Musicals. How easy they are to fall in love with, how easily they shine, they dazzle, or betray. (Anyone who got that musical reference gets a sticker.) (Don't worry, it's one of the ones I'll be talking about.) Here is a list of musicals that I fell in love with as a child or teenager and which ones I need to apologize for, which ones I would still see if I had a chance (well, heck, that's all ten of them), and which ones I will defend to the death.
10. Phantom of the Opera
M's background: I've seen this show onstage once. I grew up listening to my mom's original cast recording, as will be the case for two other Andrew Lloyd Weber projects I shall discuss. And I have seen the movie with Gerard Butler and Emmy Rossum a billion times, partly because I was working at a movie theater when it came out.
How M feels about it now: I feel like I kind of need to apologize.
To be fair, I read, well, most of, the novel for French class in high school, and Raoul was a whiny b**** whereas the Phantom was sympathetic. But, boy, that does not come across in the musical. The Phantom is a murderous incel who has been grooming Christine her entire life. But at least the musical has kind of a redeeming ending where the Phantom realizes he cannot force Christine to love him, even after years of telling her he is her father/music teacher/husband, and lets her go so she can be with Raoul and escape his manipulation.
But then, Andrew wrote a sequel, "Love Never Dies," where we find out that right after that final scene in Phantom, Christine went back to the Phantom for a quick bang that impregnates her before she runs off with Raoul. Raoul ends up becoming a drunken gambler, and the Phantom was the romantic hero ALL ALONG.
Wait ... what?
My love for the musical is greatly soured as a result of finding out what the sequel was about, but even without the sequel, it's pretty bad. All three of the main characters are put on pedestals so high by the others that they don't seem real. I mean, I still love some of the songs. For example, "Past the Point of No Return" is my favorite song in the musical. You know, the song where the Phantom has just murdered the main character in the "Don Juan" opera he wrote so that he can step in and play the romantic lead while fondling his psuedo-daughter Christine and singing about how they are going to have sex with each other, like, yesterday.
... I still enjoy the song.
9. My Fair Lady
Let's talk about a musical where an older man has a possessive attitude toward a younger woman, gives her voice lessons, and takes credit for everything she does. No, not Phantom of the Opera, we already talked about that.
Let's talk about an Audrey Hepburn movie where Audrey plays a low-class woman who cleans up real nice, a movie with a hauntingly beautiful song, a movie that was turned into a romantic comedy despite there being no romance in the source material and the male protagonist in the source material doesn't even like women, a movie where Audrey's character runs off but then comes back for a happy ending, even though that didn't happen in the source material.
No, we're not going to talk about Breakfast at Tiffany's. We're talking about the other one.
M's background: I remember watching this movie with my grandmother and liking it, and I've seen it onstage once. When I was in eighth grade, this was the musical that our small town's high school put on that year, and I went to see it with my family. They did a great job, and it was a small town so I knew half the cast. They nailed the comedic moments, but the highlight was definitely the very talented singer who played Freddy and lifted me to new heights with "On the Street Where You Live." Eighth grade was a traumatic year for me, so I cherish any good memories from around that time, and I remember that being a magical night.
But, let's actually look at My Fair Lady. It's a product of a different time, and it doesn't really age well.
The major problem with the musical is that Eliza doesn't have any worth, that people don't even really see her, until she changes the way she speaks and dresses so that she resembles an upper-class woman. And even when she conquers the diction and completely changes her personality, she's still just an impostor because under the fancy clothes she's just lower-class and that's something that never goes away.
So yeah, in addition to being incredibly dated, a lot of the songs in My Fair Lady are not really good. There are some musicals we should maybe start classifying as antiques that, though they have merit, their relevance is dwindling, and this might be one of them. My ex-boyfriend performed the song "Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man" in our college's Broadway Revue one year, and I remember being like, this song made it into Broadway Revue? Oof.
Also, the love story between Higgins and Eliza (which was not a thing in Pygmalion) seems incredibly forced. But, it has been turned into an enduring love story for the ages. I remember when I was young enough that I still perused the Barbie aisles in stores, I once saw an Eliza Doolittle Barbie, with a sign next to it on the shelf saying, "Coming Soon: 'Enry 'Iggins Ken!"
8. Sound of Music
M's background: Well, this was one of my favorite movies as a kid. I remember the first time I ever saw my own blood was when I would have been 4 or 5 and was standing on a table belting along to one of the songs in The Sound of Music and fell off the table and got a bloody nose. I've seen this onstage once. Also a high school production.
