Concept musical

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A 'concept musical' is a musical where the show's metaphor or statement is more important than the actual narrative. Concept musicals were introduced in the 1960's, and became more popular in the 1970's.

It is a term first coined by Martin Gottfried in the New Yorker magazine, to desribed a show which is 'theatrical and pictorial' rather than narratively intellectual.

This has led to an increasinly misapplied use of the phrase. For instance, it is commonly thought that Cabaret, by John Kander and Fred Ebb is a 'concept musical' because of its "diegetic" structure, where the songs comment on the action within the narrative frame of the Kit Kat Club. Removed from the story, these songs become effectively 'commentary' in the style of Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "The Threepenny Opera".

Other uses of the phrase have been applied to the intellectually challenging work of Stephen Sondheim. Yet as John Bush Jones has pointed out, this cannot truly be the case. As Gottfried insisted that aesthetic principles and 'theatricality' take precedence as 'the concept' of the work, then the intellectual rigour and socially aware narratives of Sondheim's musicals such as "Company" or "Sunday in the Park with George" are narrative driven shows whose manner of presentation are all at once postmodern, self-referential, and challenging.

As Gottfried defined the term, it would be more applicable to works such as Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats" or "Starlight Express" where the elaborate staging and concept of presentation determined many other production factors.