So, my high school had a woman who was an alum, rich, and loved Broadway. Every year she would go to New York and see every musical and also direct/produce our high school musical. In terms of being cultured, this was probably a net win for me and the town. We'll just skip over how "The King and I" was cast.
Throughout high school we kept trying to get my son to take part in a play, but he would never do it because the plays they were putting on were inevitably musicals.
The culture received in a pre-internet small town was usually distorted from the original. Irish set dancing was big in my town. Only when Riverdance happened did I realize what we were supposed to be doing.
3: My first thought was Glee (that I actually watched for a few years) but then I remembered High School Musical (that I didn't watch, but I have a sense was a huge deal among the kids).
When we were kids, we had movies about high school like Heathers. Which prepared us for life.
My high school put on plays (I remember seeing "Our Town") but my wife's high school put on musicals. She has a great voice, but could never get a lead, because the lead parts went to the children of the rich parents that donated money to the theatre department (that's a crude version of the story she tells).
7: My generation had movies like Porky's to prepare us for life.
My 1990s Canadian high school always put on a musical and never just a play. The high school across the street also put on a musical. Both schools stared the tradition in the 1980s. The schools merged in 2008 and they've put on a musical every year since then.
My high school (late 1990s) had a strict rotation: plays in the fall, musicals in the spring, with the play being Shakespeare once every four years.
3: Some for sure - they've done Lion King and Little Mermaid. But also Into the Woods, Rent, and Addams Family, so.
It's always been musicals around here, as far as I know, and samesies on the kid wanting to act but not be in a musical (he does do chorus, but musicals are a step too far). Does any other country do musicals (aside from opera)? I find them so horrible and ridiculous; are they the pickled herring of America? (It's not an analogy, it's an insult.)
My town in the 90s was all musicals, and all classic musicals of the 40s-60s. I find it shocking that schools these days are doing, like, Mamma Mia. (Only three of the current top ten school musicals are more than maybe 20 years old and none are from the Golden Age: https://schooltheatre.org/2023-play-survey-reveals-most-popular-high-school-shows/.)
My parents put out pickled herring at every holiday in the 70s. At some point they stopped because no one ate it.
13: They are a uniquely American art form, no? It hadn't occurred to me that you never see them being imported or translated. (From England being them exception. Not sure how the West End fits in, historically.) Do European schools put on light operas?
My sense in high school was that musicals were preferred in part because of the strength of the music program. Sure, some kids want to act and not sing, but on the other hand the school board poured a lot of resources into music education and none at all into drama, and there was a lot of musical talent to draw on. With a musical you can involve the band and the orchestra.
Musicals usually involve more people. I think that is part of it.
Musicals as in Broadway are still fairly niche entertainment in the US, more popular in some regions and among some classes, so I imagine it was a pretty scattered picture in high schools across the country. But then Glee and High School Musical nationalized the interest to some extent.
Our community children's theater did 4 shows a year, with one being a musical and one being a Christmas play and the other two being whatever.
I'm trying to remember what the high schools did, I had friends who did theater at several of them. I think one musical and one play was pretty typical.
We did musicals every year and some band members got to play in the pit orchestra which was entertaining. The band teachers also played alongside us to make sure the accompaniment didn't go to hell. One band teacher showed up drunk to a rehearsal once which was also fun, we got drunken commentary during the show.
I recall doing Sound of Music, Lil Abner, and Brigadoon.
I was a Nazi in the Sound of Music. Because I can't sing.
It was almost all musicals when I was in high school, and I couldn't sing worth a damn, but I wanted to do plays and I'm a boy, so I got parts -- even solo singing parts.
My daughter's high school had a club -- not the official drama club -- that wasn't technically a school-affiliated thing, but did performances in a local park of plays that were student-written. (Basically takeoffs on fairy tales.) They solved the lack of boys problem by just rewriting boy parts as girls -- so the two leads in Cinderella, for instance, were both girls and played girls. It was charming. I really like living in a blue state.
