If you’d asked me in 2019 whether musicals were “my thing,” I might have said something like “well, I do enjoy musicals from time to time, but I wouldn’t say I go out of my way to watch them.”
If you’d asked me the same question by July 2020, the answer would have been something like “oh my sweet mother of god I absolutely love musicals they are keeping me from going mad.”
Throughout 2020, I consumed what to me was an absurd number of musicals for someone who had only dabbled in the genre previously. And the world was happy to oblige my desperate need for the joy a good musical can bring. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Show Must Go On YouTube channel joyfully screened some of Webber’s classics, including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Phantom of the Opera. Other music institutions also happily aired operas, symphonic performances, and even professional productions of Shakespeare and other plays. And Spotify’s music catalogue gave me even more to enjoy, from Gilbert & Sullivan to walls of EDM and symphonies I’ve never heard before. But it was the musicals that gave me an escape.
For months last year, I obsessed over the soundtrack to The Greatest Showman before dropping a chunk of change on the blu ray. While the film leaves much to be desired, the music that makes up its soundtrack held such a powerful sway over the early days of quarantine that I played the whole thing on repeat while going about my day, sometimes gleefully singing along with tears in my eyes. Songs like “This is Me” by the absolutely incredible Keala Settle, “Rewrite the Stars” with Zac Efron and Zendaya, or the absolute banger “From Now On” with Hugh Jackman. This led me down the rabbit hole of behind-the-scenes materials, wherein I discovered this riveting performance by Settle of “This is Me,” which effectively got the movie greenlit because of her devastating honesty and the palpable joy oozing from the others in the room, many musical giants. And after years and years of cruelty and hate rampaging through U.S. culture, I kept coming back to those immortal lines from “From Now On”:
From now on
These eyes will not be blinded by the lights
From now on
What’s waited ’til tomorrow starts tonight
Tonight
Let this promise in me start
Like an anthem in my heart
From now on
And if those lyrics don’t speak to you, maybe the actual moment from the movie will, because I sure as hell lost it the first time I saw all that joy manifested in one place:
The Greatest Showman‘s songs seemed to speak to me — past me, now me, future me. And I just couldn’t get enough of it.
And when I’d played through those musicals, I found myself digging into the well of my favorites. Wicked, Urinetown, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog, and even the original Cats. Singing along to those tunes made the days being alone in my apartment or playing Pokemon in my car brought an immense amount of joy. They made existing in seemingly endless quarantine without friends or family less horrible than it could have been. And they’re still doing that work now.
There seem to be two big reasons for the power of musicals to manifest an escape:
- Singing along to a piece of music can help you not care about what’s going on around you. A lot of folks already know this deep down. Why else would you sing in the shower or run your throat raw in your car? All music has that potential, I imagine, but musicals invite you to sing along. The Greatest Showman‘s entire soundtrack have sing-along versions, as do many musicals. Even the original release got a second release as a sing-along production (with fancy lyrics on the screen). Musicals want to be sung, I feel. They want your voice to join the choir! And in doing that, you almost float away to another place. A magical place, if you will.
- Musicals in their most powerful form can cut right into your soul to all the emotions you’ve got trapped in there. The lyrics, the stories, the performances: they all have this odd ability to break down your barriers and get the emotions going. If you cry during a musical, it’s a beautiful thing. If you find yourself dancing and singing along with your face permanently stuck in a smile like the Joker from the 80s Batman, you’re probably experiencing joy at levels uncountable. Art has always been able to do this, but I think musicals hit some art-consumers with an unexpected kind of catharsis.
Musicals made 2020 bearable.
And musicals weren’t alone. When things go rough, the arts work gave themselves to us. They gave us plays and movies and art installations and documentaries and musicals and operas and symphonies and more. They gave us a lesson: that art matters, and we should ignore it at our own peril. We can’t survive without food or roofs or healthcare, but our souls need the release of great art — whatever that may be for each person. We don’t need much beyond those things. Survival and joy.
At least, that’s how I view it. What about you? Where did you find joy in 2020?
