What is concept musicals?
I got this from Wikipedia: “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 late 1960s, and became more popular in the 1970s. It is a term first coined by Martin Gottfried in the New Yorker magazine, to described a show which is ‘theatrical and pictorial’ rather than narratively intellectual. This has led to an increasingly 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 Klub (this is a reference to the KKK, aluding to discrimination in the US). 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
