Musicals that meet with my approval — and then some

I honestly didn't know — I had never given it much thought — how many musicals there are in the world of entertainment. I only began to realize how many when I was checking out certain movie critics to see what kind of consensus there is about what are the best musicals.

I realized another thing: I knew that I could never pick the "best" musical. I wouldn't even be able to pick my "favourite" musical.

For example, I love The Music Man — but do I love it because it's a great musical or because Robert Preston is one of the great loves of my life?

He's an unusual leading man; he's not mysterious or enigmatic. He seems open and joyous and fellow-next-door friendly, all of which is so attractive. But his IMDB biography calls him a "leading man of vast charisma" so perhaps he's that too. Whatever, he's the only Professor Harold Hill I can imagine so he did something right.

Singin' in the Rain is high up on most critics' list of best musicals. Gene Kelly is, without a doubt, one the great dancers and he was lucky to be able to dance with Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds in this one.

Debbie was just 19 when she was cast in Singin' in the Rain. (Gene, her love interest, was 40. The more things change. . . eh?) She was not a dancer but she had won a beauty contest and one of the big studio heads wanted her in the movie and that's how things were done in those times. Gene was very hard on her but she became a dancer of acclaim because of this experience so she eventually forgave him.

It's amazing that this movie was pulled together at all as the songs had been around for awhile — some of them, including the title song, had already been used in other movies — but the songs were dumped on the writers and the writers were told to make a story around the songs. And they did!

Gene Kelly was a perfectionist and although he was ill and had a high fever while he was filming the title song, he kept at it until it was perfect.

There it is: perfection.

And then there's Cabaret.

I've seen only the movie and I was interested to discover in the reading I've done recently that the movie and the stage production are completely different from each other.

The film is loosely based on the 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret by Kander and Ebb, which was adapted from the novel The Berlin Stories (1939) by Christopher Isherwood and the 1951 play I Am a Camera adapted from the same book. Only a few numbers from the stage score were used for the film; Kander and Ebb wrote new ones to replace those that were discarded.

People who don't like musicals complain about characters bursting into song in strange and unusual circumstances. They like Cabaret because, with one exception, all the songs are performed in the Kit Kat Klub which strikes people as being appropriate.

The exception to this is surely the most chilling moment ever caught in a musical. It's the young boy — the Nazi youth — singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me. He sings in a beer garden, in his sweet voice, his Aryan features emphasized by the sun shining on his fair beautiful face. As he sings, others begin to join in and at one point, his sweet face changes and becomes frightening with anger before it reverts to innocence, even while most of the people in the beer garden have stood to sing out along with him.

Cabaret has very dark themes as it is set in Germany during the rise of the Nazis but it also has romance and comedy and memorable music. I rank it quite high on my personal list.

I wrote about Fiddler on the Roof here and here. It's obviously on my list.

But what about My Fair Lady? Oklahoma? Guys and Dolls? The King and I? West Side Story? Show Boat?

So many musicals; so little time. It's fun writing about them though so I suspect I'll be back to them at some point.