Musical Theatre/Projects & Assessments

Triple Threat

• Project – Musical theatre performers must be able to sing, dance and act.  Enable your students to develop all three skills by staging scenes and musical numbers from a single musical.  Make sure that you have developed a supportive class community so that everyone feels comfortable singing and dancing in front of one another.  If possible, collaborate with the music and dance teachers to combine classes and encourage the students to help each other develop the necessary skills.  Be sure to let your students know that they will not necessarily be graded on their performance abilities.  Taking the risks and trying out different techniques are much more important than whether someone has raw talent or not. 
• Assessment – Personal improvement and performances using all three skills.

U.S. Musical Research

• Project – Provide the students with a list of U.S. musicals that includes a variety of composers (Stephen Sondheim, Rogers and Hammerstein, etc.), directors (Julie Taymor, James Lapine, etc.) and choreographers (Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse, Twyla Tharp, etc.) and ask them to pick one from the list.  Ask each student to research their choice and present their musical to the class in a creative way.  They can sing or play songs from the show, teach a dance number, perform a monologue, discuss the history of the production, etc.  Encourage the students to be as creative and informative as possible.  As an alternate assignment, have the entire class research the body of work from one key musical theatre person such as Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Bob Fosse, etc.
• Assessment – Creative presentation on a U.S. musical.

Movie Musicals

• Project – Some of the most popular movies of all time have been musicals.  Show the students a movie version of a musical (The Phantom of the Opera, Grease, Chicago, Little Shop of Horrors, Hairspray, etc.) and, if possible, take them to see a live version.  Ask the students to write a critique of the movie in terms of its theatricality, the performances and how the movie version adjusts the script to work cinematically.
• Assessment – Class discussions and written critique.

Musicals Based on Plays

• Project – Discuss the process of turning a play script into a musical version of the script (like Romeo and Juliet becoming West Side Story and M Butterfly becoming Miss Saigon).  Show the students a non-musical and a musical version of the same story.  Ask them to pick the same scene in both versions and analyze how and why the scene changed from one script to the next.  As an alternate assignment, the students could create arguments for the scene that they think is the better of the two and support their opinion with evidence from the text to persuade their audience.
• Assessment – Class discussions and written analysis or argument.

Songs as Monologues

• Project – Assign each student a solo song from a muscial or have him or her pick one from a list.  Ask the students to rewrite the song from the songbook in the form of a monologue.  Then, have the students analyze the lyrics as they would any other monologue paying attention to beats and character objectives and tactics.  The students could perform their monologue as both a monologue and a song provided they feel comfortable performing solo in front of the class.  The purpose of this assignment is to help students recognize that an actor is still concerned with character analysis even as they switch from spoken word to song.  The same assignment could be done with a duet turning into a spoken word scene.
• Assessment – Written analysis and evidence of that work in performance.

Song Lyric Scenes

• Project – Have the students divide into small groups or pairs and select one of their favorite songs that is not from a musical.  Working from the lyrics and drawing inspiration from the music itself, the students will write a scene.  They can use direct quotes from the lyrics if they choose, but they do not have to.  The purpose of the assignment is to capture the quality of the song in a spoken word scene.
• Assessment –Written scene and performance.

Original Musical Theatre

• Project – Divide the class into small groups based on topics that interest them.  In these groups, they will create a five to ten minute original musical about their topics in which they have at least one song (it can be an existing song with the words changed), choreography and dialogue.  Give the students enough time to rehearse and prepare their musicals before they share them with the class.
• Assessment –Creation and performance of an original work that incorporates song, dance, written dialogue, character and story.