Tomorrow marks the 2 year anniversary of one of the few dates momentous enough that I make a specific point to celebrate it annually. That day is April 4th, the first time I listened through the musical Next to Normal. This may sound like a rather trivial occurrence to many of you, but I assure you, it totally changed my life. In this post I'm going to talk about three musicals which happen to be my favorites as well as the first three I really discovered. These shows are RENT, Next to Normal and Book of Mormon. By finding these shows first I set the bar very high, but I have since found many other musicals that I love very dearly as well (see recent post on Sondheim).
I will start this post with Book of Mormon. Book of Mormon comes from Matt Stone, Trey Parker and Robert Lopez. You may know the Parker and Stone as the creators of South Park, but it's unlikely you know Lopez. As a point of reference, he also did the music for Frozen, Avenue Q and is the youngest person ever to get the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) awards. Between his skill for hilarious lyrics and Parker and Stone's knack for genius satire, this play hits on all cylinders. In the past two years I've listened to upwards of 20 musicals of all shapes and sizes, but Book of Mormon remains the absolute funniest by a large margin. This is satire at many levels mocking not only Mormonism, but deficiencies of religion and of privileged America as well. Yet despite its biting tone, this play also offers one of the strongest notes of redemption and closure I've found to date. I'm serious when I say your will laugh your head off and be a better person for knowing this show.
Next up is RENT. It pleases me that a lot of people know RENT exists, but they don't know much more about it than the idea that "it's that AIDS musical". While it is true that some of the musical is about AIDS, that's not really the drive of this play. Above all else this is a play about human experience over the course of a year, a year filled with great highs and great lows. RENT is as much a story of death and love as it is about anything related to AIDS. The central message of RENT is summed up nicely in one of the songs as "I think they meant it when they said you can't buy love, now I know you can rent it...". RENT understands the remarkable human idea that love is really hard, and that like all other things in life, it will only be here for a short season. Love is not something you can own but only something you can have and borrow for a time. People die, move away, contract disease, break up, but love is achieving love for even a short time is worth all the pain. The message of RENT remains one of the absolute best I have ever heard from anything in my whole life.
Finally we arrive at Next to Normal, the inspiration for this post. Next to Normal changed my life because of not only its exceptional quality, but also how it made me rethink everything I knew about musicals. I discovered NtN a few days before RENT, so when I found this one I was still laboring under the delusion that musicals were like all like "Singing in the Rain" and such. Don't get me wrong, I love singing in the rain, but I had never considered that musicals could be used to talk about "real" things. Next to Normal is as real as it gets. It's a play about a woman struggling with bi-polar disorder brought on by the death of her son 16 years prior. It's a story of family disfunction, attempted suicide, divorce, drug use and just the pain of love, life and loss. RENT shows a tight knit group of friends struggling with the ins and outs of life, but Next to Normal reflects a dysfunctional family in really dire circumstances that is just trying to make "Just Another Day". Despite all the pain and turmoil, it ends with a glimmer of hope that a normal life is too far from reality, but that "something next to normal" is a real possibility. It's not really a happy story, but I believe it will change your life for the better to contemplate human experience in this context.
Thank you all for bearing with me through a few slower weeks of fewer posts. Life is been more "human" than I bargained for lately. Next time I plan to talk about how you should spend Xfinity's upcoming Watchathon Week, and I'll also probably talk about Binge watching, because there's an art to it.
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