Chelsea Opera concert addresses the big question: Is it opera or musical theater?

An overly simplified comparison of genre, when distinguishing between opera and musical theater, looks at the ratio of words to music. It claims that opera is “sung through” while musicals rely on spoken word enhanced by music. In a staged concert coming up Saturday, Feb. 10, Chelsea Opera Company is going to explore the boundaries between the two art forms asking “What the H_LL Is It?: Operas That Are Musicals and Musicals That Are Operas.”

A more nuanced distinction, one explored by Anthony Tomassini in a 2011 New York Times article, posits that opera is a full dramatic production. He writes, “…composers from outside the field often … borrow the most superficially grand, inflated and melodramatic elements of the art form, whereas opera is actually a richly varied and often tautly narrative genre of musical drama.”