Well, what's not to love about this musical, if you're a kid? It's all about kids. Kids love movies about kids, and it's even better if you can feel like you are smarter than the kids in the movie. I remember joyously telling my parents when they're hiding from the Nazis and one of the little girls (Marta I think?) asks if they should make it better by singing about their favorite things, "LOOK HOW DUMB MARTA IS, SHE ACTUALLY WANTS TO SING RIGHT NOW!" Five-year-old me was smarter than and probably a better singer than all the Von Trapp kids. In my mind.
The thing is, Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals are not really high art. I was in Cinderella in high school and oh my God, that musical is so bad. It seems like they take a basic story and churn out songs to fill in any gaps. The Sound of Music is better than most because it's based on a true story, well, sort of. My brother owned a copy of Maria Von Trapp's memoir and I read part of it one day and it was not at all the joyous romp that Sound of Music was. She stated that she and the Captain were not in love, but she was good at taking care of the children and asked her to marry him, despite being 25 years older than her. So she consulted with the head nun who told her God probably wanted her to marry the Captain. And I remember that part of the book being kind of creepy, like, "Was it possible that the Captain could have feelings for me or I for him?"
But, the movie does hold up to a degree, mainly because of Julie Andrews just knocking it out of the park. And let's not forget that it gave us one of my favorite Saturday Night Live sketches and one of my favorite scenes in American Dad.
7. Rent
M's background: I was first introduced to Rent at age 14 at a cast party for my high school's production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream coat, which is a really bad play and not even worth writing about in this blog. Some of my cast mates were singing Rent karaoke and I felt like I was on the outside of the true theater community because I had never heard of this.
But then, fast forward to the movie version of Rent coming out, which for better or worse included almost all of the original cast trying to be 20 years old. It had some great songs! I remember watching it with my friend Corinne, and saying, "I wish life could really be like this."
To which she said, understandably, "Exactly how?"
And I tried to articulate, "That there's so much drama within this group of people, and they all still come together in the end." I would have rethought my wording of "come together" if I had seen the stage play at that point and had witnessed a song that was cut from the movie.
I have seen Rent onstage twice, including once with the majority of the original cast. And I still love a lot of the songs, "Tango Maureen" and "Living in America" being among my favorites.
But, as an older, less idealistic M, what was this play doing? I read a Tweet once that said one of the signs of adulthood was hearing the lyrics, "We're not gonna pay rent" and having the reaction, "Wait ... you can't do that."
I admit I have no familiarity with the source material, La Boheme, but it seems like our heroes in this play are ... fundamentally unlikable, for the most part. They're trying to live in a neighborhood they can't afford, except some of them COULD if they WANTED to. Maureen has wealthy parents that she just seems determined to piss off, and Mark also has parents begging him to come home and ... what does Mark do, anyway? He also seems determined to suffer just to piss off his parents because, they don't get what's real, man. So he has decided he is a filmmaker, whose films consist of ... taking candid videos of his friends ...
I know these characters are a generation older than me, but I feel like the way they are portrayed reflects a lot of the shade that gets thrown on millennials. Millennials are a generation that was told we could do and be anything we wanted, only to be ejected into a world where you have no chance of doing or being anything unless you majored in STEM, started working in retail at age 16 and worked your way up, or have wealthy parents. But the characters in Rent cling to the ideals that we had to abandon. And therefore they come across as the embodiment of negative stereotypes older generations impose on millennials. They are the filmmaker who cannot see, the songwriter who cannot hear, and they do nothing, they are not going to pay rent, they are not going to pay their bill at the local diner. "La Vie Boheme" is a great song, and they're singing about a variety of things that they love that polite culture might not acknowledge (not sure how "eating disorders" made that list), but also, you're kind of antagonizing everyone else in the room, you're making the gap worse, not better.
Anyway, the tragedy of Rent is that you can't continue to live like this, no matter how bright your dreams are, even if your friend figures out how to steal from ATMs and buy you a few more days. It's a musical that maybe you grow out of. Unless you're the original cast.
6. Into the Woods
M's background: My piano teacher lent me a video of a staged performance of Into the Woods when I was 14. It was, I don't know if it was the original cast? It was the one with Bernadette Peters. And I loved it so much. I was obsessed with it for the rest of high school.
Then, my sophomore year of college, my college did Into the Woods as their spring musical, and one of my good friends was in it. I saw it three times. I was very sure that I experienced something mystical while watching Into the Woods and that the woods represented various layers of the psyche and I forget what other philosophical tangents my 19-year-old brain went on but the woods were everything and nothing and me and you and all of us.
Then, they made it into a movie. That I really did not care to see, because they Disneyfied it. They took out all the darker elements, including the narrator/mysterious man and my favorite song from the musical, "No More." I felt like Disney had butchered something once precious to me and did not return to Into the Woods for a long time.
