The Musical Comedy

Until the end of the 19th century, the term musical comedy was one of the many used to describe any stage piece of comic nature to which music was either integral or incidental. By the second of the 20th century, the term defined a particular form of dramatic and musical entertainment which had virtually taken the lead in modern theater forms. Within the loose usage of the previous century, an" opera buffa" such as Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro" could be called a musical comedy. At the opposite extreme, the term, the term was also applied to the popular U.S.farces staged by Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart in the late 19th and early 20th century, on the strength of their interpolated songs and ballads. A specific
application of the term to a genre of stage piece in which popular songs, dances and production ensembles are festooned upon a farcical plot was first made in the early 1890's by George Edwards, manager of the Gaiety theatre in London. He called his production of "Gaiety Girl " a musical comedy to distinguish it from the Gaiety to the United States, where they formed the base for the entertainment that has since persisted.

Musical comedy, as it was known in the 20th century US and English theatres, differs from comic opera and operettas in that it adheres to a more vernacular style in its music, dances, lyrics and dialogues. It differs from variety vaudeville- to which it is indebted for many of its elements of song, dance and humour - in its possession of a plot, however minimal, and also as a rule, in the elaborateness of its physical production. It differs from the revue largely in its use of a plot. The mainstays of that medium: satire, parody, and topical thrusts are also used in musical comedy.

US musical comedy came into being at the beginning of the 20th century, developed through a fusion of the elements of 6 earlier types of musical entertainment- extravaganza, pantomime, variety, burlesque, farce-comedy and European comic opera.