Concept Musical
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The concept musical organizes a show around a theme, idea, or metaphor rather than a linear plot, so songs comment on a central subject — marriage, ambition, show business — from shifting angles instead of advancing a single story. Musically it favors sophisticated, often astringent scoring, ensemble numbers that function as essays, pastiche and vaudeville idioms deployed ironically, and a fractured, non-narrative structure. Sondheim-Prince collaborations define its sound: dense wordplay, dissonant harmony, and dramatic distance. The mood is intellectual, ironic, and formally daring, theatre that argues a thesis in song.
History
Cabaret (1966), staged by Harold Prince, pointed the way, and Prince's collaborations with Stephen Sondheim — Company (1970), Follies (1971), and Pacific Overtures — became the form's canon, using metaphor and pastiche instead of a hero's journey. Kander and Ebb's Chicago (1975) framed a story as a vaudeville, and A Chorus Line applied the concept approach to the audition. The concept musical rejected golden-age sentiment for irony and formal experiment, profoundly influencing later writers; though commercially riskier than the book musical, it produced some of the form's most respected and analyzed scores.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat (2010)
- Foster Hirsch, Harold Prince and the American Musical Theatre
- Larry Stempel, Showtime (2010)