可以搜索公号【璐璐的英文小酒馆】或者添加【luluxjg2】咨询课程or加入社群，查看文稿和其他精彩内容哦~

Hi everyone, and welcome back to one of your favorite segments, The Sound of Musicals. 欢迎回来大家最喜欢的板块之一【曲外之音】. And it has been a long time, Oliver.

Hello, it has been a very long time, yes. But I'm very happy to be back. It's nice to be back.

So what is the first musical we're gonna talk about now that you're back？

I thought because it's been such a long time, maybe you would like to choose something for today.

Okay. I was hoping you would ask that. Before I say the name of the musical, I want you to listen to this music. (Music) Does it sound familiar to you？

It does. I think I recognize the band who made those songs.

Okay, so you know which musical we're gonna talk about today.

I can take a very good guess, yes.

And it is ?

I’m guessing it's going to be Mamma Mia, the musical made around the music of ABBA, the songs we just heard.

Yeah, I mean, I sort of got the feeling that Mamma Mia wouldn't be your top picks.

It's not in my top ten, no.

Yeah, because it's so lighthearted. It's such a fun musical and you like the heavier stuff like you want it miserable instead of lighthearted.

It is more my style is the heavier hitting musicals with deeper messages, but I do enjoy a nice, lighthearted musical as well sometimes. There's a place for them, definitely there is .

Yeah, I mean musical theater is supposed to be more lighthearted, right? Especially compared to things like opera.

Oh, definitely so. Compared to opera and the standard plays, in many cases, musicals are the the lighthearted, forget the world for one evening and jump into a story with good music. You can dance and sing to later, things like that, musicals are a good escape.

Okay, so Oliver, since you know a lot about musicals, even the ones that you don't particularly favor, can you give us a little bit of the background like when was the premiere and just a general background?

Okay, yeah. So the musical first of all, it came out in 1999 in London. So that was when it premiered in London. And a year later in 2000, it made the trip over to the US, it has been all around the world since then. It is popular in many places, more than 50 countries and it's been on all of the continents. So it's a very, very popular musical.

Yeah. It is very popular and has been on Broadway in West End, in London for so many years. So this musical is called a jukebox musical点唱机音乐剧jukebox is, you know the olden days when you go to a bar there is like a jukebox where you can put in a coin and you can choose the music you wanted to play. So why is it called jukebox musical?

It's actually a really popular thing nowadays. Lots of bands are getting their own musicals. ABBA was one of the first, but since then there have been lots of them. They're called jukebox musicals because they use music that wasn't designed for the musical. It was released by a band. You could buy it in a shop or nowadays you can download it and listen to it online, but it's not connected to the musical.

People have used that and made the musical around it, rather than the other way, which is more common.

Yeah, it's basically, the traditional musicals, they are completely like original songs. They were written for this particular musical. But a jukebox musical is, first of all, there is a very popular singer or very popular band. And then because their albums or their songs are so popular, people... the producers decided to make a whole musical based on their existing music.

That's exactly yeah. They're kind of using the popularity of the music that's already there to create a musical. So they make a story to fit the music rather than in the traditional way they make the music to fit the story. So it's kind of a reverse, but it does mean they're really popular with audiences because everybody knows the songs, everybody can sing along. So they're really popular.

Especially if you're a fan of the band or the singer.

Definitely yeah.