Introduction
Nowadays, many people are watching musicals from the past because they love to listen to the actors’ voices and their music. We can also see people performing dramatic stories, and their songs and dances tell interesting stories. A musical is also called a musical comedy or a theatrical production. Musicals show us sentimental characteristics and give society a message in the theatre. To observe it carefully, we need to pay attention to the audio effects, lighting effects, and many more kinds of elements that play a part in the technique used at the theatre. And these technical skills encompass progress musically.
The technical science at the musical theatre
Imagine the stage filled with smoke, creepy noises, and any other special effects on the stage. These things stimulate the audience’s sense of immersion. However, let’s think about these things being removed. No music, no special effects, no lighting. It is important for musicals to progress softly, and it is important to make more musicals. That way, we can receive their messages and think about how they can express their stories more efficiently. Moreover, they could enhance their storylines’ quality. It is important to stimulate the audience’s five senses.
For example, let’s look at a concert hall like the Opera Hall. Many people play or sing songs at the largest concert halls because their architectural structures allow the production of quite beautiful sounds. One of the most popular shapes is the shoebox shape. Many engineers and architects had many trials and errors before building it. Finally, they developed a shoebox-shaped hall to make a good concert and musical theater venue. For example, there’s Vienna’s Musikverein, one of the halls located in London. It is the most famous architecture that was developed from a shoebox-shaped form. Furthermore, recently, one of the halls called vinegar-terrace-shaped by the architects showed very clear and good acoustic sounds. Actually, the elements that make up the walls help them make great sounds. The walls of the concert hall and musical theatre were in fact used to take control of the sound of acoustics. The hard surface of the wall reflects the sound, which allows the audience to receive a very beautiful sound output. Otherwise, the soft surface of the wall absorbs the actors’ and instruments’ beautiful sounds. We can also find soft stuff in the Opera Hall and musical theater: seat cushions. There is a piece of architecture located in New York City, and the building is called New York’s Carnegie Hall. It includes heavy curtains, heavy chandeliers, and frescoed walls. Many other elements exist there, but these three kinds of things are the most important and famous elements in that hall. The new wall’s style is a smooth-walled form that helps people who sit in the auditorium hear the great sounds of acoustics. In fact, rough and tough surfaces can also be used to disperse the sounds in all directions in space.
It is an unusual example, but there are two ways for sounds from the outside world to enter a concert hall. For example, the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester is mounted on lots of springs to help to reduce structure-borne sound from the outside world’s noisy elements, and the concert hall’s most modern styles are always surrounded and filled with a gap of air to prevent any sound from the outside world entering the concert hall from disturbing music.
Musical Theatres’ Future
The future of musical theater could go in any way. Maybe someone will think, “Will there be innovation in the musical theater in the future? Will there be a way for technology to affect how art is created and consumed. People could share almost anything, like music, books, movies, images, etc., over the internet. Many kinds of content can be shared because of the involved technology. However, there is one thing that you cannot share online. What is it? It is the actual experience of being at a musical theater. People can only share the recorded version, not the original version. People do not have to be in the real place. A columnist named Alex Ungerman (2014) said, “Those are recordings of theater, but watching videos does not equate to experiencing the actual theater.” Musical theater is categorized into two: traditional theater and adaptive theater.
Traditional theater is popular these days. They will continue to thrive, be protected, and exist in the future. On the other hand, adaptive musical theater will look different from current musical theater. Adaptive musical theater will not continue the trend of a cinema experience. Furthermore, adaptive musical theater will find ways to tell stories in a more interactive, more intimate, and more communal way than traditional theater does. Furthermore, this is just an expectation or a prediction, but many people are saying that it will involve virtual experiences through the use of computers, and they’ll keep developing an appreciation for in-person experiences.
Conclusion
Nowadays, together with evolving technologies and architectural skills, musical theater is evolving. We could say the science and technology involved in musical theater is very awesome or not, because no awesome science or technology was introduced or described in this article. Nevertheless, we can say the hidden science could make our ears and eyes experience more fun and it would attract our interest. In the future, there may be days when you want to go to a musical hall, and it would remind you of this article and that it talked about some trivial things that could evolve into major things.
References
Salford (2016). What makes the perfect acoustic, according to science? [online] Classic FM. Available at: https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/latest/perfect-acoustic-concert-hall-science/ [Accessed 26 September 2022].
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (2019). Musical | narrative genre. In: Encyclopædia Britannica. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/art/musical. [Accessed 28 September 2022].
Ungerman, A. (2014). Theatre of the Future. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/new-manifest-theatre-ideas/theatre-of-the-future-7818350edb62 [Accessed 28 September 2022].
