ABSTRACT
Popular musical theater is directly – and historically – connected with the modern city. The shows reflect the urban reality of modern Western cities. The musical can be traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century, but it was not recognizable as a genre until the first years of the twentieth century. It is therefore the modern urban society of the twentieth century and its salient characteristics – big cities, mass media, density, flow and fragmentation – that constitutes the rock bottom of musicals. What is suggested in the following essay is that musical theater can function not only as a way to reflect a specific society and its changes but also as a way to deal with these.
