Musical Theater… Quarter!

Happy 2021! Fingers crossed it’ll turn out better than 2020 did.

For five years in a row I’ve challenged myself to watch or listen to one musical per day during the month of February. I wanted to educate myself and expand my horizons in creative medium that I loved but hadn’t spent much time on. It’s been really fun, but the last two years didn’t work out too well. As year 6 approached, I started to think I needed to revamp things a little bit.

I still love musicals (probably now more than when I started), and I still want to set aside time in my life to exploring them further. I also need to be realistic, though. I work 10 hour shifts, and have other daily priorities in my life that I’m not interested in letting fall by the wayside for a whole month. If I try again using the same format, it’s just going to be another half-completed attempt.

So, enter Musical Theater Quarter! For the first 3 months of 2021, my plan is to watch or listen to one musical per week and write about them. This will also give me more time to study them and hopefully give me more to say. Unlike previous years, I’m also not going to publish my list right now, if at all. I have one to draw from, but I don’t know what order things are going to go in. It’ll be a surprise for both of us!

I’m pretty excited to get things going again. I started using Spotify this summer, so thanks to my 2020 playlist, I can tell you there was, again, a lot of Hadestown this past year. At the beginning of the year, I’d toyed with the idea of taking a train to NYC for a day to see the show, but we all know how that worked out! It also has a few songs from Great Comet and 21 Chump Street. I had little stints of Jesus Christ Superstar, Fun Home, Assassins, and Pippin. And then there’s the evidence of the few weeks or so during early quarantine where I had my hours cut and spent a lot of time playing Minecraft and listening to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson over and over and over again. It really hits different during this stage of the current presidency, I’ll tell you what.

More recently, midway through November I randomly got obsessed with Les Miserables to where it was all I could listen to and all I could think about. Literally. I spent a whole day in early December just consumed by the tragedy of Jean Valjean and Javert. It was a weird time for me. I came down off of that a few weeks ago and immediately took up a Chess obsession, so I guess it’s just been a weird couple of months. (Chess is really good though, you guys. You should listen to Chess.)

So that’s my way of announcing that while I won’t be publishing a formal list, I will tell you that my first two are going to be Chess and Les Miserables. I have a lot to say about them both. I may even end up with multiple blog posts about them. Who can say! 🙂