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!

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“Andrey’s family, totally messed up”

– Mary Bolkonsky and Prince Bolkonsky (Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 by Dave Molloy)

We’ve talked about friends and we’ve talked about enemies. Family can act as one, both, or neither. It can be formed by blood or by choice. Its members can live inextricably closely or like strangers. To paraphrase Tolstoy, each is happy, unhappy, or somewhere in between in its own way, and this diversity is reflected in the various families seen and heard onstage. What are your favorite/the most memorable familial relationships from musicals and why?

I’ve already written about Tateh and his Little Girl from Ragtime (https://the-avocado.org/2022/02/08/musicals-thread-heartwarming/), so this time I’d like to look at Into the Woods, a show built around multiple parent-child relationships and examining the very nature of such connections, perhaps most poignantly through the character of the Baker. He longs for a child but then doesn’t know what to do when he gets one, fearing his own influence on his son. He’s had no example to learn from himself, only reconnecting with his absentee father in the latter’s final days. His father at least recognizes his own mistakes and urges the Baker not to repeat them.