Musical TheaterMusical theater is a form of entertainment that tells stories through songs, wo rds, and dancing. The history of this form goes back several thousand years. Some of the first musicals were developed in ancient India and Greece. The Greeks added music and dances to their popular stage plays. Some of the great Greek playwrights were even known to compose their own music to accompany their plays.Hundreds of years later, in 3 B.C., this form reemerged. The Roman comic writer Plautus added songs, dances, and orchestrations to his plays. In order to make their dance steps loud enough to be heard by audiences in large open theaters, the actors put metal chips on their shoes. These were the earliest form of tap shoes.During the Middle Ages, plays became a method for the Church to spread its teachings. The liturgy was taught through religious dramas set to chants. These plays were so popular that they became a form of entertainment separate from the Church. In them, prose dialogs and liturgical chants alternated to keep audiences interested.These forms developed into the time of the Renaissance, forming an Italian tradition. Silly clowns acted their way through stories known by all of the common people. This comic entertainment form was known as Opera Buffa. This new tradition carried over to France in the 1600s. There, the great writer Moliere was able to convert some of his comedies into musicals. These were accompanied by music written by Jean Baptiste Lully.This form of entertainment spread between countries in Europe and kept changing. In Germany and Britain, the 1700s saw the rise of two different forms of musical theater. The first was the ballad opera. The writers of this dramatic form of theaterborrowedpopular songs of the day and rewrote the lyrics to fit their needs. But comic operas were different in that they had original scores and plot lines that were full of romance.The word “borrowed” in paragraph 5 is closest in meaning to...