Attention show-tune queens: The 2012 New York Musical Theatre festival is almost upon us!
With dozens of full productions, concerts and special events, its a Broadway gay’s dream come true. And, guess what? Queerty and GayCities have got free VIP tickets!
Each winner will receive a Silver Membership, which includes four tickets, two opening-night passes, priority booking and seating and discounts on merch.
To enter, simply tell us which current classic musical is your favorite. We’ll pick our ten favorite answers and notify the winners by e-mail. Entries must be submitted by Thursday, July 5, at 11:59pm. Winners will be notified on Friday, July 6.
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Participation in this contest confirms entrant will be in New York City and available to attend NYMT performances. Visit NYMF.org for more information and ticketing options.
Zane
I’ve been on a big Funny Girl kick as of late.
Alex
The revival of Follies last year confirmed its greatness. Definitely my fave of the post golden age.
RomanHans
Has another musical provided so much employment for homosexuals (and their friends) as Cabaret? It’s been a spectacular vehicle for Joel Grey, Liza Minnelli, and (sigh) Alan Cumming. Also, it’s pretty easy for me to identify with: sometimes I feel like the debauched emcee, but sometimes I feel like Sally.
Andrew
Merrily We Roll Along – Sondheim
Glamhairgal
Thoroughly Modern Millie!
jacer
Hair
I remember at 16 needing to look up the definitions to a bunch of the words in the “Sodomy” song.
Then, many weeks of singing at the top of my lungs to my parents’ old original cast record.
Good times.
Nicholas
I personally always liked Anything Goes!! Number one, you can’t go wrong with Cole Porter, Reno Sweeny is an awesome character, and Ethel Merman, Patti LuPone, and Sutton Foster all performed the role!!!
Chris S.
Sunday in the Park with George.
A masterwork not just in musical theater but drama as a whole. The fact that it is one of only a handful of musicals ever to win the Pulitzer is just a testament to the craft and intellectual heft of the show. Technically speaking it’s a tour de force in musical composition, Sondheim’s most complex and soul stirring score in its intimacy, precision, form, leitmotif, and structure. Lapine’s original story touches us all on the deepest most internal level of what really being alive and going through this journey on earth is all about. The themes and life lessons of which are seriously profound and the avant-guarde conceit heightens the philosophical nature of the show. The art world narrative and setting serves both as an effective vehicle for the messages of the play while also engaging a world many gays themselves personally identify with or relate to.
The highest compliment a show can get is when it ends and there’s just complete silence because the viewer is digesting an overwhelming onslaught of intellectually stirring material underpinned by a primal visceral response to the stimuli. That is what happened to me upon my first experience with the piece. I say experience because that is exactly what great art achieves- an interactive dialogue with the audience not passive viewership. Combine all that with the awe-inducing grip of Bernadette Peters (not only the finest musical theater performer we have but finest stage actor period) and it’s just too much for words.
Although the piece stands as a truly revelatory experience for many theater aficionados, the most poignant and heart-aching moment for me personally is the quiet scene at the end of Act I “Beautiful”. The lyrics of the song almost read as a direct narrative for my life experience and underline succinctly a culmination of Sondheim’s great themes as a writer and represents a height in the canon of his work.
Gabriel L.
La Cage Aux Folles
I saw the revival (with Hodge and Grammer) my then-new bf and it was such an empoweringly sweet and wonderful show. I had just made the decision to be honest about what I wanted for my life, and in the process, I was rewarded with a chance to meet the sweetest man, whom I’ve been with for a while now and whom I’d love to accompany me to a show 🙂
Brent
Well, when I need to get pumped up for the elliptical, I listen to XANADU. (Thinking about Cheyenne Jackson’s body helps me with shame spiraling/motivation.)
When I’m down in the dumps, I listen to 9 TO 5, because Dolly believes in me and doesn’t want the man to bring me down.
When I’m feeling like a bagel on a plate full of onion rolls, I listen to FUNNY GIRL.
And when I want to get in the mood, I listen to GYPSY. (Bump it with a trumpet, anyone?) …Patti’s version.
Dane B. McFadhen
I arrived in New York from Montreal at the Port Authority bus terminal in July of 1975 to see the one girl everyone was talking about – and it wasn’t Miss Liberty. It was Stephanie Mills. I’d saved my jeans store salesman job money and was determined to see this singing sensation I’d heard so much about in the papers. It was the newest Broadway show, “The Wiz”. I had loved the Wizard of Oz as a child, now here was something different I could see as an adult.
I checked in to a flea bag inn and made my way to the theater.It was a typically sweltering summer’s afternoon. The box office tickets being just too expensive to afford, I was going to take my chances with the discounted tickets in the pre-sale lineup.
I got to the wicket and it felt like a punch to my stomach. There were three people already waiting.
I’d been to New York with my parents a couple of times, so I knew that most theaters sold one, at most two tickets at discounted prices shortly before the curtain would go up.
The three women ahead of me were very animated. They soon drew me in and we all talked about our love for the stage.
I told them that I was a stage actor. That I still had my dreams intact and had appeared in many musicals.
The ladies all grouped around me and chitter-chattered. They were from the suburbs in New Jersey. Away from their families they came down to Broadway regularly to escape the kitchen pileup of dishes and vacuum cleaner and drippy noses. “Emancipation? Ha!” they all said.
