"Les Miserables," also musical theatre.
The difference basically has to do with what they're derived from. Opera has its roots primarily from classical music, musical theatre from popular music. These giant musicals you're talking about, it's more about the spectacle and bombast rather than the music itself -- whereas in opera, much more emphasis is placed on the music and the singers. "Phantom" and "Le Miz" are also called "pop operas," but they fall within the genre and scope of musical theatre. Just because the guys don't speak doesn't mean that it's not a musical.
However, I will concede that the more complex musicals -- 'Sweeney Todd,' 'Show Boat,' 'Porgy and Bess' -- are sometimes given productions by opera houses, so it's a genre where there is some limited crossover.
But even then, there's controversy about whether or not these musicals -- which are designed in the musical tradition -- should be performed as opera, a style with its own tradition and hallmarks. I know that Sondheim has been iffy about his shows being performed as opera, for example.
Here's what Wikipedia says, for more information:
The difference basically has to do with what they're derived from. Opera has its roots primarily from classical music, musical theatre from popular music. These giant musicals you're talking about, it's more about the spectacle and bombast rather than the music itself -- whereas in opera, much more emphasis is placed on the music and the singers. "Phantom" and "Le Miz" are also called "pop operas," but they fall within the genre and scope of musical theatre. Just because the guys don't speak doesn't mean that it's not a musical.
However, I will concede that the more complex musicals -- 'Sweeney Todd,' 'Show Boat,' 'Porgy and Bess' -- are sometimes given productions by opera houses, so it's a genre where there is some limited crossover.
But even then, there's controversy about whether or not these musicals -- which are designed in the musical tradition -- should be performed as opera, a style with its own tradition and hallmarks. I know that Sondheim has been iffy about his shows being performed as opera, for example.
Here's what Wikipedia says, for more information:
Quote:
| The 1980s and 1990s saw the influence of European "mega-musicals" or "pop operas," which typically featured a pop-influenced score and had large casts and sets and were identified as much by their notable effects - a falling chandelier, a helicopter landing on stage - as they were by anything else in the production. Many were based on novels or other works of literature. The most important writers of mega-musicals include the French team of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, responsible for Les Misérables and, in collaboration with Richard Maltby, Jr., Miss Saigon (inspired by Madame Butterfly); and the British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote Evita, based on the life of Argentina's Eva Perón, Cats, derived from the poems of T. S. Eliot, The Phantom of the Opera derived from the novel "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra" written by Gaston Leroux , and Sunset Boulevard (from the classic film of the same name). Several of these mega-musicals ran (or are still running) for decades in both New York and London. |