But, then, recently I've started listening to Into the Woods again because I've been road-trippin around and it is on our Broadway playlist. And I've been looking back on the play and wondering how profound it actually was and how much was me being a hormonal teenager. I mean, every character has a lengthy solo with lyrics something like "and I know things and knowing is good but good is different from nice" or "sometimes you want something you get and you don't want it but you like it but wanting is nice" and even the songs that are supposed to pack a real punch, like "Children Will Listen" or "No One Is Alone" are ... kinda vapid. "Someone is on your side, no one is alone." I might hate lyrics like that more now that I've seen Dear Evan Hansen and absorbed the vapid, empty comfort of "You Will Be Found," which is even more offensive given the context of that song and also that musical is bad. But, we're not talking about Dear Evan Hansen. We're talking about Into the Woods.
The best thing about this musical is the huge gear shift at the end of Act 1. This is a musical where they had to post signs that said the musical actually has two acts, because people really thought it was over. And, unlike a later entry on my list that I think would be a better musical if it ended after Act 1, this one was made so much better by Act 2. Anyway. fun musical. Check it out. Don't overthink it like I did.
5. Evita
M's background: This one will probably be short, because while I am fond of this musical, I don't have as much of a history with it as most of the others. My mom regularly played the original cast recording with Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin when I was growing up, and then the movie with Madonna and Antonio Banderas came out. My mom let me see all the Oscar nominated movies that year, even if they were R-rated (Evita was up against The English Patient, which I also saw) and I really, really loved the movie. I have seen this onstage once, just a community theater production. When I moved in with my brother at ages 25 and 35 and we were combining our movie and book collections, I thought it was pretty funny that the only thing we owned in common was Evita. I no longer own Evita. It got lost somewhere in the several times I've moved since then.
As far as song quality goes, there are some you can definitely skip, but there are some that are haunting and absolutely amazing. I still think it's a great character study on Eva Peron, who, like Eliza Doolittle, was not seen as having any worth until she rose to a higher social class due to the assistance of wealthy men, but still would never be able to wash away the stain of her origins.
I find the relationship between Eva and Che to be fascinating, as she is creating a public persona that people can rally behind and be assured that everything will be alright, while he is constantly pointing out her failings and that people need to be told the truth. In the dream sequence where they waltz together, he accuses her of trying to be Argentina's savior and she accuses him of thinking she actually could do all the things he expects of her. The characters, especially in the movie, have such great chemistry, despite it never being romantic. Which is kind of funny because Madonna admitted to Antonio Banderas being her celebrity crush well before they were cast in this movie.
Anyway, I think Evita is still worth checking out. MOST people I've shown this movie to have liked it.
4. Les Miserables
M's background: Well, this one is also going to be short, I hope, because I've written an entire blog post about Les Miserables and I don't want to repeat myself too much. But when they started playing the 10th anniversary or whatever concert pretty regularly on PBS, my family became addicted to it. This would be on every weekend, and we'd even sit through the intermissions where various people who have obviously made terrible life choices would rant about, "Oh, we'll get back to all your favorite songs soon, but right now, wouldn't you just donate a little to PBS to make sure we can keep shoving Les Mis down your gut? Look at this beautiful tote bag you can get for just a $25 donation. Little Cosette could be in your home every day. And for $50, let's talk MATCHING ENJOLRAS AND MARIUS COFFEE MUGS!"
This recording of Les Miserables was also the only CD played in our car for maybe about 5 years.
So, how many times have I seen this play onstage? Once when I was 12 and my grandmother got tickets for the family for Christmas. Once when my French class went to see it in high school. Once with my friend Naomi when I was 19. Once in London when I was 20. And yet again with Naomi at a community theater production when I was out of college. I've seen this onstage FIVE TIMES.
And my review of this play? It is GREAT. I would see it again. But it is OVERRATED.
To be fair, the writers of Les Mis had a LOT to pack into a musical that could last only 2 - 3 hours, so you can forgive them for packing all kinds of supposed character development/falling in love into a single song. And, as far as that goes, it's kind of hit or miss. "Who Am I" is great. "A Heart Full of Love" sucks *****. "Bring Him Home" is ... what the hell? I guess Valjean had a strong relationship with Marius because he knows he had a thing for his daughter but has never really interacted with him up to this point? (Also a really uninspired song in my opinion that has been the regret of so many high school boys who chose this song for Solo and Ensemble and then went through puberty midway through the song, okay, I guess I only saw that happen once.)
I guess my main issue with Les Mis is that it is THE musical. I feel like humanity in general has been oversaturated with it. I have more familiarity with musicals like Evita, Into the Woods, and Jesus Christ Superstar than most, but everyone knows Les Mis. It spawned an entire generation of theater kids who wanted nothing more than to be Eponine. At one point when I was in choir in college and we were rehearsing for Handel's Messiah, our professor said, "This is the most important part of Messiah. This is like 'Do You Hear the People Sing' in Les Mi-" and before he could even finish his sentence one of the girls in the choir almost fainted, fanning herself with her hands frantically and saying "Les Mis omigod omigod omigod omigod" until we decided medical intervention wasn't needed and the prof resumed, "I know I shouldn't have mentioned Les Mis."
