Not from my youth but of my youth: Miss Saigon. From my youth: the best of them all: Singing in the Rain.

The Sound of Music and Grease saw them both on broadway ….And when I was very young my grandmother took me to see Peter Pan with Mary Martin portraying Pan it was wonderful.

The Sound of Music!

OMG, Camelot ! My son and I have seen it whenever it is in town or out of town. It is OUR play. He was a JFK admirer and thus the idea of CAMELOT intrigued him. We have seen Robert Goulet as both Lancelot and as King Arthur. No one will ever surpass him in either role .

My favorite? Probably the one I have just seen or listened to on my IPOD. You’d love my playlist with multiple versions of titles when there have been good revivals! My first broadway show was Music Man with Robert Preston…did anyone else think Craig Bierko sounded justt like him in the revival? I went on to work in community theatre and was a theatre ed major in college so have worked on and directed many shows…loved directing “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown” with junior high kids! Also loved the revival with Anthony Rapp and Kristin Chenowith. My daughter is very proud that she saw Anthony Rapp as Charlie Brown…and told him so at a book signing! We have been fortunate to have passed along our love of musicals to our kids. I hope they can afford to continue the tradition! The most recent things I saw in New York were “A Chorus Line” and “Grease”…which was a present to my daughter just before she left for college last summer! All of you who love musicals should make it to the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, CT. It is a wonderful place (Annie and Man of La Mancha, among others, originated there)! Last season we took the college age kids to see Singin’ in the Rain…it blew their doors off…and they got a little wet, too!

Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance.” I saw a summer camp production of it when I was ten and fell in love with it. I still am! I always wanted to play The Pirate King, but for some unknown reason, no one will cast me!

Music was an enormous part of our lives. My parents had trained, and to us, mesmerizing voices. My mother’s father had studied opera all over Europe. The musicals on the stereo never stopped. Most of them came out of post-war exuberance and for me they are linked to our family at its best. The music lessons, singing, putting on skits, dancing to the musicals on the stereo, going to see the greats perform in person: Richard Harris in Camelot at the Pantages in LA and then dinner after over excited talk about the timing, costumes, lights, staging…the cohesive ambience…was the casting all ok? The most important thing about American musicals is that they are an inherent art…totally unique to our culture they started here and then were exported and recreated around the world. I love them all and when think of My Fair Lady or Camelot can see the magnolia trees in bloom outside our window, smell the roast in the over, and picture my younger sister dancing all over the room. That early tradition of music lives on: my sister was in many musicals in school herself and for the last ten years as school psychologist in a very rough area has helped her ‘kids” put on musicals not just to raise money for the school but to instill music, joy and confidence in them. I was a VP of Events for a symphony and other music groups organizing their fundraisers and balls. Those funds paid for music vans in schools and for disenfranchised children to see live performances of Nutcracker for free. Who knows what that leads to. I probably love Desert Song the best because our strange and unforgettable Thanksgiving tradition was that at the beautifully set table in my parents lovely dinning room instead of grace they stood, my tall dark-haired Dad with his arm around my beautiful blond mummy and sang “Desert Song” and “One Alone.” There wouldn’t be a dry eye, but then the champagne glasses were raised, we all laughed and dinner went on in high spirits. Years later I had One Alone instead of the wedding march when I married. A lot came from the tradition of musicals. It’s something very wonderful in America and thank god it lives on. http://www.bkserv.net/LFC/article.aspx?ArticleID=42

The first musical I saw on Broadway, on my first trip to NY, was The Wiz. But the one that stays with me still is A Chorus Line. I wore that tape (was it that long ago?) out. It’s the same guilty pleasure that makes me watch Project Runway, Top Chef, etc ….. the enjoyment of watching people create whatever it is that they are good at.

I’m afraid The Sound of Music was forever ruined for me by a remark of Christopher Plummer’s—in an interview he called it The Sound of Mucus. Badly done, Chris, badly done. But I can’t stop laughing every time I here ‘the hills are alive…’.