Features and Development Trends of Modern Domestic Children's Musical

The purpose of the article is to reveal the features of a children's musical, created for performance by a children's team, as well as to analyse the specifics of its production on the example of the performances of the leading domestic theatres-studios of musicals. Research methodology. General scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, special artistic methods of observation, systematisation and generalisation, as well as genre and style analysis, comparative method (to identify general and specific features of children's musicals) and the method of theoretical generalisation are applied. Scientific novelty is in the introduction into scientific circulation on the example of musical productions of domestic amateur children's theatre-studios of the knowledge about the musical nature of children's musicals, caused by the interaction of music, verbal, and non-verbal means of expression that correspond to the specifics of children's perception and thinking (musicality is understood as special intonation manifestations characteristic of all means of artistic expression). Children's musicals created to be performed by a children's group were studied in terms of genre specificity; musicals staged by Kyiv amateur children's theatres were analysed; the regularities of children's musicals in the creative practice of Ukrainian theatres for children: studio-theatre «OKAY!», musical theatre «Music Hall», and others are considered. Conclusions. Children's musicals staged by domestic amateur children's groups are a unique genre variety in which various branches of artistic and creative activity are connected in the most perfect form – music, movement, dance, language, speech, acting, singing, costumes, decoration, stage lighting, and special effects. The special spectacularity, brightness, picturesqueness, and construction of this music-dramatic work as a kind of game are characteristic features that create a symbolic space in which the stage action is perceived by the audience as sincerely as possible. The children's musical is endowed with a variety of positive qualities and properties that create the prerequisites for immersing the young viewer in the imaginative world of emotions and feelings, fantasies and thoughts, while remaining as clear and easy to understand as possible thanks to the visualisation of the fairy-tale world of fiction, charm and focus of the entire palette of feelings and moods around the stage spectacle. 
Key words: children's musical, amateur children's group, theatre-studio, performance, stage spectacle.