Opera or Musical?

An opera is a play that contains music (instrumental and/or vocal) as well as dialogue, and the music is just as important to the piece as is the action and spoken words of the characters. The style of singing is known as recitative, which means that the sung words are slightly modified from normal speech, just enough to make them melodic. In operas, the characters sing in the recitative mode during the action of the drama, occasionally launching into a more definitive song, during which the action temporarily stops. It is not a true opera if the lines are spoken instead of sung.

In a musical, the players do not sing their lines but rather speak them normally. The players do, however, break into song and dance at certain points in the play. The action is punctuated by these musical interludes. In an opera, the...