If you had to convince a nonbeliever, in just a few minutes, why they should make musical theater their religion, what evidence would you offer?
That’s the question we asked some major practitioners of the faith and some of our writers and editors. Their 13 answers are all over the genre map, including rock bangers, tender ballads and aching jazz arias. They’re also all over the timeline, from the 1920s to just this minute. Some are classics that once ruled the pop charts; others are secret treasures waiting for new ears.
That range is part of the evidence you’d want to offer your friend. Musical theater songs are as different as the era, the artistry and the story each arises from. At their best, they encompass that difference and transcend it, reaching out to anyone, anytime, willing to listen. Read about their selections below, check out the playlists included with this article and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.
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‘Some Enchanted Evening,’ from ‘South Pacific’
Andrew Lloyd Webber, composer
I mean it is so brilliant. The lyric is so brilliantly, deceptively simple. That kind of lyric, to work and stand up, is genius if you get it right. I don’t know how many goes at it Oscar Hammerstein II did, but there must have been a few I think. And for me it’s just one of the most remarkable melodies ever written — I was just thinking about Richard Rodgers, and reading about him. I hadn’t really realized the depth of his depressions, and the alcohol of course, and you think, “If he’d only got himself together.” He had a whole lot more music, I’m sure, inside him, but it dried up after Hammerstein died.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube
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‘And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,’ from ‘Dreamgirls’
Elisabeth Vincentelli, Times theater writer
Fasten your seatbelt and secure your belongings: This mid-tempo excerpt from Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger’s 1981 musical “Dreamgirls” is a roller coaster of emotions that goes from pits of despair to feverish anger, from emotional meltdown to defiant stand. The character, Effie, has just been kicked out of the girl group she was in, so she confronts her manager and, basically, the world. Trading a traditional structure for what can feel like a rambling stream of consciousness (but is actually precisely devised), the song usually becomes a bravura showcase for its performer. Jennifer Holliday’s original version, which topped the Billboard R&B chart and earned her a Grammy for best female R&B vocal performance, both in 1982, is considered as definitive as a number can get.
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‘Night Song,’ from ‘Golden Boy’
Jason Robert Brown, composer-lyricist
A good musical theater song is superficially the same as a good pop song, but a great musical theater song pulses with a different kind of life. In a great musical theater song, all the elements — the music, the lyrics, the orchestration, the performance — operate together to pull you deeper into the story. In the case of “Night Song,” from the 1964 musical “Golden Boy,” the song serves to introduce us to the lead character, the boxer Joe Wellington, and immerse us in his world, Harlem at the dawn of the civil rights movement. The composer Charles Strouse is most famous for “Annie” and “Bye Bye Birdie,” but “Night Song” is, befitting its subject, part of a more serious and ambitious score, an audacious melding of genres — the instrumental textures of hard bop and R&B, the Afro-Cuban rhythm of rumbas and mambos, the melodic sweep of bel canto opera, the harmonic richness of German lieder.
In the song’s bridge, matching the lyric “Where do you go / when you don’t even know / what it is you desire?,” Strouse whips vertiginously through four distinct key areas before depositing the singer thrillingly back on the tonic at “As the night comes ….” Lee Adams’s lyric matches the music’s kaleidoscopic swirl — impressionistic, romantic, suddenly baldly declamatory, bringing us face to face with a character who is yearning for meaning (“A lonely song. / When you can’t help wondering, ‘Where do I belong?’”) — and all too aware of the barriers in his way (“Who do you fight when you wanna break out / But your skin is your cage?”). Gluing it all together is Sammy Davis Jr.’s performance, swooping, back-phrasing, riffing, growling, crooning, using every expressive tool of one of pop music’s greatest singers to forge one of the theater’s most compelling dramatic performances.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube
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‘Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat’ from ‘Guys and Dolls’
Michael Paulson, Times theater reporter
“Guys and Dolls,” the 1950 classic with a score by Frank Loesser, is the best of the Golden Age musicals. There, I said it. So sue me, as Nathan Detroit says in the show. And I’m a sucker for a showstopper, especially those sung by secondary characters who steal the limelight while the principals catch their breaths. In this case, that character is a crapshooter with the fabulous name of Nicely-Nicely Johnson, and in this song, he is seeking to persuade the police that a group of unrepentant gamblers are actually penitent worshipers. Nicely-Nicely vividly vamps about a dream in which, despite his sinfulness, he is saved from damnation by people of faith. The song has everything I want from a musical theater banger — an over-the-top conceit, a transformative journey, clever and colorful lyrics, and vocal pyrotechnics. Plus, it’s catchy!
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube
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‘Will You?,’ from ‘Grey Gardens’
Sara Bareilles, singer-songwriter
Well, most of my friends love musical theater already, but if I had to imagine a world where someone I loved didn’t love it (gasp) … I would send them a bootleg video of Christine Ebersole singing “Will You?” from Grey Gardens. I know. I hate a bootleg, but I am so grateful for this one, because I never got to see this production. This song (music by Scott Frankel, lyrics by Michael Korie) does what I think great songs from musicals do — they haunt you and make you dream of sitting in the dark watching that magic unfold. The perfect union of craft and interpretation. Christine’s immaculate delivery of a melody I think of often. It is like theater itself to me, both mystical and essentially human.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube
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‘Wig in a Box,’ from ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’
Alexis Soloski, Times culture reporter
A song for anyone who has ever believed that the right hairdo can really turn a life around, “Wig in a Box” is a sad bop about human transformation. It’s sung by Hedwig Robinson. Born Hansel, “a slip of a girlie boy from communist East Berlin,” Hedwig is brought to the United States by her sugar-daddy lover and then abandoned. Some nights, in her trailer home, after a few vermouths, she tries on her wigs and imagines whom she might still become. The song, by Stephen Trask, begins as a lament before accelerating into wry pop. Then the wheels come off and it’s a thrasher. Underneath it all, it’s a ballad of the human condition and an invitation to incarnate the life you want, up or down, fringed or curled.
