The first broadway musical you saw as a teen is the greatest ever, even if the story is terrible (and that's ok)

I've always enjoyed plays and musicals and I have a couple friends in the business so I often get the inside scoop from that world when talking to them.

Over the course of my life, I've probably gone to the theater 2-3 times a year, but since I grew up on the West Coast, that means they were mostly college and high school productions (sometimes dreadful ones). I've only been to Ashland's Shakespeare festival once, but had a great time and really should go more often.

These days, I try to get out to see a Broadway on Tour show every year or two, but those only make it to the West Coast when a production is wildly popular on real Broadway for at least 5 years.

It's worth mentioning that my first visit to NYC wasn't until I was in my late 20's, but I've been able to visit New York every few years since. I've seen a handful of actual Broadway productions, but not as many as I would like, and many of them kid musicals I saw with my daughter on trips.

The important thing to know is I got a way different experience with Broadway from growing up in California.

How I experience most musicals

Given I can't get to Broadway productions when they're hot, I watch the Tonys most years and know what's popular in culture. Sometimes, when I see an interesting sounding play or musical that's getting big, I figure my chances of seeing it out west are good, so I tend to avoid looking up the plots on Wikipedia or reading any deep reviews.

I can't completely avoid everything about a musical, but I try not to listen to soundtracks before I see a production I want to see, but I can often pick up the gist of a story by osmosis as people talk about what they love about them.

What was your teen musical moment?

I was born in the 1970s, so my first broadway production (on tour, in Pasadena) was seeing Les Misérables in the early 1990s, well after its 1987 debut. It was fantastic, totally blew me away, and even if the actors were likely understudies from the main production, the talent and the music and the singing over each other completely blew my little 19 year old mind.

It's always going to be my high water mark for musicals and I think it still holds up today.

Seeing musicals as an adult though…

The first time I was ho-hum about a musical was when I got to see Avenue Q in Portland sometime around 2009. I knew it won a Tony for best musical, and everyone online seemed to think it was hilarious. A quarter of the crowd were super fans, wearing Avenue Q gear and someone even brought a puppet to the show.

I was in my mid-30s at this point and I thought it was a mildly amusing Sesame Street parody but most of the humor relied on puppets swearing, fart jokes, and sex. "The Internet is for Porn" is a fun, catchy tune but I felt the humor was too sophomoric and more like an episode of Family Guy than I expected and the story was pretty thin.

I lived in San Francisco when Wicked was developed and I remember theater friends saying the pre-production budgets were so high that even if the musical sucked, it was going to play on Broadway for 10 years or more just to pay the investors back.

When I finally got to see the movie last year, I totally see what theater people were talking about. The vocal performances (now, and then too) were extraordinary, but the story itself was pretty thin. I really expected it be more than a fish out of water/new person isn't accepted at college kind of story, but I know every friend I have that is 15 years younger than me and got to see Wicked during its first reign on Broadway loves every song to death.

I got to visit NYC in 2016 and 2018, back when Dear Evan Hansen posters were literally everywhere in the city. I knew Ben Platt was a big part of the success, but I avoided spoilers and reviews thinking I'd like to see it someday. I skipped the film version from a few years ago, and finally got to see the production last week in Eugene, Oregon.

It was frankly kind of disappointing. It trivialized mental health, started with a surprise suicide that the audience is never supposed to care about, and the main character gets away with lying and betrayal on a grand scale with very little consequences (I won't mention the actual Kickstarter fraud!). By the end of the show, I hated the main character and thought the script was terrible. The songs were good and I've heard that Ben Platt did amazing things with them, but I did not like that musical.

But again, for people I know that are 20+ years younger than me, I get why they fell in love with it. When I load up reddit's /r/Broadway and search for Evan Hansen, there are hundreds of threads about how brilliant the show is, how great Ben Platt was with difficult material, and even though reading people defending it feels like gaslighting, I get why young people enjoyed it. It felt like the first musical that dealt with modern themes like social media and texting, so it struck a chord with young people at the time.

I know a lot of my friends that are a few years younger than me love RENT and my older friends go nuts for Little Shop of Horrors, Hairspray, or Jesus Christ Superstar. I've come to the conclusion that whatever musical you got to see as a teenager that captured your heart and your imagination is likely your favorite, and it's one you'll love as long as you live, but seeing them years later, I've been surprised at how many Tony winners just do don't do it for me, story-wise.

But that's also OK! Everyone gets to enjoy the theater they got to grow up on, and more fans of plays and musicals is absolutely a good thing—even if the stories are ho-hum.

(by the way: Hamilton was fucking amazing from beginning to end and I'll not hear a bad word about it)