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While the plot of West Side Story is taken from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the atmosphere is rooted in the tough, swinging New York youth culture of the 1950s, as seen in the eternally cool 1961 movie adaptation. Rival street gangs took on the dramatic weight of battling nations and thanks to an angular, jazzy score by Leonard Bernstein, West Side Story made musical theatre feel sharp and socially relevant.

Many of West Side Story's songs subsequently lodged in the popular imagination. A decade after it was first performed on stage, English prog rock band recast the song America - a jaunty, playful ode to the exciting possibilities of immigration - in an entirely different light. Their mostly instrumental 1968 cover set the song to a swinging beat, adding keyboard runs of violently clashing notes and a spoken coda which deliberately curdles the optimism of the original song: “America is pregnant with promise and anticipation but is murdered by the hand of the inevitable.” Bernstein hated it.

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Hair - or Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, to give it its full title - was a product of 60s pop culture that then came to define it, especially for onlookers. A reflection of the growing hippie scene in America, it was unabashedly counter-cultural, racially integrated, liberal in discussing drug use and sex, and contained live stage nudity. It also gave a leg-up to future Rocky Horror Show stars Tim Curry, Richard O’Brien and , as well as , glam rocker and Floella Benjamin of 91热爆 children’s TV fame. The songs were a vibrant mix of rock and soul, with the medley Aquarius / Let the Sunshine In being covered by everyone from to the crowd at Woodstock - the latter version being a true mark of acceptance from the scene it portrayed.

Having realised that a musical about the life of Christ might struggle to find backers, and Tim Rice elected to develop their first hit show as a concept album first, during the aftermath of ’s celebrated rock opera Tommy. The album featured Joe Cocker’s Grease Band as the pit orchestra, and starred Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan as Jesus and Manfred Mann’s Mike d’Abo as King Herod. The stage versions and movie adaptation only followed once the album had gone to No.1 in America.

As the following clip from 91热爆 One Breakfast shows, Jesus Christ Superstar is a musical that lends itself to contemporary adaptations; Laurence Connor's 2012 revival set the story against the backdrop of the Occupy movement and the London riots.

References to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s best-loved work are littered through pop culture, including French and Saunders spoofing I Have Confidence in Me, the ’s own ear-shredding tribute The Sound of Music, and covering Do-Re-Mi. Perhaps the coolest Sound of Music tribute of them all was ’s 1961 album My Favorite Things, on which the jazz legend improvised over themes from four stage musical songs, taking the title track into a realm entirely unencumbered by raindrops, roses, or whiskery kittens.

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During the 1970s, grown-ups who were teenagers during the 50s took part in a mass nostalgia trip for the innocent rebellion of that era, and this was reflected in TV shows such as Happy Days, movies like American Graffiti, and the stage show Grease. The 1978 movie adaptation was a true pop culture phenomenon, making a pop star out of the actor John Travolta and securing No.1 singles for soundtrack hits You’re the One that I Want and Summer Nights. This avalanche of popularity masked the movie’s adult subject matter and created a feelgood family musical with an edge.

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Although it has been performed many times on various cake-splattered stages, Bugsy Malone was a film first. Its memorable score was written by , the songwriter and composer behind big hits for the - We’ve Only Just Begun and Rainy Days and Mondays - and ’s Fill Your Heart from his 1971 album Hunky Dory. His most surprising commission, however, came in 2014 when invited him to co-write and sing the songs Touch and Beyond on their 2014 album Random Access Memories.

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The greatest musical theatre songs work just as well out of the context of the story they are telling, so you really don’t need to know that Annie is the story of a hot-headed girl living in an orphanage during the Great Depression to appreciate the sentiment behind Tomorrow or It’s the Hard Knock Life. sampled the latter for his own Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem) in 1998, which also led to a spoof version sung by Dr Evil and Mini-Me for the movie Austin Powers in Goldmember. More recently, it was sampled by for their 2014 single Mama Said.

The conceit of Jerry Springer: The Opera is that reality TV contains the same grand themes of temptation, betrayal and redemption as any of Wagner or Verdi’s greatest works, it just lacks the tunes. Comic composer Richard Thomas provided those, while the surreal, challenging script came from comedian Stewart Lee; he left in the grisly, crude reality (and language) of Jerry Springer’s TV show, while weaving in elements of magical realism, including a battle with Satan and a tap-dancing routine involving the Ku Klux Klan. It managed to provoke an outraged reaction from Christian groups that would be the envy of Marilyn Manson.

Stage musicals have always been unashamedly populist, and so were - which of course makes them natural bedfellows. Mamma Mia! is the 1994 show that used ABBA songs to soundtrack the chaos and confusion surrounding a wedding at which there are three potential fathers of the bride. Its galloping success - and subsequent feelgood movie adaptation - paved the way for subsequent jukebox musicals, such as We Will Rock You () and Our House (). Arguably without Mamma Mia!, might not have been able to turn their American Idiot album into a successful Broadway show.

As an authentic voice of the streets, rap music hasn’t traditionally been a good fit for the giddy, sparkly world of musical theatre. Hamilton has changed all that, although it sensibly hasn’t tried to recreate contemporary life on the Broadway stage. Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote his biographical musical of Alexander Hamilton - America’s first Secretary of the Treasury - using rap as his principal musical mode because he saw great parallels between Hamilton’s story (and his readiness to beef with other founding fathers) and the rags to riches stories of hustler rappers such as Jay Z and Ice Cube. Miranda did such a good job that the soundtrack album stormed up the Billboard rap album charts, and he won a Pulitzer Prize into the bargain.