Specificity is critical to any meaningful discussion of the musical stage. This list aims to address several terms that are commonly misunderstood.

Book, Lyrics, and Music
The book of a stage musical comprises the dialogue, the structure, the characters, the environment, and even, to an extent, the musical routine. It is sometimes referred to as the libretto within the context of the legitimate musical stage. The lyrics are the sung words. The term “score” has come to mean the combination of lyrics and music.

Librettist, Lyricist, and Composer
The librettist, or book writer, is the author of the book; the lyricist is the author of the lyrics; and the composer is the author of the music. The functions of librettist, lyricist, and composer need not necessarily be performed by or limited to three individuals, and not all composers write their own music arrangements or orchestrations.

Story vs. Plot
Story refers to what a show is about. Plot refers to the typically chronological incidents and events that happen over the course of the story.

Show vs. Production
The show, or musical, is the property – book, lyrics, and music. The production is the presentation of any given show, or musical, by a specific cast and creative team. The original production can, to an extent, inform the show, but the show and the production are ultimately two different things.

Broadway
Today, Broadway refers to a relatively small collection of legitimate playhouses located within a specific quadrant around Times Square. (Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater is the sole outlier.) Each playhouse is further required to have a seating capacity greater than 499. In the early 1900s, though, Broadway was a sprawling entertainment mecca encompassing vaudeville, nightclubs, burlesque, and legit. It even hosted a minstrel show from time to time. The term steadily narrowed in definition over the course of the 20th century and ultimately arrived at its present definition by the early 1980s.

Legitimate Stage
This term has been used historically to differentiate plays and musicals from other forms of stage entertainment (e.g. vaudeville, burlesque, cabaret).

Golden Age
This popular term, a bit of nostalgic sensationalism, has no common or consistent meaning. It is often used to denote the middle of the 20th century and what is incorrectly perceived to have been a particular style of show written and produced during that period. But the middle of the 20th century was defined by no one style, no one story, no one sound, and no one theme. Guys and Dolls (1950), for instance, is a very different show than Cabaret (1966), Lady in the Dark (1941), Little Me (1962), or My Fair Lady (1956). It has separately been suggested that the “Golden Age” was a unique period in the middle of the 20th century when the musical stage overlapped with popular culture. But the musical stage was popular culture prior to the rise of radio and talking pictures in the 1920s. What actually made the middle of the 20th century unique, specifically in terms of the legitimate musical stage, was the maturation of the American musical that took place through a pronounced creative movement, begun decades prior and brought to a close in the 1960s, to better the art of musical storytelling.

Comedy vs. Camp
Camp, often characterized as a homosexual or queer sensibility, is a specific style of entertainment defined by artificial, affected, and untruthful performance. It began to flourish in the 1960s and 70s, led by the likes of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre Company and spurred on by the contemporaneous embrace of nostalgia, sneering parody, and antiquated show business glamour. The American musical comedy, as matured in the middle of the 20th century, is not inherently camp, nor is it inherently campy, no matter how big the characters or how great the buffoonery. These boisterous works, like Barefoot Boy with Cheek (1947), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), and Wonderful Town (1953), are rooted in high stakes and honesty. George Abbott, who directed the original productions of these three particular musicals, was a master of comedy and farce. “A helluva lot of directors think you get fun by being funny,” he once professed. “If it’s a good show, you get fun by being real.” This very clear distinction extends to contemporary works of musical comedy as well. The exception, of course, would be a musical comedy specifically written as camp.

Revue
A revue is a scripted musical show without a story or a plot. It consists of original sketches, songs, and dances organized into a specific routine. Revue began to take shape in America in the 1890s and ultimately developed into a modern, sophisticated, and clearly articulated medium by the late 1920s. It was perhaps the most influential form of entertainment on the legitimate stage throughout the first half of the 20th century: sharp, dynamic, innovative, intelligent, exceptionally difficult, and exquisitely theatrical. But, revue experienced a steep decline in the 1950s and 60s. And, by the 1970s, the term had become a nondescript catch-all for anthologies, retrospectives, song cycles, concerts, and the like.

Burlesque
Burlesque is a boisterous stage style characterized by slapstick, travesty, and knockabout comedy. It is also an amorphous stage form now commonly associated with striptease and performance art. But, the form, prior to the 1930s, was, like the style, characterized by slapstick, travesty, and knockabout comedy. And, during the first three decades of the 20th century, burlesque established itself as a clean, cheery national institution with a home on Broadway at the Columbia Theatre. The Columbia, however, closed in 1930, and burlesque became synonymous with stripping thereafter.

Concept Musical
This term has no clear, practical meaning. The works, like Assassins (1991) and A Chorus Line (1975), that have been labeled as such are simply nontraditional in their storytelling. They often trace a theme or a psyche, often lack a purely linear plot, occasionally employ a framing device, and often find their composition heavily influenced by revue.

Jukebox Musical
This popular term, which caught on in the 21st century, has no common or consistent meaning. The Report specifically defines the term as a story-driven musical with a score composed of preexisting songs unassociated with the stage that were written for popular consumption in a contemporary style relative to roughly the 1950s and beyond.