This film features how Oscar Hammerstein and Rouben Mamoulian created a new genre in American theatre, the musical. The following artists are featured: Stephen Sondheim; Agnes de Mille; Bob Fosse; Harold Prince; Joseph Papp; Ken Russell; Lorenz Hart; Richard Rodgers; William Hammerstein.

Combining music, dance and dialogue to tell visually and emotionally engaging stories, Musical theater can be traced back to ancient Greece, where musicians would often accompany lines delivered by actors. But it wasn’t until the late 19th century that musical theatre took hold in America.

When two or more notes sound together, harmony occurs. This interaction of pitches, understood in vastly different ways around the world, is analyzed here in jazz, chamber music, Bosnian ganga singing, early music plainchants, and barbershop quartets.

Melody— the part of music we most often remember— is examined here both scientifically and poetically, from a strict sequence of pitches to a group of notes "in love with each other." We see and hear melodies shaped, elaborated, and developed within Western classical music, the Arabic maqam tradition, Irish dance music and sean-nós singing, and Indian raga.

Marking time and moving through our bodies, rhythm has a special relationship to both musical form and worldwide dance traditions. How rhythm structures music is examined through the American marching band, North Indian tala, Japanese shakuhachi tradition, West African drumming, and Afro-Cuban dance music.

"Heart of the Wood," by composer Howard Goodall and lyricist Charles Hart, is a song from a musical based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. "Medieval March," by Debbie Wiseman, is the theme from a TV movie about Hans Christian Andersen. By deconstructing these two pieces, this program analyzes how music composed for the stage and screen performs its dramatic functions.

Radio 1 presenter Alice Levine meets Kaffe Keating, the actor who plays Christopher in the hit West End play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, to learn how using video and lighting design can enhance storytelling. Kaffe shows her some of the effects from this highly technological production, and explains how they can be more flexible than naturalistic design.

New instrument types and new electronic media for distribution are obvious results of technology, but so were the first bone flute and the first stretched catgut. How technology affects music is examined here in a case study of the flute, and in an examination of developing recording and composing technologies where the roles of composer, musician, arranger, and conductor begin to fuse.

Acting teacher Timothy Craig believes it's an actor's ability to move with purpose that makes her different from an animated character.

In this program, CBS Television’s president and CEO, Leslie Moonves and Alex Yemenidjian, chairman and CEO of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, tell all as they consider the evolution of entertainment as Hollywood goes digital. In addition, MBA students and faculty from The Anderson School at UCLA ask questions about increasing the racial diversity among TV/film executives, dealing with actor and writer strikes, and career options for MBA graduates in the movie industry.

Valuable for students aspiring to enter the world of filmmaking, The Crew series vividly presents the jobs and lives of film production workers and explores the technical aspects of producing a film by talking to the people who make it happen.

One of the joys and challenges of being an actor is the unpredictable nature of what new character may enter your life for some period of time.

An elderly comedian was quoted on his deathbed as saying, “Dying is hard but comedy is harder.” On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin said in his autobiography, “All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.” Surely the truth lies somewhere in between.

As the famous acting teacher Robert Lewis said, “The problem with acting is that the better you do it, the more everyone thinks they can do what you do.” Never has this been clearer than in film acting. Film acting is not like operatic singing or ballet dancing, which easily proves to the audience that the performers can do things that the viewer cannot.

Music and acting…there was a time when they were inseparable. But today we have divided these two great art forms and we only put them together in the opera and the musical. How does the music influence an Actor’s work?

The power of Shakespeare’s plays still makes them among the most attended theatre events in the English-speaking world. The plays also continue to attract high quality actors in all phases of their careers.

This documentary profiles Canadian actor Christopher Plummer of the Shakespearean Theater, best known as The Sound of Music’s Captain von Trapp. In his dressing room, Plummer dons his make-up and prepares to enter stage as Cyrano de Bergerac.

In a space outside of time, Indigenous playwright Yves Sioui Durand encounters the masks that have been created for his plays over a period of more than 30 years. Inhabited by the spirit of the Elders, these faces influence the actors’ every move as they bring to life the memory of the First Peoples of the Americas.

This short film depicts how a small Canadian city, bearing the name of Stratford and by a river Avon, created its own renowned Shakespearean theatre. The film tells how the idea grew, how a famous British director, international stars and Canadian talent were recruited, and how the Stratford Shakespearean Festival finally became a triumphant reality.