Essays on Musicals

A Passionate Revival of Movie Musical Styles

Film Review: La La Land – A Passionate Revival of Movie Musical Styles La La Land was released by Lionsgate and Black Label Media on December 25, 2016. It is considered a comedy/drama/musical production. Damien Chazelle is the director and writer of the film. Major stars in the movie are Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone and Rosemarie DeWitt (Platt & Gilbert, 2016). It has received 14 Oscar nominations and numerous Golden Globe awards. The plot involves the evolving and troubled love affair between an aspiring actress and a disillusioned jazz pianist. This is a musical production that includes drama, romance and comedy ...

Explain the cultural/historical context for the performance.

The world of music is now quite diverse, with jazz takes not the last place in it. If we immerse yourself in the history of the origins of jazz, we note that the music of this style has a large number of types and areas, which to some extent may be quite different from each other. It would seem that jazz means some one particular trend in music, but it is so much more. For example, among particularities we have the blues, swing, bebop, fusion, postbol, ​​cool, mainstream, hard -bop, stride But this list does not end there. Throughout ...

The Stormy Weather starring Bill Robinson and Lena Horne was one of the most successful Broadway musicals ever created especially by a full-African American actors and actresses. The film presents a charming combination of jazz, singing, dancing, and occasional rhythmic rants of the characters from the story. At first, I was quite skeptical whether the film will make me interested until the end; however, the Stormy Weather’s brilliant and happy music creates a lively atmosphere which is impossible to deny. The film was set against the backdrop of the Progressive era, approximately during the 1920s, considering the clothes ...

Research into the Characters, Story, and Music of Guys and Dolls

The musical Guys and Dolls first premiered on Broadway in 1950; it ran for more than 1,200 performances (Liukkonen). The characters and much of the story of the musical were originally created by Damon Runyon in his work “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown.” Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling adapted the characters and story from Runyon’s writings into musical form (Liukkonen).

This play’s characteristic nature that makes it very different from other plays is that it generates its characters’ traits and story from music and this is why it is called a musical. Though criticized for going ...