Introduction

Musical theatre has been one of the most celebrated art forms to emerge in the past two hundred years. There are many books out there that celebrate the “greatest” musicals and the “best” musicals, each subjected to the personal tastes of the individual author. Music had always been a staple of storytelling. Whether it was Yoruba theatre or Melodrama, music had been asked to provide divertissement, enlightenment, and reinforcement to the story it inhabited. In the 1500s, came a group known as the Florentine Camerata, group of Italian humanists whose explorations of utilizing only music in storytelling led to the development of Opera, an art form that uses no spoken dialog, to communicate its intentions. During the Elizabethan Era, William Shakespeare’s use of soliloquy, where an audience goes into the mind of its protagonist as they speak their inner thoughts aloud, became quite popular and added another element that musical theatre would eventually cobble into an art form in 1866.