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what is your favorite musical?

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lottebeertje
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Re: what is your favorite musical?

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ErnieBerla wrote:
lottebeertje wrote:
Mark Cool wrote:
And wow, a lot of people seem to like Little Shop of Horrors. It's a really unknown musical here! At singing class we did Suddenly Seymour years ago...
I think Feed Me Seymour is a lot more fun to sing, although I've only sung along with the soundtrack.
It is, I guess, but we girls have to have some notes we can easily reach :lol:
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Re: what is your favorite musical?

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Wow. Favourite musicals. I don't even know where to begin. I suppose it depends on how you define 'favourite'. (or 'favorite'...whichever you prefer.) If you're defining it by the number of times you've seen it live, then my honest answer would have to be 'Wicked'. I've seen it once in New York, and then about five or six times in London. (Once with Idina Menzel, twice with Kerry Ellis, Once with Shuna, and once with Ashleigh Grey. Ashleigh Grey was deff. my favourite Elphaba.)

Other musicals that I enjoy are Rent, (although admittedly I've only seen the film - I wasn't lucky enough to see it in the West End.) I also enjoy Cats, which I saw in Woking, Joseph and the Technicolored Dreamcoat, Les Miserables, Chicago, and the Lion King. I'm hoping to see The Phantom of the Opera some time soon, perhaps as an Easter treat or maybe valentines day, if I can find a date.
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Re: what is your favorite musical?

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The Phantom of the Opera!!! (The West End production, not the film)

My favourite musical films:
Sweeny Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Corpse Bride

Yes...i like Tim Burton, a bit...
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Krysondra

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Re: what is your favorite musical?

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On Broadway, I saw Rent and Titanic. Rent rocked. Titanic, well, sunk.

Off Broadway, I've seen Rent, Les Miserables, Titanic, and Wicked.

Of all of them, Wicked has been my favorite with Rent following in a close second.

On another note, has anyone seen Avenue Q? It combines muppets and live actors. It's very ... off color, but the soundtrack is hilarious. I want to see it the next time that it comes near.
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Re: what is your favorite musical?

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I have seen Avenue Q and I thought I'd die laughing. Given where I saw it—the front row of the balcony at the Spreckles Theatre in San Diego—dying was a very real possibility. You slip on one of the steps down to your seat, and you won't stop until you're falling over the railing. It would take a lot to get my mind off the sense of vertigo I felt, but that musical certainly did it. ;)

Aside from Avenue Q, which is wickedly funny, my truly favorite musical would have to be Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. I am a major Sondheim fan, I have to admit, and also love A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Assassins, and Passion (which, as an opera buff, I'd really like to see in what I regard as its real native habitat: being performed as a chamber opera by a professional opera company). The only ones I'm not so keen on are Anyone Can Whistle and Merrily We Roll Along, and I haven't heard Frogs or Bounce/Road Show.

I also like Kander and Ebb's Chicago, Cabaret, and Sweet Charity. Sweet Charity was given, in one of the best performances I've ever seen, in a small, now-defunct experimental theatre called Sledgehammer Theatre.

I also like Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady, Rodger and Hammerstein's Carousel, and some others of that era.

Of the newer composers, I like Adam Guettel (Floyd Collins, The Light in the Piazza) and Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening). I didn't like Rent the first time I saw it (at its world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse, no less), but the score grew on me with repeated hearings.

I'm a big fan of Ragtime by Flaherty and Ahrens, though I've never seen it in a good performance, only in an staggeringly badly executed performance at the Starlight Bowl in San Diego. One of the quirks about the Starlight Bowl is that it's an outdoor amphitheatre that lies in the flight path to Lindbergh Field. In times past, they used to direct the actors to stop singing and freeze in mid-performance until the plane passed (using lights that were only seen backstage), but now they've taken to using microphones. In this performance, they were too cheap to put microphones on everyone, so some actors boomed while others could barely be heard. The sound board operator should have been fired for using the channels' volume slides to mute microphones. There are actual buttons that will do that, and the reason you use buttons is that if you use the volume slide, then there's a weird crescendo effect when people start speaking. It's like stopping a turntable with your hand and then letting it play.

The stage scenery was cheap, including plastic cut-outs of houses for the New Rochelle scenes. They might as well have had garden gnomes and pink flamingos for how tacky it looked. And the orchestra was cut beyond the bare bones, but nobody re-orchestrated the score so that it didn't sound thin. They just used the Broadway orchestration, so there were points where everything dropped out except a harp just vamping a rhythm because all the melody instruments were gone.

I thought I'd beat the crowd by leaving at the intermission, but half the theatre was emptying out at the same time. That's how bad it was.
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Re: what is your favorite musical?

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I have wanted to see Wicked, but have not had the opportunity. I love the music from it! So, favorite that I have seen is Spring Awakening. Music is so much fun! I saw the original cast. For any of you that are fans of Glee, Lea Michele played the lead female role.
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Re: what is your favorite musical?

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Nullifidian wrote:I also like Kander and Ebb's Chicago, Cabaret, and Sweet Charity. Sweet Charity was given, in one of the best performances I've ever seen, in a small, now-defunct experimental theatre called Sledgehammer Theatre.
Wow Nullifidian, you get around, I envy you. I also loved Cabaret, I was lucky to see it starring Joel Grey many years ago.

I would have to say my favorite musical is Cats, I saw it with my husband, well, before we were married. We have seen many musicals since then, but because of the wonderful, memorable time we had, Cats, is my favorite.
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Suzanne wrote:Wow Nullifidian, you get around, I envy you.
It's a byproduct of living in San Diego. Many new musicals get their "out of town tryouts" at the Old Globe Theatre or the La Jolla Playhouse. Sometimes this can be a good thing, like when I saw Into the Woods at the Old Globe, and sometimes it can be a very bad thing. A few years back at the Old Globe, I went to see The Full Monty, which was three hours long and excruciatingly boring. I gather they tightened up the show a little after this performance, but still it wasn't much of a consolation for sitting through it in the first place.
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Re: what is your favorite musical?

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This is going to sound really weird...but it's a toss-up between Sweeney Todd and My Fair Lady.
A likely story.
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Re: what is your favorite musical?

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It is interesting how different people have different tastes in music, musicals and other art forms. My wife and I walked out of Sweeney Todd after about 45 minutes. It was just too annoying for us. But the rest of the audience seemed mesmerized.
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