How did you interest in musical theater start?

First, mom and her best friend took me, and her best friend's daughter...who I had a little crush on...to a matinee of "Hello, Dolly!" At the Shubert in Boston. Pearl Bailey was Dolly...still my favorite cast album of the show!

Second, as a birthday present, I went to see "Follies" at the Colonial in Boston with my father when Yvonne De Carlo was still singing "Boy, Can That Boy Foxtrot"...right before "I'm Still Here" replaced it.

My father was mortified by the language and subject matter of "Follies," but I was hooked. I got to tell Sondheim this story many, many years later when I was working with him on a project.

Mom took me to see a college production of Oklahoma when I was 6. The rest is history.

Updated On: 4/25/16 at 09:52 PM

Hello, Fantod... I think my post qualifies me as older... Ha ha. God knows at least I was there, but I'm here... I'm still here!

Updated On: 4/25/16 at 10:21 PM

Roxy, I'm just discovering Here's Love through Apple Music. Those were the days, but I still think the best is yet to come...

Here's Love had Craig Stevens who played Peter Gunn on tv. Unless he had a number not recorded,I do not remember him being in any musical number. In a supporting role was Fred Gwyne of The Munsters. A member of the chorus was a very young unknown named Michael Bennett.

Mr. R, since we are talking about memories from more than a half-century ago, I hope you will believe I am merely correcting the history, not playing "gotcha" with your post.

According to the original cast recording of HERE'S LOVE (at least as now available for download at iTunes), Mr. Stevens sang "My Wisb" with Valerie Lee, "Look, Little Girl" (his only identified solo), and "She Hadda Go Back", a quartet. He has pitch problems (despite the recourse to retakes) and talk sings through his up tempo numbers (which only makes his pitch worse). But he croons "My Wish" in a nice baritone.

I am almost THAT old and I became addicted to musicals because between about the ages of seven and eleven my mother had OBC albums from "Golden Era" shows constantly playing on the mono. My father was a sales manager in Manhattan and often entertained customers with "dinner and a show."

But I was not one-dimensional. I was probably the only nine year old in the country whose two favorite pieces of music were "The Carousel Waltz" and "Hound Dog."

My earliest memories of musical in any form was the late '90s TV versions of ANNIE and CINDERELLA. My family would also rent VHS tapes of musical films like MY FAIR LADY, FIDDLER, SINGIN IN THE RAIN etc. from the library.

I then discovered the Cast Album CD section of the Library, which included such albums as OKLAHOMA, A CHORUS LINE, MISS SAIGON and SUNSET BOULEVARD. From there my knowledge of cast albums expanded into the obsession that continues to today.

I wouldn't actually see my first professional production until the tour of IN THE HEIGHTS came through Pittsburgh in 2010. Six years and it feels like a lifetime ago.

Perhaps it was when I saw the Lincoln Center production of "Carousel" with John Raitt in 1965 (We went on vacation to see the NY World's Fair - I was 9). Or it may have been the cast recordings and soundtracks I listened to continuously. (Carousel, The Music Man, Hans Christian Anderson). Yet, my family seldom went to stage productions. I loved being in shows in High School, yet since it wasn't popular amongst my friends thereafter, I never caught on to attending in my 20s and 30s.

In 1996, I went to NY and my first show was "Rent." That year we had lost about four people, including our closest friend, to AIDS. It was perhaps the most moving experience I had encountered in a theatre. Between that show and the others (Nathan Lane "Forum" and "A Delicate Balance" with Stritch & Grizzard) I was hooked. In a few weeks we'll be in NY for the 16th time in the 20 years since.

Updated On: 4/26/16 at 05:15 AM

The first show that I ever saw was a tour of Peter Pan with Cathy Rigby when I was 4 or 5 years old. I went with my grandparents (if I remember correctly, the tickets were a gift of some sort - whether it was a birthday, Christmas, etc, I have no idea) and I was completely enthralled with the whole thing. I loved the idea of people getting up on a stage and singing and dancing and telling a story in such a way. And of course, being so young, the flying around the stage in this particular show seemed like real magic to me.



In second grade, my mom and stepdad took me to see a family friend's daughter in a community theatre production of Annie - she was in the ensemble of orphans. Until this point, I never realized that regular people could be a part of theatre as well, and it didn't have to be a big, expensive production to be good (although, this production of Annie was not. I didn't care at the time). As soon as the show was over, I got my mom to get audition information for this theatre's upcoming shows, and I got cast as the Prince's Royal Grand Duke in an all-children's production of Cinderella that they put on. This sparked my love of performing, and I've been doing it ever since.

Over time, performing in shows led me to become aware of other shows that were playing on Broadway (mostly from the savvy theatre folk talking about them) and I started purchasing cast albums and watching movie adaptions of musicals, and from there, my love of this art grew and grew and put me where I am today, and it even still continues to grow.

Well, I attended Les Mis in the womb, so probably from there...

I auditioned for my first school musical in year 8 because I was the enthusiastic kid who was into everything and some of my friends had been in the musical the year before (which made it a bit awkward when I got in and they all didn't). I then really enjoyed it so continued doing theatre through high school including theatre studies in year 11 & 12. When I was 17 my class saw Wicked and I became crazy obsessed with it, saw it a couple more times over the next year and then a few months later saw Hairspray and realised that there was this whole amazing world of musicals out there for me to explore and I haven't stopped since!

When I was 10 years old our grade school had all the classes do selections from musicals and such. My class did "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown", which I found kinda meh, but they let us watch the other classes rehearse and one of them did selections from "H.M.S. Pinafore". The moment they started up with "We sail the ocean blue..." I was hooked. I never knew you could tell a story through music like that. Thanks to my early obsession with Gilbert and Sullivan I was probably the only fourth grader with a vocabulary that included six-syllable words.

Updated On: 4/26/16 at 08:17 AM