Opera & Musical Theatre Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which 1996 rock musical by Jonathan Larson, updates the plot of La boheme to a group of young artists and musicians in New York's East Village living with poverty, eviction and AIDS, and includes the song Seasons of Love?

Question 2

Which 1975 musical, staged on a bare stage marked only by a white line, dramatises a day-long audition for the unnamed chorus of a Broadway show, with the dancers stepping forward one by one to tell their life stories?

Question 3

Which 1950 musical with songs by Frank Loesser, set among the gamblers, showgirls and street missionaries of a stylised Times Square drawn from the stories of Damon Runyon, includes Luck Be a Lady and Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat?

Question 4

Which 2001 musical, adapted by Mel Brooks from his own 1967 film, follows two crooked producers who scheme to get rich by staging a deliberate flop, a musical in praise of Hitler, only for it to become a smash hit?

Question 5

What is the German-derived name for the rehearsal, usually the first with the full orchestra, at which the singers sit and simply sing through the score with the players, with no acting, movement or costume, to fix the musical side before adding the staging back in?

Question 6

Which composer-lyricist, who first made his name writing only the words for West Side Story and Gypsy, went on to write both music and lyrics for Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods, prizing wit, ambivalence and intricate craft over easy tunes?

Question 7

What is the name, Italian for little book, for the complete text of an opera, the words the characters sing, written by a separate author working with or for the composer?

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About Opera & Musical Theatre

Opera and musical theatre are two branches of the same tree, sung drama on a stage, and this quiz covers both in eighty questions. Each describes a work, a voice type, a role, a piece of jargon, a theatre, a performer or an event, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains it with the story or the record attached.

The first pack is the essentials of each side. For opera: the aria and the recitative, the libretto, the soprano and the tenor, bel canto and verismo, the operas Carmen, La boheme and The Magic Flute, the houses La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera, and the stars Maria Callas and Luciano Pavarotti. For musical theatre: the book musical, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Hamilton and the Tony Awards.

The second pack goes wider. The mezzo, baritone and bass voices, coloratura and the trouser role; the operas Aida, Tosca, The Barber of Seville, Madama Butterfly and Don Giovanni; the Bayreuth Festival, Porgy and Bess, the singers Domingo, Caruso and Leontyne Price, and the workings of surtitles, the claque and Gilbert and Sullivan. Then the musicals: operetta, Show Boat, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line, Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, Rent, The Lion King, Wicked, Cabaret; the jukebox and concept and mega musicals; Bob Fosse, Hal Prince and the eleven o'clock number.

The third pack is history and lore: the Florentine Camerata that invented opera; The Threepenny Opera and Nixon in China; the sunken orchestra pit; Marian Anderson's 1955 Metropolitan debut and the disastrous first Bayreuth Festival of 1876; the record-breaking run of The Phantom of the Opera; the controversy around The Mikado; the opera-or-musical argument over Porgy and Bess; the curtain call and the Gypsy Robe; Sweeney Todd, the out-of-town tryout, Evita, The Book of Mormon; the Callas and Tebaldi rivalry; the horseshoe auditorium and the Paris chandelier that inspired the Phantom; the record 12 Tonys of The Producers; and the swing and the sitzprobe.

The wrong answers are always the same kind of thing as the right one, a work beside works, a voice beside voices, so a shaky guess is easily caught. Images are used only where they cannot give the answer away: a plain photo of an empty auditorium, an orchestra pit or a bare stage appears on a question about a term or a person, chosen to fit every one of the four options equally. Facts and dates have been checked, and a few myths, such as the tale that Aida opened the Suez Canal, are corrected.