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You could say that Sweeney Todd is a musical because Sondheim chose to write it for the Broadway stage. And yet, it has been performed in opera houses. Les Miz ran for years on Broadway and the West End and has hardly any spoken dialogue. It has, to my knowledge, never been performed in an opera house.
I worked at the York Theatre Company at the time they were producing a new musical called Asylum: the Strange Case of Mary Lincoln, and the opera crowd ate it up. In terms of book to score ratio, it was about even, and the dialogue was wonderful and plentiful. But something about the score and the epic nature of this woman's struggle to prove her own sanity while her money was wasted away to pay for her imprisonment felt very operatic. We even had opera diva Carolann Page in the lead role of Mary Todd Lincoln, and she was brilliant!
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~David
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