What is it about this musical? Will it ever be replaced as THE musical? I guess Hamilton is a strong contender. I once knew a theater major who refused to listen to or see Hamilton because "it's the play that people who aren't theater people go to see and think they're theater people."
I've seen Hamilton three times and Les Mis five, so I guess I'm not a theater people. Am I one of those people who claims to like TV but says their favorite show is "Breaking Bad?"
(Breaking Bad is one of my favorite shows)
3. Wicked
M's background: I was the first person in my family or friends or online people circle to listen to the soundtrack for the musical Wicked. I had read the book and couldn't imagine how they could possibly make it into a musical, so I bought the soundtrack out of sheer curiosity, and hey, this was good, I mean, it was nothing like the book except it had the same title, and that's what made it good.
I've blogged about Wicked extensively, so I'll keep this short. I listened to the soundtrack a lot that summer, and tried to get my parents to listen to it, which they did not, due to being averse to my music tastes in general, until it became pop-u-u-lar. Then suddenly all my friends and family were on board, and I did see Wicked onstage once with my college roommates. It was a fantastic experience, with "Defying Gravity" giving me full-body chills. The actress playing Glinda was an understudy and it was her first time taking over the lead in this production, and my roommates and I actually met her when we stopped at a McDonald's before heading out of the city. She was bouncing up and down "I can't believe I did it, I can't believe I did it" and we congratulated her on her performance while her friends tried to get her to calm down and get something to eat or drink.
Years later, the world is rediscovering Wicked due to the movie, and, you know what, it holds up. The characters are so endearing, the lyrics so clever. I was listening to the soundtrack with my partner recently and asked him, "Is it just me, or are the lyrics to Wicked more well thought-out than half the lyrics in Les Miserables?" And, it really holds up in today's political climate as well, as frightening as that is. The Wizard has turned himself into an almost god-like figure who helps Oz continue to be great. In the movie, when it is revealed that the Wizard was behind the persecution of the animals all along, Jeff Goldblum delivers the line with no remorse or really any emotion at all, "In order to unite the people, you need to create a common enemy."
Plausible. Chillingly. Plausible.
2. West Side Story
M's background: This was my favorite movie for all of the childhood I can remember. I replaced it with Fellowship of the Ring when that came out and then replaced Fellowship with Uzumaki when I saw that, but I grew up on the older version of West Side Story.
I have seen this onstage a billion times, but never by professionals. I saw a community theater production that my friend was in in high school, and I stage managed it in college.
Speaking of which, I was a terrifying cesspool of hormones when I was in college and lyrics like "Tonight, tonight, the world is wild and bright, going mad, shooting sparks into space" made my eyes well while I was making sure everyone's cues were in order and there were no wardrobe malfunctions.
I went to see the Spielberg remake of West Side Story in the theater, the first time I'd been to a movie theater in a couple years, and I was crying so hard by the end of it that I crashed into two people (one was a theater employee trying to sweep up, the other was a lady trying to go to the bathroom, I didn't really see either of them).
The thing is, this musical is so much more than meets the eye. Yes, it's a modern-day re-envisioning of Romeo and Juliet, but it's not just that two teenagers fall in love at first sight and it's such a shame that their feuding families keep them from being together. The three central characters in this play, Tony, Maria, and Anita, are all trapped in a life they do not want and desperately grasping for a new one. Tony and Maria see in each other a possibility for starting over, and that's enough to open up a world of possibilities and opportunities they didn't think they had. What was just a world is a star, and I don't see that as just romantic BS, I still freaking love West Side Story.
1. Jesus Christ Superstar
M's background: I've seen this show onstage twice. I was kind of shocked when I did that math, thinking it would be more, because I've watched SO many versions of this play, including the 2000 version that became a family tradition because my sister was Facebook-married to the guy who played Simon Zealotes for a while.
But, of course, my first introduction was the original album that my mom owned, with Ted Neeley as Jesus. (I would actually end up seeing Ted Neeley play Jesus, probably a little past what his retirement age should have been.) And I saw that movie, and so many other very different versions that followed. The reason this play ages so well (other than it is AWESOME) is that it's so ... open-ended. You can set it in any location, in any time period. You can reimagine the characters' motivations, their genders, how terrifying you want King Herod to be. This play is essentially a slate that directors can create beautiful art with and also my second favorite musical of all time. I cherish it so very much.
So, in conclusion, musicals that we remember from childhood are a land of contrast. But, regardless, you'll have all of these songs stuck in your head forever.
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