Forms of Theatre : Origin of Musicals
Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining music, songs, spoken dialogue and dance. Musical theatre in Europe dates back to the theatre of the ancient Greeks, who included music and dance in their stage comedies and tragedies in the 5th century BC.The dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles composed their own music to accompany their plays and choreographed the dances of the chorus. The 3rd-century BCE Roman comedies of Plautus included song and dance routines performed with orchestrations.The musical theatre of India also dates back to Antiquity. Ancient Sanskrit drama had a highly stylized nature with an emphasis on spectacle, where music, dance and gesture combined to create a vibrant artistic unit with dance and mime being central to the dramatic experience. Traditional folk theatre became popular from around the 10th century with the decline of Sanskrit theatre. These regional traditions include the Jatra of Bengal, the Ramlila of Uttar Pradesh, and the Terukkuttu of Tamil Nadu. In particular, Parsi theatre blended realism and fantasy, music and dance, narrative and spectacle, earthy dialogue and ingenuity of stage presentation, integrating them into a dramatic discourse of melodrama.