Resurfacing...

First off, Dad is home from the hospital as of yesterday. He'll stay on antibiotic IV for four weeks, with a visiting nurse coming 1-2 times per day to check on him, I think. There's some pump maintenance he's supposed to do on his own, too. Transesophageal Echo showed a very slight thickening of the wall around the mitral valve, but no permanent damage to the heart. Yay. I won't go into the other systemic stuff they're still working on, becuase trust me, it's Too Much Information. *I* don't even want to know half of what he tells me about his colon. Reallly. But he's on a "low-fiber" diet for now - in other words, no roughage, no wheat, no nuts, no food that leaves a heavy residue in the GI tract, etc. Refined flours and very few vegetables, white rice, easy-to-digest meat - that kind of thing. They'll do a follow-up scan in a week or so.

Next, once again, I dropped off posting. I intended to post earlier this week, but life has been hectic, and LJ is nearly always the first thing to go.

But, I have a bit of something to post about.... Sunday night we went for dinner with several cast members, and Peri mentioned that our director, Bill, agreed to do the show not knowing it at all. He said during rehearsals that he had seen Mame, but apparently that meant, like, once. As his directing constantly seemed to be coming from the land of No Clue, this tidbit of information suddenly brought a lot of things into very sharp focus. It all made sense! ...And then it didn't.

How can someone who's had a whole career (I'm talking decades) in musical theatre not know Mame?

So Monday night, at dinner, etakyma and I got to talking about that, and posed the question over dinner: "What musicals should a serious student/practitioner of the form know?" Mind, these are not our 100 favourites or the 100 winners of anything - this is a "short list" of musicals that, in our opinion, professionals in the field should at least be passingly familiar with in terms of story and music - at least enough to recognize songs, even if they don't necessarily know the whole score. Heck, *we* even violated our rules and added things that *we* don't know as well as we'd like....

It might help to know that in our theatre program, we also had to take a "play-reading" test to graduate with the major in theatre. We took a multiple choice test with questions about 50 plays - plays which we had to have read, on our own time, within the course of our four years at school. (This meant most of us crammed them in senior year, because who has time to do it over four years? Not to mention that you'll never remember the answers....)

So here's our list of candidates, in alphabetical order, with the optional (i.e., nice, but not necessary to know) musicals in parentheses at the end.

( The list )

Again, we left off a LOT of good shows for various reasons - either they're too obscure, or they didn't really push the boundaries of the musical form, or they're just not that Important, or what have you. What do you think? Deletions? Additions? Did we overlook something obvious and if so, why do you think it should be there?