Song Types, Structure and individual elements
Most songs fit into these categories:
action songs which move the plot forward
character songs which enable a character to express their feelings
Within these two formats, different song types can be found, including:
ballads which are usually slow, romantic and reflective
comedy songs which are funny, so the lyrics are very important
production numbers which involve the full company and are used to show major changes in location or plot, and often open and close acts
rhythm songs which are driven by energetic rhythm patterns
Many show songs use 32 bar song form. And using AABA structure:
In modern terminology the A section is repeated as the main section of the song and is known as "the verse".
The A sections are similar in melody but different in lyrical content. The phrases of the A sections often comes to harmonic closure.
This is followed by the bridge (B) which is musically and lyrically different than the A sections. The bridge gives the song contrast before transitioning to the final A section. The B section often provides melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, or contrast in texture. The B section is known as "the Bridge", "Middle Eight" or "the Release". It presents the listener with a change in mood in the song, often using contrasting melody, lyrics and chords.
Derived versions of this form (AABABA or AABAA for example) or AABA with the addition of a coda (or “outro”) are not uncommon.
The standard AABA song form is 32-bars long, with each section of the song being 8 bars long.
The chorus:
sets the repeated refrain of the lyrics and often contains the title words
usually returns several times, always with the same words
is normally the 'catchiest' part of the song
The verse usually has different words with each repetition.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z27fyrd/revision/1
https://www.songstuff.com/song-writing/article/aaba-song-form/
Acting while Singing
There are techniques which help actors to act while singing.
I found a guide on WikiHow and this is a short version with steps of preparation of the song:
Learn song
Read as a monologue with intonation to understand the emotion
Use physical vocal modes (twang, crying voice, falsetto, belting, speech)
Use of body language and movement
Sad characters move slowly, usually with very deliberate movements. While you don't want to slouch while you sing, looking slightly down can give the same effect.
Happy or loving characters use big, expressive, and open gestures, as if trying to spread their wonderful emotions with the whole world.
Angry characters add weight, literally, to their movements, flying around the stage, stomping, and moving with short, rapid movements.
Pensive or thoughtful characters tend to repeat movements, like pacing, often with quick bursts of inspired movements ("Eureka!") when the light bulb above their head brightens.
Use of plot – what happened before and what will be after the song
https://www.wikihow.com/Act-While-Singing
Physical Vocal Modes (make a video)
Speech mode
Falsetto
Belting
Twang
Sob/Crying
Head voice
Chest voice
Speech mode – speaking during the song or have elements of speech in it
Sob/Crying – singing with sound of crying or sobbing in the voice (make it up with Puppy sound)
Twang – singing with an accent
Falsetto – singing in upper register voice with breathy tone
Belting – singing on the top of the vocal range using chest power
Head voice – singing in upper register voice and producing a clear tone
Chest voice – singing on the bottom of the vocal range
George and Ira Gershwin
Someone to Watch Over Me
George and Ira Gershwin will always be remembered as the songwriting team whose voice was synonymous with the sounds and style of the Jazz Age. By the time of their 1924 Broadway hit, LADY, BE GOOD!, George had worked with lyricist Buddy DeSylva on a series of revues, GEORGE WHITE’S SCANDALS, while Ira enjoyed success with composer Vincent Youmans on TWO LITTLE GIRLS IN BLUE. But from 1924 until George’s death in 1937, the brothers wrote almost exclusively with each other, composing over two dozen scores for Broadway and Hollywood. Though they had many individual song hits, their greatest achievement may have been the elevation of musical comedy to an American art form. With their trilogy of political satires — STRIKE UP THE BAND, the Pulitzer Prize-winning OF THEE I SING, and its sequel, LET ’EM EAT CAKE (all three written with playwrights George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind) – they helped raise popular musical theatre to a new level of sophistication. Their now-classic folk opera, PORGY AND BESS (co-written with DuBose Heyward), is constantly revived in opera houses and theatres throughout the world. Concurrently with the Gershwins’ musical theatre and film work, George attained great success in the concert arena as a piano virtuoso, conductor, and composer of such celebrated works as RHAPSODY IN BLUE, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, and the CONCERTO IN F.
