Once a season, growing up, the fam went down to NYC to visit relatives and see a Broadway show. Oddly, the habit came from my dad who had been stationed @ Ft Monmouth and got weekly leave, which he always used to go into the city, stay @ the Y and see as many shows as he could. I didn't connect with it til i saw Zero Mostel in
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and then fell madly in love with the whole concept. My uncle's kids caught the fever from us and cousins Rob & Kathleen have Oscars, Emmys & Tonys as musical director/choreographers as a result. I've been writing a musical for most of this decade and it has been the greatest creative pleasure of my life. There is a lot of stagy crap in musical theater - and, as bad as this #### is these days, the % hasn't gone significantly higher - but moving a soul with a musical number is the greatest artistic achievement of which i am aware and actually can change the world.
My two greatest moments as a fan have been seeing Zero as Tevya - no one was ever more glamorous on a stage and his being a fat ugly man only underlined that - and watching cousin Rob's
Chicago onscreen. We talked on the phone a lot while he was editing it - those who have seen the show on both stage & film know how many problems of conversion he solved, something 7 previous directors assigned to film it over the previous quarter-century couldnt achieve until he & Bill Condon figured it out - and he was sure his first motion picture was going to expose him as a fraud the entire way. To see the transitions he developed and pace he maintained made me weep like a proud father the first 100 times i watched it.
For my money,
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the greatest musical work of my lifetime - yeah, more than Dylan, Beatles, Prince, Radiohead, whatever - but my favorite musical is Sondheim's
Company. As someone who has written comedy and therefore knows the shelflife of social commentary, it astounds me that a musical about relationships is as relevant today as it was almost 50 yrs ago. I have been trying to talk Rob into making a film version with four quarter-screens going on with supporting/contrasting images during each number for the last 15 years and we argued for a long time over which couple we'd make gay to update it til he told me a few months ago the next revival is going to be all-male. And they won't have to change a line. Remarkable.
I don't trust my memory or youthful biases that well and i put touring companies on par with women's basketball, so i don't have a lot of theater to comment on for the last 40 yrs. I'm an Astaire over Kelly guy - Fred worked hard to integrate his dances into the human experience and Gene, though more skilled, did the opposite - and therefore prefer
Bandwagon to
Singing in the Rain like Eephus does.
Cabaret beats
Sound of Music or
West Side Story as my template, simply because - just as Mel Brooks did with
Springtime For Hitler - it brought evil to ground in song, an amazing achievement. There's an awful lot of fuss & hysterics in it, but
Phantom of the Opera has the best run of songs in that first act (and Masquerade opening the 2nd) i've ever heard in a musical.
Wizard of Oz is more than a musical, it's my religion.
All That Jazz was great, as is anything Fosse. Richard Rogers is the best composer and it ain't close - i've learned/stolen so much from him in my work and all the Rogers & Hammerstein musicals are behind only flashbacks as the comfort food of my soul. And Meredith Wilson's lyric patterns are one of the under-appreciated treasures of the 20th century. Look forward to seeing Book of Mormon and Hamilton onscreen one day (wont ever pay those prices) and it will be interesting to see how you all react to the film adaptation of a stage production that has entered your hearts. And look for my Alice-grown-up-in-Manhattan musical GLASS sometime in the 2020s
ETA: Here's a nice production of
Company from PBS Great Performances a few yrs ago with people you'll recognize like Stephen Colbert & Jon Cryer & Christina Hendricks in it.