Performing Arts by Credo Reference: Theater

From Encyclopedia of American Studies
The American Broadway musical is arguably the most distinctive and original theatrical form to develop in the United States and one of the most prominent forms of American popular entertainment of the twentieth century.

Form of entertainment that achieves its effects through caricature, ridicule, and distortion. About 1920 the term began to refer to the "strip-tease" show, which created its own stars, such as Gypsy Rose Lee; in c.1937 burlesque performances in New York City were banned.

Literary work that aims primarily to provoke laughter. Unlike tragedy, which seeks to engage profound emotions and sympathies, comedy strives to entertain chiefly through criticism and ridicule of man's customs and institutions.

Popular form of comedy employing improvised dialogue and masked characters that flourished in Italy from the 16th to the 18th cent.

Several origins have been proposed for drama: the ceremonies and dances performed by hunter-gatherers to ensure a successful hunt and initiate the young into the nature of the animals they hunted and the tactics used to kill them is one; dramatic story-telling in which the narrator enacts different roles while telling the story is another; religious ritual, and the enactment of religious stories at festivals, such as those conducted in ancient Egypt from before 2000BC, is a third.

Originally a spoken text with musical background, as in Greek drama.

From The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics
(Gr., "imitation"). In the cl. sense of the term, a type of drama in which players rely mainly on gestures to tell a story. Found in ancient Greece and Rome, the mime probably arose, as its name implies, from the natural impulse to imitate persons or scenes from daily life.