Tin Pan Alley to Today: 100 Years of Musical Theatre History
Vocal Styles and Techniques
When I first began entering high school musical theatre students in the NATS auditions back in the early 2000s, there were three requirements for repertoire:
- One piece must be written prior to 1960
- One piece must be written after 1960
- Three different composers – you couldn’t have two pieces by the same composer, even if one was written before 1960 and one after (even if their styles had radically changed)
And college auditions were pretty much the same way.
Now, the requirements for the NATS HS MT auditions are:
THREE contrasting musical theatre selections from musicals including film musicals, revues, operettas, musical theatre song cycles, or musical theatre song literature. Only one selection may be chosen from an operetta or musical theatre song literature.
And according to getacceptd.com, the common musical theatre repertoire requirements for college prescreens are:
- One musical theater song from any time period.
- One song of your choice from any time period and in any style that best suits you (musical theater, pop, hip-hop, folk, rock, rap, soul, country, punk, etc.). This song should contrast the style of the first selection.
Why learn about earlier eras?
So a lot of people are simply not familiar with or interested in older musical theater. Why even bother?
Because in 2025, Broadway musicals can be originals (Hadestown, The Outsiders, The Great Gatsby), they can be jukebox musicals (MJ, & Juliet, Moulin Rouge) or they can be revivals (Gypsy, Sunset Boulevard, Wonderful Town). A well-rounded performer will know how to adapt their vocal style and technique to suit the era in which the piece is written (while still appealing to modern sensibilities). I’ve sat in on auditions where people are auditioning for a pre-1970 musical but bringing repertoire that is contemporary and not at all in the right style.
One of my former students is Lissa deGuzman, who is currently standby for Elphaba in Wicked on Broadway, after playing her on the national tour for a year. Lissa can belt her face off, as is evidenced in multiple videos on YouTube:
Other roles she’s played on national tours, Broadway, and in regional theatre are Jasmine in Aladdin, Ann in King Kong, Vivienne in Legally Blonde, and Dawn in Waitress. All roles where you need to belt your face off.
But she’s also played Cinderella, Guenevere in Camelot, Maria in West Side Story, and recently did a symphony concert in which she sang Christine in Phantom, Audrey in Little Shop and Evita. So she’s not a one-trick pony.
She’s working regularly because she can sing anything and sings in the appropriate style for the roles she’s hired for. (And by the way, she could belt when she came to me – I didn’t teach her how to belt like that, just how to be healthy while doing it.)
In this next series of posts, I’d like to give you an overview of the evolution of musical theater from 1925-2025, exploring the shifts in vocal style and technique required for each era. We’ll start out with:
- Tin Pan Alley, 1925-1942
- The Golden Age, 1943-1959
- The Classic Era, 1960-1970
- The Concept Musical and the Mega-Musical, 1971-1989
- The Second Golden Age/The Disney Renaissance, 1990-2004
- Pop Goes the Musical!, 2005-2005
(The start and end dates of these are not drawn in stone – there is some overlap, which we’ll talk about. But these are convenient benchmarks.)
Stay tuned for an overview of the music of Tin Pan Alley and the Jazz Age!
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The content for this series is drawn from the musical theater course of the same name I gave online in 2020, which was the source material for the workshops I gave last weekend for the Maryland Thespians Festival at Towson University. If you would like to know more about musical theater style, either for you or for your students, contact me to find out about lessons, workshops, or masterclasses!