To not understand what kind of person hates musicals

[CrotchBurn]

Love them. Love all musicals. I just don't understand how you can have people who like stories, and who like music, and they have this hatred of musicals.

There's also so many different types of musicals from Cabaret to Blood Brothers to Cats to Sound of Music, how could you dislike them ALL?

Is it about the singing preventing you from engaging with the story? Because it feels artificial? But surely all films and plays feel artificial? I just think there's no better way of getting huge amounts of info across quickly than in musicals. This scene from Les Mis for example, in one song you understand the conflict, both characters' motives and back stories.

Also isnt there a bit of snobbery here - theres no difference between opera and musicals except musicals are more fun.

I go to the theatre a LOT and on the whole, dislike musicals. There are a few notable exceptions (Chicago, Joseph, Bat out of Hell, West Side Story,Hello Dolly, Come from Away) but they aren't my preferred genre. I think it's because the performance side of singing seems to put a barrier between the audience and the actors. It stops the emotional connection I feel during a really good straight play.

I enjoyed reading Les Mis but the musical made me want to scream. Telling the story through the medium of song does not make it better, not at all.

Oh I don't know, it definitely gets plus points for telling the story and not abandoning it to tell us all about the history of the Paris sewer system, or military movements at Waterloo. I like to learn interesting facts as part of the story, not massive standalone sections that basically say "look, I did all this research and now I'm going to tell you everything I found out".

Can’t stand musicals never have. When people at work say “oooh you should watch this one, I love it” I just say “not going to waste my time watching it”.

I just do not enjoy them at all.

Not keen if I'm honest, I think it's the way they burst into song in a hammed up, stage school kind of way that irritates me.

@Norwester

They're definitely better seen on stage. That way the spectacle and the songs distract from the (often) dull and predictable story line.

@cushioncovers Wicked was awful, wasn't it? I took the dc to see it in the West End and the worst part was the canned music - no orchestra. I don't see many musicals (I usually enjoy them but prefer plays or opera or concerts), so maybe this is usual now? I thought it was crap to deny a load of musicians work on a musical by playing prerecorded music.

That's really interesting @cushioncovers. we went to see Wicked and I thought it was dire. I would happily have left at the interval but DH insisted on staying. It hadn't occurred to me until now that it might be because there was no orchestra.

I enjoy musicals at the theatre, don’t really like watching them on television or the cinema.

What I can’t stand watching is dancing, it’s the facial expressions that get me. Worse is when the dancers mouth along to the words of the song...so cringe worthy!

@PolkadotsAndMoonbeams
Les Mis is my number one. It does a great job of weaving in a LOT of complex storylines IMO

I absolutely hate musicals with a passion.

I find the songs overly cheesy and sort of false in terms of the emotion they're trying to portray.

Also, the songs carry on for so bloody long! I prefer a story to be fast paced or at least medium paced - if you've sat there for ten minutes and nothing has actually happened or developed in the plot I find myself massively bored.

I love most music, but the sort of songs sung in musicals just do my head in.

Interesting to read all the perspectives here.

Bit rich to berate the OP @LakieLady when you think it's perfectly okay to post, I have a particular loathing of anything emanating from that Lloyd Webber creature and then go on to make further derogatory remarks about him.

Your posts say more about you than ALW and his work.

Also to say that opera is harder to sing than musicals is actually incorrect. Yes, sometimes there are celebs cast in musicals who aren't up to the job in terms of their singing ability, but if you know anything about singing, songs in musicals sounds deceptively easy, i.e. they are not and there's a lot more to it than you think.

I like musicals. The only one I absolutely loathe is Les Mis. I didn't realise it is literally just singing...like..all the way through. Dreadful. I need decent amounts of dialogue to balance it all.

What was the last musical you saw?
I caught Be More Chill on opening night in Feb half term and was very pleasantly surprised. Michael in the Bathroom is such a good song and the whole thing was funny and energetic with a fab cast.
@CrotchBurn
(I know I could start my own thread but my people are already here, hope you don't mind).

I hate musicals. Probably due to the fact that as children we had to frequently endure to my cousins shit drama group shows and then have to endure her jazz hands friends for the rest of the evening. All had creepy permanent smiles and irritating over the top laughs. Fucking detested every second.

Just say it, why all the singing/shouting.

@lotusbell

Me, I hate musicals. I find the singing corny, OTT and hammy. Each song seems like extreme overacting and just a bit naff. But I'm perfectly OK with people who do enjoy them as we all like different things and it's not a personal slight if you do or don't. Hth.

Apart from West Side Story I too can't stand musicals, surely we're allowed different views? Personally I can't stand sci-fi, only ever seen Star Wars in the Disney queues when I was whatsapping family in the UK to identify characters, wouldn't watch Chariots of Fire at first! How boring life would be if we all agreed on everything.

I can’t stand musical, and I have sat through enough of the bloody things to have an informed opinion.

‘Titanic’ on Broadway was a case in point. It sank.

Each to their own, though. I love watching live sport, and (in normal times) I have a season-ticket at a big Championship club. Some games we win, some we lose. Some games are incredibly dull. Some are just unbelievably tense. The unique thing about live sport, however, is that the drama is unscripted and the crowd are participants, not just a passive audience.

This is me. One that sticks in my mind is Westside Story. What kind of credible gang struts, clicks fingers and bursts into song?

