantic trials and tribulations of Charity Hope Valentine, “a girl who wanted to be loved.” Charity is a taxi dancer, a dance partner-for-hire at a seedy dance hall in New York City. Though the job may be decidedly undesirable, Charity’s hopeful romanticism and unfailing optimism lift her out of her circumstances and help her reach for a life beyond.

In the past, she’s been strung along and hung out to dry by a series of bad relationships and lousier men. When she meets Oscar, a neurotic, shy actuary seemingly from another world, will she finally find true love at last? 

Sweet CHarity [1966, Coleman & Fields]

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Analysis: LINK

Company [1970, Sondheim]

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Company was the first musical I saw on Broadway and has always had a special place in my affections. It is gratifying to see it not just being revived but also intelligently reimagined.

The original production was nominated for a record-setting fourteen Tony Awards and won six.

Company [1970, Sondheim]

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Originally titled Threes, its story revolves around Robert (a single man unable to commit fully to a steady relationship, let alone marriage), the five married couples who are his best friends, and his three girlfriends. Unlike most book musicals, which follow a clearly delineated plot, Company is a concept musical composed of shorvignettes, presented in no particular chronological order, linked by a celebration for Robert's 35th birthday.

Company was among the first musicals to deal with adult themes and relationships. As Sondheim puts it, "Broadway theater has been for many years supported by upper-middle-class people with upper-middle-class problems. These people really want to escape that world when they go to the theatre, and then here we are with Company talking about how we're going to bring it right back in their faces".

A Chorus Line [1975, Hamlish & Kleban]

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

The triumph of ‘A Chorus Line’ lay in its ability to thrill most people, its greatness lay in the artistry that was necessary to achieve that thrill,”

 

“This show was the theatre’s tribute to itself.”

 

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the show won nine Tonys and set Broadway records with 15-year run [6,137 performances].

A Chorus Line [1975, Hamlish & Kleban]

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

The story takes the audience on a heart-rending, nail-biting roller-coaster of emotions as a group of potential performers are put through a vigorous series of dance numbers and their numbers are gradually reduced to the sixteen from whom the director, Zach, must make his final choice. Instead of making them read a short audition, Zach asks, each hopeful to give a personal history of how they came to be in show business and what are their hopes, and inspirations.

By the end of the show the audience can identify with each performer and why they have endured a life filled with rejection, injury, pain and heartache to be involved with what is, to them, the glamorous world of the musical theatre. The show finishes when the successful few, now dressed in full costume, step forward in turn to receive an individual bow, before joining together to perform the brilliant dance finale showing exactly the talent required to make up that usually unappreciated essential of every successful show 

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Criticism [Wiki]

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Much has been written about the importance and impact of the concept musical. Drama theorist and critic Kathryn Edney believes that the concept musical "is rarely popular or particularly profitable, although it often garners critical praise, scholarly attention, and a cult following among the musical theater cognoscenti."

She postulates that the discrepancies between the concept musical and megamusical are a direct result of the efforts of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, whose "competing musical and personal styles... polarized fans of this genre. One is not supposed to enjoy both Cats and Company."

Likewise considering the relationship between the concept musical and megamusical, Siropoulos finds that the concept musical "is the product of a culture permeated by spectacle... The concept musical's disproportional concentration on the visual aspects of performance goes hand in hand with representational ends, an obligation to represent, however obliquely, the external world."

Criticism

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Siropoulos also argues that Prince, over any of his peers, is the true link between the concept musical and megamusical. Prince's work on Company and Evita, in particular, showcase his abilities in directing two distinct styles. 

Like the megamusical, [Company] undermines the narrative organization of the musical and foregrounds the visual aspects of the performance. For the staging of Evita, Prince employed and further developed the directorial vocabulary he cultivated in his concept musicals, creating, in the process, the first international megamusical blockbuster. In a sense, Prince can be considered the father of both the concept musical and the megamusical, linking, in this way, two forms of musical theatre: one of the most critically acclaimed with the one that has generally been considered as an anomaly and aberration in the history of the twentieth-century musical theatre.

— Vagelis Siropoulos, Evita, the Society of the Spectacle and the Advent of the Megamusical

Criticism

Musical Theatre

The Concept Musical

Dramaturg Scott McMillin argues that the concept musical built upon the theories of Rodgers and Hammerstein to bring the genre into the modern era, allowing the musical to become "arguably the major form of drama produced so far in America."

The age of the concept musical carried this advance in book-and-number formatting to the point that there is virtually nothing that cannot be imagined an effective topic for a musical. The ferment of ideas behind the concept show combines innovation with a strict sense of the musical’s history (the revue as called to life in Follies), the musical’s procedures (the audition and rehearsals of A Chorus Line), and the musical’s relationships to other forms of theatre (the kabuki methods in Pacific Overtures). The past and the future of the theatre are at issue in the best of them.

— Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama