Return To The Forbidden Planet
Return To The Forbidden Planet
Return to the Forbidden Planet is a Jukebox musical by director Bob Carlton based on Shakespeare's The Tempest and the 1950s science fiction film Forbidden Planet (which itself drew its plot loosely from The Tempest).
Return to the Forbidden Planet started life with the Bubble Theatre Company as a production for open-air performance in a tent. A revised version of the musical opened, indoors, at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in the mid 1980s. It later moved to the Tricycle Theatre in London. After some rework a final version opened the Cambridge Theatre in London's West End in September 1989. It won the Olivier Award for best musical for both 1989 and 1990.
The plot follows the crew of a routine survey flight under the command of Captain Tempest. Their spaceship is drawn mysteriously to the planet D'Illyria where mad scientist Doctor Prospero and his lovely daughter Miranda are marooned.
Musical Theatre
Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining music, songs, spoken dialogue and dance. The emotional content of the piece - humor, pathos, love, anger - as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called simply, "musicals".
Musicals are performed all around the world. They may be presented in large venues, such as big budget West End and Broadway theatre productions in London and New York City, or in smaller fringe theatre, Off-Broadway or regional productions, on tour, or by amateur groups in schools, theatres and other performance spaces. In addition to Britain and North America, there are vibrant musical theatre scenes in many countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia.
Some famous musicals include Show Boat, Oklahoma!, West Side Story, The Fantasticks, Hair, A Chorus Line, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Rent, The Producers and Wicked.
Theatre
Theatre is a branch of the performing arts. While any performance may be considered theatre, as a performing art, it focuses almost exclusively on live performers creating a self contained drama. A performance qualifies as dramatic by creating a representational illusion. By this broad definition, theatre had existed since the dawn of man, as a result of the human tendency for storytelling. Since its inception, theatre has come to take on many forms, utilizing speech, gesture, music, dance, and spectacle, combining the other performing arts, often as well as the visual arts, into a single artistic form.
The word derives from the Ancient Greek theatron meaning "the seeing place."