Welcome to the Musicals Thread, the Avocado’s space for anything and everything related to musical theatre! Every month I’ll post a discussion prompt, but please feel free to comment on other topics, from new discoveries to old favorites. If you have ideas for future prompts or would like to write a feature for the thread, let me know!
“Which generally comes first, the words or the music?”
It’s perhaps the most popular question to pitch to songwriters. Well, here at the Musicals Thread, music is coming first, with words to follow next month!
What is (some of) your favorite music from musical theatre and why? Feel free to cite the tunes or orchestration/accompaniments of songs that also include lyrics as well as purely instrumental pieces. Here are a few of my picks to get the ball rolling:
The overture from Merrily We Roll Along. The opening fanfare immediately launches us into the adventurous, bustling world of show business. The horns swelling during the “Good Thing Going” section (“And if I wanted too much…”) always feels so warm, a nod to the partnership at the story’s center. The elements of the score flow effortlessly into one another, building momentum to a triumphant finish. Curtain up!
“Poison in My Pocket” from A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. A delightfully bouncy sequence about the logistics behind Monty Navarro’s gruesome mission, only interrupted by the screams indicating its completion – not a bad representation of the show as a whole. The rhythms of his voice and those of his victims nicely overlap in the last verse, before the fatal moment.
The melody from Hadestown. As Eurydice challenged Orpheus to perform his unfinished composition for her, I considered what a daunting task it must have been for Anaïs Mitchell to create his song – one around which the entire show would revolve, one plausibly of such beauty and power within the story as to deliver on Orpheus’ promises to heal the world and win Eurydice’s heart. By the end of the first of many iterations of those seven notes, I thought “Okay, yeah, that’ll do it.”