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‘There’s a Boat That’s Leavin’ Soon for New York,’ from ‘Porgy and Bess’
Jesse Green, Times culture correspondent
What does a pimp sound like? Listen to the slippery, insinuating motif for bassoon and bass clarinet that starts one of musical theater’s most astonishing sequences. Bess, a former prostitute and drug addict, has cleaned herself up with the help of Porgy, a disabled beggar. But in this scene from the third act of “Porgy and Bess” (1935), Sportin’ Life, her dealer and procurer, tries to drag her back down with a seductive tune (by George Gershwin) and a hypnotic lyric (by George’s brother Ira) that promises “the swellest mansion up on Upper Fifth Avenue.” With its jazzy pleasures, the song would entice anyone onto the wrong track — but listen through to the end of the scene. That’s when it goes off the rails in a hair-raising intimation of catastrophe.
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‘Lost Horizon,’ from ‘Gone Missing’
Jeanine Tesori, composer
It’s one of the few theater songs on my playlist, and I return to it again and again. Michael Friedman had a way of combining sturdy, great grooves with fragile lyrics — “I wanna live in Xanadu / Without you / With Kublai Khan so I can smoke my pipe and dream of you.” The paradox of floating and being grounded at the same time. He was like a rocker Studs Terkel, able to give voice to so many of the people he interviewed, along with the character he musicalized. His music is fearless and powerful and poetic.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube
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‘Fable,’ from ‘The Light in the Piazza’
Joshua Henry, singer and actor
This song (by Adam Guettel) includes some of the most gorgeous music you’ve ever heard. It takes you to a different time, in Italy, when a woman (played by Victoria Clark) is having the realization that she can’t tell her daughter to be careful about love. She’s telling her daughter, “You know what? If it happens, be wild with it. Go all in.” You see a character go from “I hate this” to “It’s the most glorious thing in the world.” For someone who’s not a musical theater person, you see this number, and hear the lyrics, and you understand what musical theater is about. It’s about a journey. It’s about a character discovering something in real time. Every great musical theater song should be that. It’s not about a memory. It’s about real-time discovery. And “Fable” is one of those songs that just does it in the best way.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube
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‘Superstar,’ from ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’
Elisabeth Vincentelli, Times contributor
Rock music and Broadway don’t have the best relationship, but this raver from 1970 proves that the most antagonistic factions can get along. Sung by Judas Iscariot in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the number is maximalist fun: an intro molded out of triumphant bombast, a ripe opportunity for a singer willing and able to commit to over-the-top acrobatics, a blaring brass section and a galloping bass line, sweet interludes with a women’s choir to refuel the machine, a frenetic rush to the finish line. As befits its title, “Superstar” is equally at ease in theaters and arenas, where the show is often presented in concert version. No matter the setting, this extravagant epic is ridiculously exciting.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube
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‘Satisfied,’ from ‘Hamilton’
Nicole Herrington, Times theater editor
Part of what makes “Hamilton” feel so thrilling is how its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, weaves popular musical genres — hip-hop, R&B, pop — into a musical theater structure. An infectious, multilayered example of this is “Satisfied,” which is framed as a toast by Angelica Schuyler (the radiant Renée Elise Goldsberry) at the wedding of her sister Eliza and Alexander Hamilton. It opens with a simple piano melody, and well wishes from Angelica. But then it takes a dark turn, reflecting Angelica’s inner turmoil. In an impassioned song-rap, a whole back story comes to life: Angelica’s meet-cute with the equally restless Hamilton — “this is what it feels like to match wits with someone at your level”— and the realization that her sweet younger sister is also smitten with him. A better sense of Angelica’s shrewdness is revealed as she enumerates her reasoning for sacrificing her own romantic happiness for her sister’s.
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‘Low Down Blues,’ from ‘Shuffle Along’
Jesse Green, Times culture correspondent
Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s classic “my heart is breaking” number was called a “Blues Character Song” on the label of its first recording, in 1921. But it’s also an encapsulation of the evolution of Black music in the American musical theater. Shoehorned as an up-tempo novelty into their 1922 Broadway hit “Shuffle Along” — the first to feature an all-Black creative team, cast and orchestra — it showed up in the 1978 revue “Eubie!” as a contextless showstopper for Gregory Hines. By 2016, when Billy Porter sang it in a “Shuffle Along” reimagined by George C. Wolfe, it had emerged as a full-throated dramatic aria. The truth is, it was all those things all along.
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‘A Letter From Harry’s Mother,’ from ‘Suffs’
Laura Collins-Hughes, Times contributor
Warning: This gentle country song might pluck your heart right from its socket — especially since its story is substantially true. In 1920, when winning the right to vote was tantalizingly close for American women, passage of the 19th Amendment really did come down to one young state legislator in Tennessee. And his mother, Phoebe Burn, really did write a letter urging him to “be a good boy” and “vote for Suffrage.”
In Shaina Taub’s simple, plaintive ballad, Phoebe pours her powerlessness and longing into a telegram, and lodges with her son an urgent request: “Let your mama know she raised a good one.” Emily Skinner played Phoebe on Broadway in 2024, and reliably made audiences cry — for all the mothers and mothers’ mothers who went through life second class.
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Michael Paulson interviewed the contributing artists.
The post 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Musicals appeared first on New York Times.
