
Nothing beats a well-staged musical for entertainment. Especially when you have soaring music, gorgeous voices, convincing actors and clever special effects. But there are some shows that take a musical way beyond entertaining to life changing.
Les Miserables is one of those shows for me. That was what I was longing to see the first time I ever went to Broadway. But I was there on a date and he'd bought tickets to Phantom of the Opera. It wasn't the show I wanted to see and I wasn't the woman he wanted to take -- he had a crush on my look-alike sister. Since she was married and I wasn't, and he had enough money to blow on a hopeless cause, he'd flown me from Vancouver to New York for a weekend that was supposed to wow me. We had great seats and the show was spectacular. I remember heat radiating off the chandelier when it came crashing to the stage. I was hugely entertained. But what I wanted was Les Mis and the date was disappointing for both of us.
It was almost a decade later when I finally got back to New York City. I was there on business, but had a free evening and wound up with a last minute ticket to see the musical I'd been dreaming about. It was a cheap seat in the nosebleed section. The special effects, like when Javert appears to jump off a bridge and fall many feet to his death, don't work super well from that far up into the balconies. But it didn't matter. I was completely engrossed in the powerful story of redemption, and relentless love. I felt like I was right there with Jean Valjean when the Bishop of Digne gave him grace instead of his just desserts, and offered him the silver candlesticks that would help him start new and change his life. I was with him along every courageous and principled choice he made from that point forward. Even though I already loved the book and had memorized the songs, I remember sitting there in wonder and thinking that watching this show was empowering me to be a better person. I wished I could see it again and again. I wonder now what it would be like to be a member of the cast?
Stories are powerful agents of change. Stories mixed with music are more powerful still.
I saw that again when my daughter and I wrote a musical. It started almost accidentally. Our local homeschool moms voted to stage a children's adaptation of Peter Pan. It's a fun enough story, but I had personal reasons that I didn't want my children to be immersed in it for months on end. Their father, my ex, used to say that he was a Peter Pan and I'd made him that way, because I was a Wendy. So I just wasn't willing to have my kids give countless hours and energy to a play that celebrates the choice to never grow up.
I wound up writing a bunch of songs that took Wendy on a journey out of codependency and led Peter to the realization that he did want to grow up after all. We turned the play into a musical, and it was so successful that we were asked to stage it again at the district level. I wanted to do this right, so my 16-year-old daughter wrote a new adaptation of J. M. Barrie's script while I wrote some additional songs.
My youngest, the one who'd been afraid of growing up, was 11 at the time and got cast as Captain Hook. He had an excessively active imagination -- so much so that he couldn't sleep at night unless he kept his lights on. But one night partway through rehearsals, as I was tucking him into bed, he asked me to turn out the light. I was stunned and asked him what had changed.
He smiled at me and started singing a snippet from Peter's final song, "I want to beeee a maaaaan someday."

There's another chapter to this story -- about how we were able to revise that same musical with Indigenous collaborators and start bridging a deep ethnic divide. But I'll save that for another day.
Today, I just want to ask -- has your life been changed by a musical? If so, which one, and how did it change you?
My life has been changed by being involved with many, many musicals both on and off the stage. From acting to makeup to box office to administration to costuming etc etc etc Now my children and grandchildren love musicals too and are quite involved! Life lessons are learned through being involved with theatre! ❤️❤️❤️
Fiddler on the Roof! Many applications for my marriage and relationships