http://gershwin.com/the-gershwin-brothers/
"Someone to Watch Over Me" was introduced in the first preview of the musical Oh, Kay! in Philadelphia on October 18, 1926, by Gertrude Lawrence, the British star of musical revues and musical comedy. The story was typical for Twenties shows that featured complicated plots tossing together the rich and famous with the hoi polloi. This one included American millionaires, flappers, British aristocrats hard-up for money, and bootleggers all involved in "mistaken identities and zany deceptions," which provide "the usual opportunities for the principals and chorus to burst into song" (Hyland, p. 112). "Someone To Watch Over Me," one of the great love songs in American musical theater history, is performed by Lawrence in the title role of Kay. During the second act, she appears on stage alone pouring out her heart to a rag doll. Kay, a British aristocrat disguised as a housemaid in love with an American playboy is feeling lonesome and insecure. She is despairing of her chances for winning his affection, or, for that matter, of ever finding anybody to care for her. She shares her feelings of needing someone to watch over her with the doll.
http://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/s/someone_to_watch_over_me.html
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein
I Enjoy Being a Girl
Rodgers was born June 28, 1902 in Queens, NYC, and studied music at the Institute of Musical Arts (what is now Julliard).
The other half of the duo, Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein II also came from a theatrical family. However, Oscar's father would not allow his son to follow in his footsteps. Instead he pursued a law degree at Columbia University and Columbia Law School. He took part in his first play at 19 after his father died, and subsequently dropped out of law school to pursue the theatre.
Rodgers was the first person to win what became known as the EGOT: he won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and a Tony. He's one of only two people to have also won a Pulitzer Prize! He was the principle composer for more than 900 songs and 43 musicals. As librettist, producer, and director, Hammerstein won two Oscars, eight Tony awards, a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.
https://study.com/academy/lesson/rodgers-hammerstein-biography-musicals-lesson.html
Fred Ebb and John Kander
Mein Herr
Ebb was introduced to composer John Kander in 1964. The legendary team would stay together for 21 years.
The first successful Kander & Ebb collaboration was on the song "My Coloring Book," recorded by Kitty Kallen, Sandy Stewart, and Barbra Streisand. The duo's first stage musical, Golden Gate, went unrealized, but it did convince producer Harold Prince to hire them for his new Broadway show Flora, The Red Menace, a satire of Greenwich Village bohemian culture and radical politics that starred Liza Minnelli in her Tony Award-winning Broadway debut. Though not a hit, the show solidified Kander and Ebb as a team and Liza Minnelli as a star.
The next year, Prince commissioned Kander & Ebb to create the score for a musical version of I Am A Camera, which was to be produced under the name of Cabaret. In 1966, Cabaret opened, winning seven Tony Awards including Best Musical and Best Score of the Season Award. The original production ran for 1,166 performances, has been revived three times and produced a 1972 film version starring Liza Minnelli (a role which earned her a Best Actress Oscar Award).
For nearly five decades, Kander and Ebb have been one of Broadway's preeminent songwriting teams, the longest-running music-and-lyrics partnership in Broadway musical history. Minnelli once said, "The greatest thing about Kander and Ebb is you sing their songs and you feel good."