My son really would have profited from that sort of thing in much the same way I did. Like me, he is naturally shy and introverted. But I could never talk him into it. He did do various high school bands, though, and actually has a group of friends that he continues to play with -- recently on stage. He's a music snob, though, and his band insists on playing original compositions. (Which are good! But not commercial.)
Two of the really talented kids from my high school did time on Broadway, and a third had a career performing on cruise ships and whatnot. Another two -- not particularly talented -- did some commercials and small TV roles. And I bet there are more that I don't know about. I was surrounded by a lot of talent in high school.
Probably the most famous kid from my high school did some commercials and acting but ended up being some sort of activist who's pretty well known, has appeared with Obama and runs some sort of advocacy group. He was in several of the musicals we did- I think he was the one who messed up a line in Lil Abner that caused the whole show to freeze while the others on stage figured out what to do for the next line.
There's one reasonably successful actor from my childhood theater crowd. Several Broadway credits, a New Haven Shakespeare play opposite Paul Giamatti, Shakespeare in the park, some minor TV roles. The triple threat who we all thought would be the successful actor instead ended up being a movie producer. Oh, and the queen of my middle school theater social group married a B-list celebrity actor.
Maybe more C-list? Had a lead role in a successful network TV show.
My high school did musicals in the fall, plays in the spring. The theater director was a failed Hollywood actor who cast his daughter (my classmate) in every starring role. My junior year the school put on Sound of Music. He felt that the actors playing the family members should look plausibly related, so the Von Trapps were all played by white kids. This meant that the non-white kids all had to be nuns, or Nazis. God, he was such a moron.
We had 3 plays area in high school. In winter it was always a musical.
Awhile back, I saw my nephew in the school production of Guys and Dolls. It was really bad, and caused me to wonder whether my school plays were as good as I remember them being.
I believe I've mentioned here before, snootily, that I when to middle school with the Sweet Valley Twins? thank you.
I was in an HS production of Guys and Dolls, great theater at my HS. One of the school janitors liked my zoot suit costume, showed me a photo of himself from the forties similarly dressed and told me about his life then.
13. Bollywood and popular imitation in India? ChatGPT thinks the Glee guys were not influenced by Bollywood. I broadly don't like US musical theater, but I like about 1/3 of the musical bits of Glee a lot. Classification is hard-- is Weill musical theater? Diamond Dogs? Cabaret styled performance also-- Michelle Gurevich is quite good. IMO focusing on commercially motivated hack imitations or musical instantiations, common on Broadway, is not right, there's more to musicals than that.
Early 1990s, we put on three shows a year - one musical, one non-musical single play, and a collection of one-acts. Having the musical seemed as much as anything to be a way to give the musicians something to do outside of marching band season.
One of my classmates, and our star for West Side Story senior year, is now a reasonably well-known Broadway actor, and is definitely one of my better "I knew him way back" connections.
My high school always did a play in the fall and a musical in the spring.
We also did West Side Story. I remember it as a very hard play to master -- but the music was even harder, and our orchestra was brilliant.
My high school was large (2500 students), had a community theater building on campus, and I have no memory of what they did for plays. My junior high had a drama teacher who wrote his own parodies of classic musicals, including his own song lyrics.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention my own experience. We Montessoris were hoity-toity enough that elementary school and middle school both put on operas, internally written and produced, usually on classical themes. The elementary school combined various storylets of the many Greek gods, and an adult guest instructor/composer helped devise most of the book while we portrayed it as student-led; the middle school one really was mostly student-designed and -led, focusing on the Helen and Paris story; it may have extended all the way into the Trojan War.
Maybe "opera" should be in quotes; we certainly called it that but musical might be a better term. I remember a lot of Beatles covers in the elementary school one.
