In which I discover musicals

Growing up, I was a pretty strange kid musicwise.  I didn't care about popular music, or even the music of my parents' generation.  My thing was classical music.  Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, that sort of thing.  Mostly instrumental, mostly orchestral (or, because of my violin lessons, violin concertos).  This worked out pretty well for me, since CDs of classical music were on the cheap side.  Popular stuff could run $16 for a single; classical music was in the cheap bin, mostly $5 stuff.

(For the record, I still do like classical music a lot.  I just have a broader spectrum of stuff that I listened to.)

I should also point out that I wasn't too fond of opera.  The plots tended to be slow (seriously, do you really need a twenty minute aria about how you have been stabbed with a sword and are therefore dying?), and they were rarely in English, and while live opera did have subtitles, CDs didn't, and anyway operas were long.  I also wasn't fond of the large choral pieces like Handel's Messiah or similar, because they would say the same thing over and over again.  Literally.  It was like reading a book, except every sentence had to be said twenty times.

But somewhere along the line, I discovered Broadway musicals.

It might have been in London, where we saw a few (okay, it was technically West End, not Broadway, but the musicals were the same).  It might have been later.  I know there was one trip to Boston where we saw Phantom of the Opera -- I don't remember when, I just remember seeing it.  (And I remember my dad getting a bad case of food poisoning from some clams the night before.  But let's not go into that.)

My Phantom obsession started in Boston, I'm pretty sure.  I got a stereo at some point, and I remember testing it in the store using the Phantom overture (which is a good thing to test with because it's nice and loud, but I was all awkward and embarrassed because, goodness, people might find out I liked it!  Obviously I was the only person in the world who liked Phantom).  I remember playing the CDs over and over again.  I remember one summer when I was at camp and borrowed cassettes from a friend and practically wore them out over the six weeks.

And I found others.  Les Miserables, obviously.  (I started out with the Original London Cast recording, and there is one song -- "I Saw Him Once" that doesn't show up on other recordings that, now, always reminds me of physics homework done during the summer before senior year.)  My sister also introduced me to the Secret Garden musical, and to Chess, although the latter bothered me because -- gasp -- it used bad words.

(I was brought up with the understanding that one must never say the f-word or s-word or d-word, and I was very good about following that.  Partly because it was a Rule, and Rules must be followed; because if my mom heard something bad she would flick a finger against our lips, just barely hard enough to sting. I don't actually remember any time that happened, but I do remember one time I said something smart-mouthed and ducked out of the way of the finger-flick.  At any rate, I never used swear words until I got into college, to the point where I remember one of my friends at one of the language camps commenting on the fact that I used something as swear-ish-y as "pissed off".  So a musical that had lyrics like "Refugee, total shit--That is how I've always seen us." ... well, it was a tad shocking.  Though it did become one of my oft-listened-to favorites.)

It wasn't that I liked all musicals.  Brigadoon, which my high school put on and I was in the pit orchestra for, didn't stick; I mainly remember the stage fog (which, being heavier than air, liked to creep its way down into the pit) and the ew factor of the two main leads kissing (they were boyfriend and girlfriend in real life, so the kisses were not just stage kisses but full-on slobbery real kisses).  Bye Bye Birdie and Carousel, also high school productions but ones I wasn't involved with, also didn't stay with me, the first because it wasn't my sort of music and the second because it was too depressing.  Oklahoma was good but scared the crap out of me, so I didn't either watch or listen to it a lot.

But overall, as a genre, I loved musicals.  They were generally in English, they didn't have a lot of boring repetition, and they were fun to sing along to.  And the ones I really truly loved (Phantom, Les Mis, and Secret Garden,at least for high school; others came later, in college, but that's another chapter of this saga) I listened to over and over and over again.

I was probably pretty annoying about it, really.  But I had fun.