https://www.songhall.org/profile/Fred_Ebb
Cabaret takes place from 1929-1930, a time when Berlin, in the midst of a post-World War I economic depression, is transitioning from a center of underground, avant-garde cultural epicenter to the beginnings of Hitler’s totalitarian regime and the rise of the Nazi Party. Into this world enters Clifford Bradshaw, a struggling American writer looking for inspiration for his next novel. On his first night in Berlin, Cliff wanders into the Kit Kat Klub, a seedy nightclub overseen by the strange, omniscient and gender-bending Master of Ceremonies, “the Emcee.” Here, Cliff meets Sally Bowles, a vivacious, talented cabaret performer, and an utterly lost soul. Sally and Cliff begin a relationship, which blossoms unexpectedly into a dream-like romance. As time passes, however, the situation in Berlin changes from exciting and vital to ominous and violent; Ernst, Cliff’s first German friend, turns out to be an up-and-coming member of the Nazi Party, and Herr Schultz, a fellow boarder at Fraulein Schneider’s guest house (and Schneider’s fiancee), is the victim of an Anti-Semitic hate crime. When he finds out that Sally is pregnant, Cliff decides that they must leave for America at once, before things get any worse. Sally, afraid, confused, and unsure that she’ll ever really be able to trade the sexy, illicit cabaret lifestyle for motherhood, gets an abortion, and tells Cliff that he must leave without her. With a distinctly Brechtian dose of provocation and a score featuring songs that have become classics of the American Musical Theater, Cabaret is a fierce, meaty musical that pushes the boundaries of the form and literally holds “the mirror up to nature.”
Stephen Sondheim
Moments in the Woods
Stephen Sondheim was born in 1930 and raised in New York City. He graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where he began a lifetime of award winning, taking down the renowned Hutchinson Prize for Music Composition, following which he studied theory and composition with Milton Babbitt.
Sondheim has written prolifically and profusely for motion pictures, television dramas, and background songs and scores for legitimate theater, in addition to his extensive catalog of Broadway scores. In fact, Sondheim is one of the very few tunesmiths to have garnered both Tony awards and Oscars for his multi-directional output, not to mention literally countless other accolades for his unique talents.
Sondheim is the owner of five Tony Awards (Best Score for a Musical) for “Into the Woods,” “Sweeney Todd.” “A Little Night Music,” “Follies” and “Company.” All these shows also won New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, as did “Pacific
Overtures” and “Sunday in the Park with George,” the latter also receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1985, with music and lyrics by Sondheim and book by James Lapine.
https://www.songhall.org/awards/winner/Stephen_Sondheim
“Be careful what you wish for” seems to be the ongoing theme in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Brothers Grimm inspired musical, Into the Woods. The story follows The Baker and his wife who wish to have a child, Cinderella who wishes to go the King’s Festival, and Jack who wishes his cow would give some milk. When the Baker and his wife are visited by the neighborhood witch, who reveals to them that she placed a curse on their family, the two set off on a journey into the woods to reverse the curse. Also in the woods, we meet Little Red, who is trying to visit her grandmother, the Wolf who loves tasty little girls, the Witch’s daughter Rapunzel, and the Princes chasing after their loves. By the end of Act I, everyone has gotten their wish and will seemingly live happily ever after. But in Act II, when Jack’s beanstalk brings them a visit from an angry Giant, we see how the consequences of their actions haunt them in disastrous ways. The community must come together to save each other and their kingdom, but sacrifices must be made.
Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg
I'd Give My Life for You
The lyricist Alain Boublil, 57 was born in Tunisia and moved to Paris at 18. He began his musical career as a publisher and producer. Claude-Michel Schonberg, composer, 54, was born in Brittany of Hungarian parents, and wrote and performed pop songs at university. Boublil and Schonberg's partnership is one of the most successful in musical history, producing Les Miserables, Miss Saigon and Martin Guerre, which won the 1996 Olivier Award for Best Musical and is about to reopen, in revised form, in Leeds.
In 1978 Schonberg and Boublil conceived the idea for a stage musical version of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, which opened at the Palias de Sports in Paris in 1980. The musical opened to acclaim in London in 1985 and on Broadway in 1987. The Broadway production was nominated for twelve Tony Awards and won eight, including Best Musical and Best Original Score . In 1989, Schönberg and Boublil took London by storm with the musical Miss Saigon, which starred Lea Salonga and Jonathan Pryce. In its transition to Broadway, the show broke advance-ticket sales, earning $24 million before its premiere on April 11, 1991 . The show was nominated for ten Tony awards, including Best Musical and Best Original Score.