My class in high school had a dude who could really sing (he later studied opera at Oberlin, IIRC), so my... I want to say junior, but maybe senior, year, we did Jesus Christ Superstar, and he kicked ass as Judas.
did time on Broadway
You only perform two days in a Broadway run: the day you open and the day you close.
At my (reform Jewish) summer camp each age group did a play, but the drama staff only worked with one group at a time, so each group had basically a week to prepare. The older groups did the better known musicals- Fiddler, Cats, Little Shop of Horrors, Godspell (that one went over the heads of all the good little Jews). Younger groups did simpler adaptations usually. 14 year olds went last and wrote a spoof of everything that happened that summer, some of which could be quite biting, or reference things campers didn't know about in theory but that their counselors slipped in to the show.
Oh man I just googled one of the funniest guys from there and he's a corporate sellout, VP if a natural gas company. But maybe he makes jokes about having so much gas.
I forget if I mentioned his original songs here before- I'd call it kind of BNL but more deranged. There was one song about a kid who wouldn't clean his room so his parents put him in the fridge and ate him for dinner. Chorus:
He's a cool kid
He was supposed to clean his room but he never did
So now he's chilliiiiiing
Inside the fridge
And another (title: attached at the hip) about a guy who loved his girlfriend so much he sewed himself to her. Bridge:
We're attached at the hip
So come one let's dance
You know we got trouble
Wearing pants
I thought this would make our lives perfect
Instead we look just like a birth defect
we all know about the relationship between correlation and causation, but my sense is you could do a graph of the rise of high school musicals with the rise of queer kid identity and you'd only need a single line for the two
That makes sense (I mean, not mathematically in terms of how you plot correlations, but substantively). I guess it didn't occur to me because my high school had both musicals and it was well before homosexuality was publicly acceptable.
"Straight play" means there's no singing, not that the actors are straight!
(Actors date men, crew date women, regardless of their own gender.)
To the OP, my school alternated between musicals and non-musicals for the big annual show in the autumn. Patience, Pirates of Penzance, My Fair Lady, and on the other side Hamlet, Comedy of Errors, Caucasian Chalk Circle.
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One of the weird things (to me) locally is how many gigging musicians make a little money playing pit orchestra for high school musicals. Like, on clarinet and similar common instruments that in my experience were 100% played by high school kids. Music education here starts band in 7th grade so maybe that's why?
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My high school did a fall play, spring musical, and also (I think) one-acts, but it was an arts school so only people in the theater department (and maybe music?) were involved. We don't have any alumni that are huge stars but many whom are working actors and musicians, some of whom a few of you may know of.
Back in the day at my HS they would generally do a musical and regular play each year, but the musical was a much bigger production with multiple nights and a lot of attendance vs. a partially full auditorium for the straight play. The junior high (7-9) did a pretty large musical as well (mentored by the HS music director and linked to the HS). Somewhat shockingly I (a very, very basic singer* who was in the choir for more social reasons) got the lead role of Scrooge in a seemingly totally obscure/forgotten musical** based on A Christmas Carol. There were much better male singers in my class but don't think they were in the choir--one guy did a a very good Tevye our senior year. The choir director trying to get me to loosen up while singing pointed out to me that Rex Harrison couldn't sing either.
*A friend complimented me on making my singing voice sound like an old man...
**This would have been 1968 and I can fond no mention nor lyrics of the few songs I recall on the net (or instance "Christmas is a monumental humbug! Just designed to pick your pockets once a year"). Now I'm kind of curious as to how they came to select it. Maybe there is a category of school-only purpose-written musicals.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is really strange.
I've now seen Into the Woods. Amazingly talented kids, interminable 2nd half (with seriously dull, slow songs), which I've now learned is a parable about the AIDS epidemic.
I didn't know that and I've seen "Into the Woods" too.
The thing I was reading though, while waiting on Hawaii to come out, said "Of course he'd say that, but really, it is."
Sondheim's music is not really to my taste, but I thought "Agony" was pretty funny.
He's a better lyricist than he is a composer.
