Musicals by alphabet

[dr_whom]

Like, a week ago, _mycroft_holmes posted a list of her favorite musical for each letter of the alphabet. Sounds like an lj-meme to me! Here are mine:

Assassins
Beauty and the Beast (movie, not Broadway musical)
Cabaret
Drowsy Chaperone
--
Fiddler on the Roof
Guys and Dolls
Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney movie again)
Into the Woods
Jungle Book (Disney movie)
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Little Night Music
My Fair Lady
New Brain
On the Twentieth Century
Pippin
--
Ragtime
Sweeney Todd
Titanic
Urinetown
Victor/Victoria
West Side Story
--
You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown
Zombie Prom

Notes:

• B: I didn't like the Broadway musical at all, but the movie is wonderful.
  
• E: I've never seen Evita, and that doesn't leave much in E.
  
• H: Still waiting for an English stage version of this, though my reaction to the stage version of Beauty and the Beast means that may be a poor idea.
  
• J: A lame choice, but I don't know Jesus Christ Superstar well enough for it to be eligible. And I don't like Jekyll & Hyde or Joseph.... Which, again, doesn't leave much.
  
• M: The Music Man is close, but.
  
• O: Never seen Oliver!, Oklahoma!, or Once on This Island. I've never seen On the Twentieth Century either, but at least I've heard the whole cast album, and I like it better than Of Thee I Sing.
  
• S: Tough choice here. 1776 and Songs for a New World both give it a run for its money, though I admit I'm biased in the case of Songs....
  
• V: I've only seen the movie of Victor/Victoria, which isn't really a musical, and it was okay but I was kind of lukewarm about it. But I've never seen any other musical beginning with V.
  
• Z: Not great, but not actively bad; and it begins with Z.

Comments

[yaleartificer.livejournal.com]

I like Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar -- the music and the books are both better than Andrew Lloyd Webber's other stuff, I think. (I've heard I'm not supposed to like Tim Rice, but nobody ever explained to me why.) Che and Judas add an edge that keep them from going all sloppily sentimental like Phantom (or what I know of Cats). "Waltz for Eva and Che" is about as nifty a piece as the Webber/Rice team ever did.

I also like how these two operas are weird reflections of each other, with Che as a completely impotent Judas and Eva Peron a completely narcissistic Jesus.

[timmypowg.livejournal.com]

Look up Jungle Book on Wikipedia if you get a chance. Pretty cool stuff: Bare Necessities, by far my favorite song in the movie and probably most people's (you can hear a clarinet quartet arrangement on my webpage at web.mit.edu/braunst/www), was the only song left over from a previous version by Terry Gilkyson (I think that's the name), whose songs were too inspired by the Rudyard Kipling story. The new guys Disney brought in to completely rewrite it were only allowed to do so on the condition that they not read the original book. Disney is interesting, isn't it?

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

My school-deprived brain: 1776? That doesn't start with an- oh. Seventeen Seventy Six.

It really does make one wonder how I got into Harvard. Or Penn, for that matter.

Missing letters, and then some

[notachnai.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend Finn's Elegies if you don't know it.

Q means either Quilters or Quadrophenia, and Quilters is clearly better.

And, to my immense surprise, X means Xanadu!

And I cannot possibly condone your treatment of Bajour, Candide, Follies (although I too love Fiddler), John & Jen, Pacific Overtures and Zanna, Don't (although Zombie Prom is certainly worthy).

Finally, note that several of your picks are cheating, in that, like A Chorus Line, they actually begin with "A"--A Little Night Music, A New Brain, etc.

Best,

Re: Missing letters, and then some

[notachnai.livejournal.com]

Also, Titanic vs. The Last Five Years would be close for me.

Re: Missing letters, and then some

[notachnai.livejournal.com]

And if you're looking for a worthy V, I highly recommend Violet.

Re: Missing letters, and then some

[dr_whom]

I know of Elegies, but I've only heard one or two songs from it.

Treatment? What treatment? Of the ones you list, the only one I've seen is Candide, and I've heard entire cast recordings of Follies and Pacific Overtures, so only those three would be eligible for consideration. I suppose Pippin vs. Pacific Overtures is a tight thing, but there are just too many songs in Pacific Overtures that I find unpleasant to listen to. Candide, from what I recall (I've only seen it once), is fun, but ultimately I think Cabaret is better at getting done what it tries to do; my judgment may be skewed here because I know Cabaret much better than Candide, having seen the former three times since the one time I've seen the latter. (Also, I know everyone loves "Make Our Garden Grow", but as a song I find it really boring.) And as for Fiddler—again, I may be biased because I know it a whole lot better than Follies. But it's better structured and tells a more interesting story; and if Bock & Harnick had written only "Sunrise, Sunset", dayenu.

Obviously leading "a" and "the" are omitted for the purpose of alphabetizing. I'm just lucky I like A Little Night Music and My Fair Lady both better than Les Misérables, so I didn't have to decide whether that begins with L or M.

Re: Missing letters, and then some

[dr_whom]

I've heard a song from it on the radio frequently, and that one I like. Always the same song, though, so I've got nothing to judge the rest of the show by. I'll keep it in mind, though.

Re: Missing letters, and then some

[http://users.livejournal.com/-mycroft-holmes/]

The guy from whom I stole this idea has quite a bit to say about alphabetization:
http://www.theatermania.com/peterfilichia/index.cfm?date=20070803

(He makes the point, in a later column that I can't be bothered to find, that people say "Les Miz" or "La Cage", whereas they drop the articles when abbreviating English show names. I prefer that argument to the one he gives here for retaining foreign articles in alphabetizing.)

[orewashinanai.livejournal.com]

Hi! This is Tom from Philadelphia.