Re: Broadway musicals
My hotel room has a channel on the TV that does nothing but highlight musicals that are currently on Broadway.
I know this makes me a bad person, but I hate musicals. I mean I really loathe them. The only musicals I’ve ever liked were musicals that openly took potshots at musicals: “The Producers” and “Urinetown”.
And yet, I still go to see them, the way some people go to see movies they know they’re going to hate.
Musicals (in general) are supposed to be grandiose and make you believe in the power of love and friendship and all that crap. Musicals, along with figure skating/ice dancing and Disney movies, are the opiate of the masses.
There are several things you need to buy into in order to really enjoy a musical. The biggest of these is that every emotion a character has is important enough to warrant a huge production number, with a chorus and dancers and big set pieces.
This is never the case. Anyone who has ever had a huge breakup and wants to talk about it (for hours, over the course of several months) knows this. The world doesn’t stand still and nobody stands around basking in the beauty of your pathos. If you’re lucky, someone will pat you on the back and give you a few words of encouragement. If not, people will just tell you to get over it.
Part of the appeal of musicals is this aggrandizement of universal emotions. That’s okay, I guess. I just don’t believe people need to be encouraged to believe that all of New York City should stop and listen to them expatiate, in song, about how they got stood up at Balthazar last week by that film student they thought they really had a connection with.
11:08:04 AM 
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