The story
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the theatre in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia) generally emphasised music, with the dialogue being sung. These early performances were given different names depending on their type, such as bangsawan and komedi stambul. In the mid-1920s companies in the country began adapting more European stylings, with an emphasis on spoken dialogue and a reduction in the amount of music used during the performance; troupes using this new format referred to the genre as toneel, an adaptation of the Dutch word for theatre.
From Wikipedia’s article on Dardanella (theatre company), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3