https://www.last.fm/music/Claude-Michel+Sch%C3%B6nberg/+wiki
In the last days of the Vietnam War, 17-year-old Kim is forced to work in a Saigon bar run by a notorious character known as the Engineer. There, she meets and falls in love with an American G.I. named Chris, but they are torn apart by the fall of Saigon. For 3 years, Kim goes on an epic journey of survival to find her way back to Chris, who has no idea he’s fathered a son.
https://www.miss-saigon.com/us-tour/about-the-show
I'd Give My Life for You is a solo sung by Kim, declaring her devotion to her son Tam. It is the final solo of Act I as Exodus begins on its final notes.https://misssaigon.fandom.com/wiki/I%27d_Give_My_Life_for_You
Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick
Far From the Home I Love
Sheldon Harnick is one of the most distinguished lyricists in the history of musical theater. He studied music at Northwestern University and was eventually drawn to Broadway.
By 1958 he had joined forces with the composer Jerry Bock, and the team of Bock and Harnick would turn out a series of musicals that included some of the best loved in the middle 20th century. Their first joint venture was The Body Beautiful (1958), a musical about an aspiring boxer, which had only a brief run on Broadway.
Their next collaboration, however, was a smash hit, Fiorello! (1959), about New York’s celebrated mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Tom Bosley played the corruption-routing mayor, and the musical enjoyed great acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and several Tonys, including one for Best Musical.
But the most successful musical that Bock and Harnick worked on is surely Fiddler on the Roof (1964), the original production of which ran for an unprecedented 3,242 performances. A tale about a Jewish husband and wife and their five daughters, all living in a Russian shtetl in the early 20th century, the musical snapped up numerous Tonys®, including Best Musical, Best Composer and Lyricist, and Best Choreography and Best Direction of a Musical (both for Jerome Robbins).
https://masterworksbroadway.com/artist/sheldon-harnick/
Set in Russia at the turn of the 1905 Revolution, Fiddler on the Roof centres around Tevye, a Jewish man who works hard to ensure that he raises his five daughters with traditional Jewish customs. When the village matchmaker brings news that a wealthy butcher wants to marry their eldest child Tzeitel, it’s clear that pairing people together isn’t what Tzeitel wants. Tzeitel wants to marry her childhood friend, Motel the tailor. Eventually, Tzeitel and Motel marry each other, with local Jews joining in with the ceremony, but they are not able to celebrate for too long, with Russians wreaking havoc in their community.
Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss
I Don't Need Your Love
The two met at Cambridge University, where Marlow studied English at Robinson College and Moss read history at Gonville & Caius. They were drawn to each other by a shared love of pop music and dancing, but it was not until their final year that they began to write together. The seed for the idea of SIX came to Marlow while he was daydreaming in poetry class, and he scribbled down his thoughts, followed by “need Lucy.”
The idea of writing SIX in the first place came from Moss and Marlow’s sense that there simply aren’t enough substantive roles for women. “We had loads of women and non-binary friends who never got the good parts,” Moss explains. “Women have emotional ballads; the guys have big character songs,” Marlow adds. The musical was influenced by the same cultural conversations that shaped the #MeToo movement, but the darkness of contemporary gender politics is lightly applied. “Turns out some guys just employ women to get them into their private chambers,” says Katherine Howard at one point. “It was a different time back then.”
Over the course of about 10 nonconsecutive days, they put together the basics for the show. By the summer of 2017, it was being staged (with Moss as choreographer) as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the annual cultural jamboree that plays out across church halls, street corners, pubs, and, in this case, a converted conference room in a hotel.
https://www.vogue.com/article/six-playwrights-lucy-moss-toby-marlow
Six, the modern retelling of the lives of Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives, has extended its London run into 2020. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival five-star hit runs until 5 January 2020 at the West End’s Arts Theatre.
Created by friends Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, Six unfolds as part musical, part all-out pop performance driven by the vocally diverse ensemble cast. Each of the six wives, pigeonholed by childhood slogan “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived”, take centre stage to tell their tale. Ultimately, they declare themselves more than a rhyme, and more than just the wives of an infamous King.
https://discover.ticketmaster.co.uk/theatre/six-musical-review-40265/