I think West Side Story marks the point where (big generalisation coming up!) musicals became pretentious and dull, with the cringiness dialled up to 11. I'm totally allergic to the Bernstein/Sondheim/Lloyd-Webber genre, including all their present day imitators. I do like some later stuff - Barbra Streisand's great, and I still watch the Elvis movies I loved as a little kid - but there are really only two kinds of movie musicals that I like, and they are all pre-1960. The first is the lavish, Busby Berkeley, Astaire-Rogers type of extravaganza - you could put Singin' In The Rain in that category and it's probably the best of them all. Then there's the kind which is really just a star vehicle for an extraordinary singer - Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Al Jolson, Richard Tauber, Doris Day - and these are the films I obsessed over when I was younger. I guess you could put Marilyn Monroe's musicals or those of Marlene Dietrich in the "star vehicle" category, except that they weren't really primarily singers, so I mostly watch those kind of films to ogle the costumes and interiors.

Back in the early 90s Channel 4 used to show old movie musicals at 2pm on weekdays. I'd go back to school and leave the video set to record, then come back home to some top-quality escapist cinema. Remember the Tauber Pagliacci? How I wish I still had that VHS tape. It's totally unavailable everywhere now. It's what started me off on opera. Even though the score is a bit butchered, I think it would have been a good introduction to both opera and musicals for the kind of people who think it's so artificial when people suddenly start singing - both because Richard Tauber's Canio is a revelation (who knew he could act?) and because the play-within-a-play device allows a kind of nuanced exploration of the relationship between artifice and verisimilitude. (Very topical talking point when the opera was written.) I think I'm making it sound boring but it really isn't. I took the kids to see an am-dram Cav/Pag just before lockdown and they all loved it. The 11 year old was a bit upset by the ending and is now not sure about clowns, but she's asking to see the German film of Bluebeard's Castle again, so I guess the darker subjects in opera haven't turned her off permanently.

I love opera too, at least until it started getting all avant-garde and tuneless. A naked/Nazi-costumed eurotrash production of Strauss' Salomé is up there with Chess and Miss Saigon as the cringiest thing I've seen on stage. I do always like a good trad production of a tuneful opera, though. I'm fussy about singing but I don't expect much from live performances so I'm never disappointed. I think old movie adaptations of operas, as well as lighter musicals featuring the opera stars of the day, are insanely underrated. Anyone who's seen Louise with George Thill will know what I mean - I dare anyone to see André Pernet as the Father and then say that singing actors aren't believable! (I really believed he was going to throw Grace Moore out of the window at one point. :) )

I do think that YANBU and that people who "don't like musicals" were probably turned off by particular films or shows that were underachieving (like the Wicked with canned music mentioned upthread) or just part of a musical subgenre they don't happen to like. I'm not going to force musicals down anyone's throat, but there are vastly more of them than 99% of us have ever heard of, and you're bound to like at least one if you have the patience to seek them out. :)

People prefer different things OP. They shouldn’t need you to understand their preferences.
FWIW, I like some musicals but hated others. So I don’t know what it means really. I also suspect that some of the combined auditory and visual effects may be quite overwhelming in some cases and may even cause physical reactions in some viewers. People aren’t always comfortable to discuss something this personal so you may not be aware of this.

I'm a bit confused about the "no live music at Wicked" comments. If I'm in the stalls I always like to have a look into the pit (often when I go for my ice cream!) and there definitely were musicians there! I've just dug out my programme to be sure.

Some bits might have been pre-recorded (I'm pretty sure the young Wizard's lines are pre-recorded by the actor playing the older Wizard so the voice doesn't change), but I would think the fact that the string section is tiny is because it's doubled on one of the four keyboards rather than pre-recorded.

Keyboards instead of strings? OK for the local amateur panto. Not OK in the West End or on Broadway.

I cannot stand musicals, hate them. The cheesy artificial sentimentality makes my skin crawl! Noone sings like that in real life! And the cheesy smiles, ugh. Hate it. I couldn’t even sit through the ones I wanted to like: Avenue Q, Mama Mia film or that Ryan Gosling film. I get the strong Ick!

I was coming on here to say I don’t like musicals, and think you nailed the reason why in the OP — It’s the Suspension of belief thing, I like to be immersed and once the spell is broken, I struggle (so thank you for articulating that for me)

But then I also rate Rocky Horror Picture Show and Blues Brothers as my 2 favourite mindless fun movies. I think it might be that the music is somehow more intrinsic. Of the plot so utterly fantastical that it doesn’t matter. Or both.

I love opera too, at least until it started getting all avant-garde and tuneless. A naked/Nazi-costumed eurotrash production of Strauss' Salomé is up there with Chess and Miss Saigon as the cringiest thing I've seen on stage.

I think I might actually prefer some amateur performances for that reason — I once saw La Bohème twice in three weeks, and the one where it was the dreams of somebody dying from cancer was far more confusing than it being played straight. I knew the story well and struggled!

This is a strange thread. I like some musicals, not all. But we're all different aren't we? I hate cats for example.

Also to say that opera is harder to sing than musicals is actually incorrect. Yes, sometimes there are celebs cast in musicals who aren't up to the job in terms of their singing ability, but if you know anything about singing, songs in musicals sounds deceptively easy, i.e. they are not and there's a lot more to it than you think.

Many musical stars are/were classically trained anyway, I believe. Or could have sung in opera had life taken them in that direction. I guess musicals (particularly movie musicals where amplification is a given) are more accommodating in that roles can be written for both very technically accomplished singers and for actors with limited singing talent. Sometimes you have both within the same show: it takes a talented vocalist to pull off Eliza Doolittle's "I could have danced all night" but Higgins' music was actually composed for Rex Harrison, who was perfectly cast but couldn't sing a note. (Too bad Julie Andrews wasn't in the movie version.)

I am a very musical person but hate opera and musicals. With opera it's the type of singing I don't like whereas I find musicals naff. The plot is going along nicely and then it's interrupted with the cast bursting into song.
When I go to London people are always asking me what shows I'm going to see. When I say none, they look at me as if I've got 2 heads