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''The Black Crook'' is often considered to be the first piece of musical theatre that conforms to the modern notion of a "book musical". The book is by Charles M. Barras (1826-1873), an American playwright. The music is mostly adaptations, but some new songs were composed for the play, notably "March of the Amazons" by Giuseppe Operti, and "You Naughty, Naughty Men", with music by George Bickwell and lyrics by Theodore Kennick. It opened on September 12, 1866 at the 3,200-seat Niblo's Garden on Broadway, New York City and ran for a record-breaking 474 performances. It was then toured extensively for decades and revived on Broadway in 1870–71, 1871–72 and many more times after that. This production gave America claim to having originated the musical. ''The Black Crook'' is considered a prototype of the modern musical in that its popular songs and dances are interspersed throughout a unifying play and performed by the actors.〔Morley, p. 15〕 The British production of ''The Black Crook'', which opened at the Alhambra Theatre on December 23, 1872, was an opera bouffe version based on the same French source material, with new music by Frederic Clay and Georges Jacobi. The musical was also produced in 1882 in Birmingham, Alabama. A silent film version of ''The Black Crook'' was produced in 1916.〔http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0006432/〕 It is the only screen version of the show. ==Background== ''The Black Crook'' was born in 1866 when a dramatic group and Parisian ballet troupe joined forces in New York. Henry C. Jarrett and Harry Palmer had hired the ballet troupe to perform at the New York Academy of Music but the troupe was left without an engagement when a fire destroyed the Academy. They approached Wheatley at Niblo's Garden to see if he could use them. Wheatley offered them a chance to participate in a musical "spectacle" by combining their ballet forces with Barras's melodrama.〔(Article on the creation of ''The Black Crook'' )〕 In operas, even comic operas with dialogue like ''The Magic Flute'', the principal singers leave the dancing to the ballet troupe. In burlesque, music hall and vaudeville, there is little or no unifying story, just a series of sketches. So ''The Black Crook'', with song and dance for everyone, was an evolutionary step, and has been called the first musical comedy.〔〔("Broadway's first musical: ''The Black Crook''" ). ''The Bowery Boys'', November 26, 2007, accessed 1 March 2010; the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' entry on the musical agrees (subscription required)〕〔Grosch, Nils and Tobias Widmaier (Hrsg.) (2010) (''Lied und populäre Kultur - Song and Popular Culture'' )〕 Cecil Michener Smith dissented from this view, arguing that while multiple scholars point to the show as the first popular comedy, "calling ''The Black Crook'' the first example of the theatrical genus we now call musical comedy is not only incorrect; it fails to suggest any useful assessment of the place of Jarrett and Palmer's extravaganza in the history of the popular musical theatre ... but in its first form it contained almost none of the vernacular attributes of book, lyrics, music, and dancing which distinguish musical comedy."〔Smith, Cecil. ''Musical Comedy in America''. New York. The Colonial Press, 1950〕 Another dissenter is Larry Stempel.〔Stempel, Larry. ''Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theatre'', p. 49: "()he claim would be hard to sustain on purely historical grounds whatever criteria one chooses to apply."〕 The same year that ''The Black Crook'' opened, ''The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post'' was the first show to call itself a "musical comedy."〔 In the late 1860s, as post-Civil War business boomed, there was a sharp increase in the number of working- and middle-class people in New York, and these more affluent people sought entertainment. Theaters became more popular, and Niblo's Garden, which had formerly hosted opera, began to offer light comedy. ''The Black Crook'' was followed by ''The White Fawn'' (1868), ''Le Barbe Blue'' (1868) and ''Evangeline'' (1873).〔(Article at the Musicals101 website )〕 An apparently similar show from six years earlier, ''The Seven Sisters'' (1860), which also ran for a very long run of 253 performances, is now lost and forgotten. It also included special effects and scene changes. Theatre historian John Kenrick suggests that ''The Black Crook's'' greater success resulted from changes brought about by the Civil War: First, respectable women, having had to work during the war, no longer felt tied to their homes and could attend the theatre, although many did so heavily veiled. This substantially increased the potential audience for popular entertainment. Second, America's railroad system had improved during the war, making it feasible for large productions to tour.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Black Crook」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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