The Best Musicals To Sing Along To
Now that the weather is a little warmer and life around is alive and well, it just makes a person want to sing out loud. Now, you could just sing along to your favorite music, but if you really want to know what’s better to sing along to, it’s musicals. Musicals are like the modern-day operas of the past. Musicals tell a story through song and dance, which in its own way is better than watching a movie with regular dialogue.
Below are the best musicals to sing along to this summer. These musicals will keep you feeling good as you watch them and learn the songs. In no particular order:
What a beautiful movie. Perhaps the most cinematic musical of all time as it is filmed in the Austrian Alps. The story follows Baronin (Julia Andrews) as she is hired as governess in a house full of talented children who aim to escape Austria and the Nazis during WWII.
Many of the songs in this movie are classics, like the intro song “The Sound of Music,” “My Favorite Things,” and “The Lonely Goatherd.” The Sound of Music has won five Oscar awards.
This is a story of teenage love set in the aesthetic 50s. The musical follows Danny (John Travolta), a tough-boy who courts the delicate Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) during the summer before school. When Danny finds out that Sandy is set to attend the same school as him, he struggles to maintain his tough-boy image while being reminded of the gentle square that he played to win Sandy over.
The music in the movie is catchy to say the least and from the very beginning the viewer is presented with a set of characters they grow to care about. This movie is also what got John Travolta associated with dancing, a trope that is often exploited in other movies such as in the diner scene in Pulp Fiction.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a science-fiction comedy horror musical. The story follows newlyweds, Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon), whose car breaks down on their honeymoon and are forced to ask for help at the nearest spooky mansion. Once there, they’re greeted by strange people, who turn out to be aliens, including a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania (Tim Curry).
The musical has gained a very strong cult following and every year across the country, productions of it are performed around Halloween time. The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been in theaters for longer than any other movie in history.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2008)
This is like a comic book turned musical. It is about a villian named Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) and his many plots to take over the world while being stopped at every corner by Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion). There’s also a love interest between Dr. Horrible and a girl named Penny (Felicia Day), who ends up dating Captain Hammer, causing Dr. Horrible emotional anguish.
Unlike many other musicals, this one doesn’t really have a lot of instrumentation nor dancing. In fact, it’s mostly vocals and piano, which easily lend themselves to be sung even when you’re not watching the movie.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog won a Primetime Emmy in 2009 for Outstanding Special Class – Short-format Live-Action Entertainment Programs.
This musical follows the lives of a group of Bohemian artists in New York City who struggle to pay their bills, struggle with their careers and on top of that, struggle with the AIDs epidemic of the late 20th century. When this musical first came out, it was groundbreaking that these subjects would be talked about, let alone through song and dance. This movie is based on the broadway musical of the same name and, in turn, on Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème.
Unlike a lot of other musicals, this one is quite funny and outlandish. It follows Seymour (Rick Moranis), a florist, who discovers a human-eating plant that offers him relationship advice. This musical leans towards more of a blues-rock and roll.
I’m sure you’ve heard the name Leonard Bernstein before. Maybe equally famous for being an orchestral conductor, Bernstein also composed the soundtrack to the modern-day Romeo and Juliet. The story goes that a girl named Maria, from the Upper West Side, is arranged to marry an equally yoked boy but instead falls in love with Tony, a Puerto Rican from the wrong side of town. This clash of the two different groups is violent and makes for an entertaining spectacle of singing and dance. The musical is such a classic that in 2021, Steven Spielberg remade the classic film.
Final Thoughts
Musicals sometimes get a bad rep for being a little over the top, but I think it’s that over the top aspect that makes them so memorable. Although these may not be a lot, these musicals will present the viewer with catchy music to sing along to.