Adaptable

As much as I love watching movies, I cannot watch a musical. You know that cringing feeling you get when you know you're about to get a huge static shock off the doorknob from walking across the carpet? I get that same feeling about musicals.

No matter how great, how classic, or how enthralling it may be, if any major portion of the dialog is conveyed through singing, I'm not interested. There's no rhyme or reason for it. I just don't like it.

I've seen the Wizard of Oz once. I've seen parts of The Sound of Music. That's about all I could tolerate. Mary Poppins? No. Grease? No. Chicago? No. Moulin Rouge? No. No, no, no. Even Scorsese, who's films I adore, is not enough to get me to watch The Gangs of New York.

So when Nathalie and I were in New York, I was curious as to how I would react to a Broadway show.

And amazingly, I really liked it. There's just something different about seeing live actors as opposed to those on a movie screen. To my utter disbelief, I even enjoyed the singing. Fritz over at The Movie Guys summed up my feelings about musicals quite well with this statement he made in review of Sweeney Todd in regards to his distaste for musicals as opposed to regular movies:

...film [is] a more literal medium than the stage and it seems more patently ridiculous when characters burst into song on film than when they do on the stage, where the stage itself makes things seem inherently more artificial, so it's not as jarring when the characters sing. On top of this, seeing a musical on stage is a more energetic experience. Watching the performers belt out the music live in front of you gives off a palpable energy that rarely translates to the screen (witness the failures of the film versions of Rent, Phantom of the Opera, Evita).

I couldn't agree with his statement more. People on stage on a Broadway show could fart rainbows and I wouldn't think it was weird at all.

I actually heard myself telling Nathalie on the subway ride back to the hotel that we need to go watch more Broadway shows. And I wasn't being facetious. I really did enjoy them.

So does this mean I'm going to go rent Grease and give musicals a try?

Uh... No.