## The Musical - TV Tropes
Source URL:: <https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheMusical>
### Highlights
> [!quote]+ %%Updated on Sun Apr 02 2023 09:15:27 GMT-0400%%
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> there's the danger of having too much utterly mundane dialogue set to music in a way that draws the audience's attention to the blatant artificiality of the concept; with a book musical, the transitions from musical scenes to spoken dialogue and vice versa can be awkward and forced if they're not handled carefully.
> [!quote]+ %%Updated on Sun Apr 02 2023 09:17:10 GMT-0400%%
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> theater can have very little physical movement and tell the story with verbal images.
> [!quote]+ %%Updated on Sun Apr 02 2023 09:17:22 GMT-0400%%
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> Stephen Sondheim has said that one reason why it's hard to adapt a stage musical to film is that in film a close-up can tell you everything that a song can—so why bother with the song?
> [!quote]+ %%Updated on Sun Apr 02 2023 09:18:56 GMT-0400%%
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> The Musical Alternate Universe Hypothesis: The musical is set in an alternate world, or magic has been worked on the ordinary world, in which people really do burst into spontaneous song and dance. I
> [!quote]+ %%Updated on Sun Apr 02 2023 09:19:08 GMT-0400%%
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> The All In Their Heads Hypothesis: There is no singing; the songs are an artistic rendering of the characters' fantasies, with the format of song in a way serving to distinguish between what really happens and what is only in the characters' heads, much like a Shakespearean soliloquy.
> [!quote]+ %%Updated on Sun Apr 02 2023 09:19:23 GMT-0400%%
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> The Diegetic Hypothesis: The characters are performing actual, literal songs for one another as they might in Real Life, with the songs having been written and practiced beforehand in a realistic way.
> [!quote]+ %%Updated on Sun Apr 02 2023 09:19:43 GMT-0400%%
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> Adaptation Hypothesis: Derives from the Literary Agent Hypothesis: the songs are merely a dramatic reconstruction of what really happened.
> [!quote]+ %%Updated on Sun Apr 02 2023 09:20:10 GMT-0400%%
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> For instance, if two characters converse in song and come to some sort of conclusion, it is assumed that the characters really just had a normal, non-musical conversation that came to the same conclusion, but because it's a musical, it has here been adapted into a song for drama (or comedy) purposes. This is the most common interpretation in stage musicals, and the way most of them are written
> [!quote]+ %%Updated on Sun Apr 02 2023 09:20:38 GMT-0400%%
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> All-Maestro Cast: If it is explicitly shown or implied (other than by the mere fact of their singing) that all of the characters in a musical who sing have great (by Real Life's standards) skill at improvised music, it is at least plausible that these characters really are capable of coming up with tunes and rhymes on the fly, and do so during the musical