OK, yes, it has Second Act Problems, but I submit they are largely book problems. Act II has "Agony" which is funny if both prices ham it up (cf: Chris Pine and Billy Magnusen in the movie) and "Moments in the Woods" which is rueful and witty and kind of profound and maybe the best number in the show, and "Your Fault" which has some top notch SOndheim verbal noodling ("It's his father's fault/That the curse got placed/And the place got cursed/In the first place...") though granted "The Last Midnight" is extremely heavy-handed and "Children Will Listen" is smarmy and feels like it belongs in another musical and wait, AIDS parable? Well, I never notice anything.
I think maybe Cara Delevingne didn't have tremendous range in acting. But, yes, the script was the problem.
Yes, a lot of the lyrics were great to the upbeat songs, which I'm including Agony to be. But it clocked in at three hours, which was also Agony. (And the cast really did do a spectacular job. I was really impressed.)
The movie has its charms. Anna Kendrick is startlingly good. As movie musicals go, it's by and large a success. Would it have been better if they cast actual musical theater people? Yeah of course. But on the other hand: Dear Evan Hansen.
Anyway he's a great lyricist and a great composer. A Little Night Music is full of great tunes and "A Weekend in the Country" is a better ensemble than anything since Figaro. The man who wrote "Losing My Mind" and "I'm Still Here" and "Being Alive" and "Another Hundred People" and "Not While I'm Around" is doing fine in the composing department.
Sorry, slightly tired and fighty!
"Dear Evan Hansen" just made me so annoyed or uncomfortable that I left at halftime to get coffee. I've not seen the movie.
is now a reasonably well-known Broadway actor
Now I'm trying to think who's a reasonably well-known Broadway actor the age of commenters here and I'm going to go with Christian Borle.
Also wasn't Agony in the first act? it was reprised in the 2nd act.
The only Broadway star I can name is Jerry Orbach.
And Bernadette Peters, who should go on the TV the play a detective.
If people you have been working with for five years got laid off, but you didn't, you should send them a nice email or not? The layoff isn't effective for a few weeks, so I'll be in contact with them for a while yet.
Bernadette Peters already named Bernadette Peters, having been born Bernadette Lazzara or anyway having been named that shortly after being born.
I saw her once in Gypsy and twice in Follies. I wish high schools would do more age-inappropriate Sondheim like Follies. If there's one thing that could make a high school play more appealing, it would be the camp value of Dakota from Algebra class belting it out as a jaded, washed up show girl.
Not Patti Lupone? Idina Menzel?
Also to 72, there's Orbach's partner on Law & Order, Jesse Martin.
I've seen her many times in The Jerk.
75: I'll always do so as a response to a "departing soon" email by them, but rarely acknowledge their departure before they bring it up. But my experience is heavier on voluntary departures, where the big question is whether they'll mention it after giving notice, or just vanish.
My boys catholic high school did only musicals in the 80s. The star of them all in my class is a professional and was in breaking bad and billions. I had fun working stage crew, up in the rafters hauling backdrops up & down.
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Rage rage rage and raging of rage.
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Separately, my thanks to whichever reprobate recommended SHWEP.
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re: 84
Very similar experience for me. My high school only did musicals, that I can recall. I was in an adult theatre group in high school, and we were quite good but I couldn't sing at all. So I did stage crew / stage management for the school musical, and wasn't on stage. One guy in the theatre group (also at my high school) became a professional. Two actually, but the second guy was younger than me so I didn't know him.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0292142/
re: 86
Ditto. I just started it, too.
We saw a great production of Into the Woods in Juneau once. It was a combined high school and community theater production but seemed to be mostly driven by the high schoolers and the performance was at the high school.
I did stagecraft as well in high school and college. Really enjoyed it.
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Apparently, this book by Saez and Zucman partially motivated a federal contractor to misappropriate and then leak Trump's tax returns. Go public intellectuals!
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