The article focuses on the specific historical contributions of filmed musicals and examines selected areas of intersection between stage and screen. The four significant domains of filmed musicals are mise-en-scène covering all aspects of the “look” within the film's frame that include setting, whether specially constructed or found in the everyday world, and lighting, both artificial and natural. Another domain is cinematography that involves three things such as photographic qualities of the shot such as color, hue, speed, perspective, framing, or the way that the borders of the particular image focus viewer attention, particularizing the image, and duration, or “take” that is the length of the camera's view of a specific scene before cutting to another. Another domain is editing that depends on qualities of the mise-en-scène and cinematography. The narrative sound film typically maintains the illusion of reality through deploying its combination of images and sounds so as to seem natural to audiences, whether by directly simulating experienced reality or by following familiar conventions of cinematic storytelling. Musicals adjust the default aesthetic of cinematic realism at nearly every turn, because in musical numbers characters appear to sing and dance their feelings in open violation of the restrained acting fostered by cinematic realism.

This article deals with different aspects of the history of the musical. The histories construct narratives of one sort or another and the events or series of events are linked in speech or writing to form a chain of causal relationships that may be roughly simultaneous (synchronic) and/or spread out over time (diachronic). The fundamentals involved in the construction of a specifically historical narrative are dependent on forms of documentation that include oral histories and folk tales or myths, eyewitness accounts of events, artifacts, and written documents of many types. Such documents may be cited without question, especially in earlier historical accounts, but more often a historian spends considerable time reading the documents critically. Historians characteristically aspire to factual accuracy, and critical assessment is a crucial part of a historian's task. The different approaches defining history include the formist approach that takes on the task of crafting explanations by cataloging the specificities creating the unique characteristics of a particular historical field. Another approach is the organicist approach that also works with such specificities but attempts to interrelate them as parts of an overarching whole. The third approach is the mechanistic strategy that seeks to understand the specificities of a given historical field as the results of some overarching set of causal laws. Lastly, the contextualist strategy that sees the same particulars as best explained by the set of contingent relationships obtained between the very particulars.

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They say I do it, ain't nobody caught me Sho' got to prove it on me -Ma Rainey Who knows how long the world of entertainment-theater, dance, and music-has been hospitable to sexual minorities? What forms of engagement have existed between popular music and people who dwell at the margins of the conventions of sex and gender? What did these variously cryptic and blatant encounters mean, and what might their traces mean to us? Scholars who study the myriad forms of popular music invented and performed since the late 19th century have only recently begun to ask questions like these. There are fascinating accounts of male and female impersonators on the American and British stage, and fugitive narratives and portraits of sexual outlaws and gender nonconformists in the lyrics of sheet music (and very occasionally, perhaps, in the cover art that advertises them), but the most striking presences are sonic; for once we learn how to listen, a stunning range of musical utterances can command our attention. These voices incarnate multitudinously complex identities and manners, zestfully framing an astonishing repertory of ways to make a flourishing life in difficult circumstances.