I have seen
Avenue Q and I thought I'd die laughing. Given where I saw it—the front row of the balcony at the Spreckles Theatre in San Diego—dying was a very real possibility. You slip on one of the steps down to your seat, and you won't stop until you're falling over the railing. It would take a lot to get my mind off the sense of vertigo I felt, but that musical certainly did it.
Aside from
Avenue Q, which is wickedly funny, my truly favorite musical would have to be Stephen Sondheim's
Sunday in the Park with George. I am a major Sondheim fan, I have to admit, and also love
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,
Company,
Follies,
A Little Night Music,
Pacific Overtures,
Sweeney Todd,
Assassins, and
Passion (which, as an opera buff, I'd really like to see in what I regard as its real native habitat: being performed as a chamber opera by a professional opera company). The only ones I'm not so keen on are
Anyone Can Whistle and
Merrily We Roll Along, and I haven't heard
Frogs or
Bounce/
Road Show.
I also like Kander and Ebb's
Chicago,
Cabaret, and
Sweet Charity.
Sweet Charity was given, in one of the best performances I've ever seen, in a small, now-defunct experimental theatre called Sledgehammer Theatre.
I also like Lerner and Loewe's
My Fair Lady, Rodger and Hammerstein's
Carousel, and some others of that era.
Of the newer composers, I like Adam Guettel (
Floyd Collins,
The Light in the Piazza) and Duncan Sheik (
Spring Awakening). I didn't like
Rent the first time I saw it (at its world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse, no less), but the score grew on me with repeated hearings.
I'm a big fan of
Ragtime by Flaherty and Ahrens, though I've never seen it in a good performance, only in an staggeringly badly executed performance at the Starlight Bowl in San Diego. One of the quirks about the Starlight Bowl is that it's an outdoor amphitheatre that lies in the flight path to Lindbergh Field. In times past, they used to direct the actors to stop singing and freeze in mid-performance until the plane passed (using lights that were only seen backstage), but now they've taken to using microphones. In this performance, they were too cheap to put microphones on everyone, so some actors boomed while others could barely be heard. The sound board operator should have been fired for using the channels' volume slides to mute microphones. There are actual buttons that will do that, and the reason you use buttons is that if you use the volume slide, then there's a weird crescendo effect when people start speaking. It's like stopping a turntable with your hand and then letting it play.
The stage scenery was cheap, including plastic cut-outs of houses for the New Rochelle scenes. They might as well have had garden gnomes and pink flamingos for how tacky it looked. And the orchestra was cut beyond the bare bones, but nobody re-orchestrated the score so that it didn't sound thin. They just used the Broadway orchestration, so there were points where everything dropped out except a harp just vamping a rhythm because all the melody instruments were
gone.
I thought I'd beat the crowd by leaving at the intermission, but half the theatre was emptying out at the same time. That's how bad it was.