Women were still so housebound then.
We talked and laughed for almost three hours till there was a rattle at the wicket window. We all immediately turned and a woman’s face appeared. Funny…none of us moved. We just stared.
Behind the little black wrought iron bars the woman pushed a couple of papers and then, almost without looking at us (guess she hated seeing all the disappointed faces) simply said, “I have one ticket”.
My shoulders slumped. I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked down at my sneakers.
It burst out of them like a Broadway song. All I heard were the sweetest words to a theater kid’s ear, “Give it to him!” My new women friends, laughing their heads off, literally pushed me right up to the window.
The woman behind the grate simply slid the ticket to me and said in a monotone, “Enjoy the show” and slapped the gate shut.
I gave back as good as I got. We must’ve hugged for ten minutes. It was so hot my tee shirt and their dresses stuck to each other. They were all balling. I was the dry eye. I was suspended like a clipped marionette. They had to shake me to get me to say something.
To say I came alive would be an understatement. I thanked them over and over and after they’d left, I walked in with all the hordes, they in their finest, me in my raggedy-assed shorts and shoes.
I wound up four rows from the stage, center aisle on the floor the most perfect seat in the house and bawled all through “Home” and “Be a Lion” and rump-danced to “He’s The Wiz” and was transfixed…forever. Wherever you are ladies of New Jersey, thank you for an experience that busts my face into a Broadway smile even as I write this.
Yours Sincerly,
Dane
Chris
I’ve absolutely loved Oklahoma since the first time I saw it, when *I* was as high as an elephant’s eye.
Jules
Into the Woods, in anticipation of the Shakespeare in the Park production with Amy Adams, Chip Zien, and the magnificent Donna Murphy.
Andrew Beck
In many ways “The Book of Mormon” restored my faith in the American musical. It reminded me that a musical can be genuinely funny, contemporarily relevant, plot-driven and full of quirky, individualized characters many of whom get their own moment to shine. It was more than just a one joke or one gimmick show–it had depth and direction. This season, I appreciated the revival of “Follies” because it demonstrated how a musical could at one time stretch boundaries, yet remain true to the form, entertaining, poignant, and absolutely clever. When I saw the original trying out in Boston in the early 1970’s, I was stunned when the “Loveland” sequence begun. What an exciting shock! Couldn’t believe how a stage could be so transformed in a mere seconds! Electric moment!
Richard Cohen
I’ve got “No Day But Today” tattooed on my bicep so even though I want to say “Spring Awakening” my allegiance in these important matters must remain with “Rent”!
Nick
My favorite classic will always be Gyspy. Mix in one part bitchy mother, one part sassy daughter, one striptease and mix in either Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters or Patti LuPone — you’ve got yourself a classic.
Hands down the best musical ever written for musical theatre.
Noah
Assassins was on Broadway maybe ten years ago, and just out of curiosity I picked up student rush tickets. It was a revelation — absolutely brilliant. I’d always thought musicals had to be about heteros in Kansas just bursting into song in the middle of conversations, but this was a topical, beautifully-written show about something not often discussed. Since then, I haven’t found many musicals that get anywhere near this kind of quality, but I’m still looking!
Johnny Cakes
Sondheim’s “Company” will always have a soft spot in my heart. It was the first musical I ever had the opportunity to watch, and I got the greatest kick out of it because of its focus on (relatively) young urban professionals dealing with their upper-middle class problems. It’s funny, caters perfectly to its audience, and wrestles with the question of whether a bachelor is happier going through life by himself or better off finding someone else to confront the challenge of being alive with.
I went to the show to escape from life’s little relationship problems for a while, only to find that the musical deals with them head-on. But at the time I watched the musical, I was a young professional new to the city, and I appreciated the series of stories “Company” had to tell and the issues the characters confront. The comedy, the singing, and the artistic flair! So much to miss about it!
James
Reasons why In The Heights is my favorite current classic musical:
1) It captures the life, and energy of the Hispanic/Latino diaspora which is underrepresented in the theatrical art form. It’s a present day, vibrant tale that celebrates diversity in its very existence and forwards the agenda of the disempowered in its content. (During the blackout, the lyrics “we are powerless, we are powerless” always stick with me as they lead into and out of politically charged rapping).
2) I’m about to move across country to attend grad school, and I’ll be leaving my longtime boyfriend (who also loves musicals and who I’d love to win this contest for) on the east coast. This situation runs parallel to Nina’s leaving for college, and the song When The Sun Goes Down jerks the tears out of me each time I hear it.
3) No matter who is playing Benny, they are always attractive.
4) The choreography is incomparably fierce.
5) Almost each one of the characters gets an opportunity to sing their own little torch song/personal story, which is a tradition long revered by gay men singing into hairbrushes in front of their mirror everywhere.
6) The music is sweeping, current, timely, and unique.
7) Lin Manuel Miranda’s performance at his wedding took a straight wedding to the gayest possible place it could go without becoming a gay wedding.
8) Last (although I could go on forever) – It is the show that contains the most roles that I want to play, with the most songs that I would love to perform and act my way through. Unfortunately, they are female roles- and being a gay man- I don’t quite type into them as well as I’d like.