the many advantages of musicals over traditional plays

Musicals can do a bunch of things more easily than straight plays — not because they’re “higher art,” but because they have extra gears: music, rhythm and often choreography.

But before we get started, what are your favorite musicals, and why?  (Just put your comment on the bottom of this page.)

A few ways that can make musicals feel “better” (depending on what you like):

• They can turn emotion into physics. 

  When a character sings, the feeling doesn’t just get described — it swells, repeats, modulates, breaks. Music makes inner life audible in a way dialogue can’t quite mimic.

  
  

• They compress time and logic elegantly. 

  A three-minute song can cover a yearlong longing, a whole relationship arc, or a moral argument without feeling like exposition — because melody and structure do the heavy lifting.

• They create “memory hooks.”

  People leave humming. Themes recur, lyrics reprise, a motif returns in a new context  — so the story keeps echoing after curtain.

• They can hold contradiction better. A character can sing something beautiful while lying, or dance while devastated. The form tolerates irony and double-meaning naturally.

  
  

• They’re built for momentum. 

  Songs impose forward motion (verse → chorus → bridge), which can prevent scenes from stalling in talkiness or realism.

• They deliver spectacle and community at once. 

  Ensemble numbers are basically theatre saying: “We’re all in this together.” That shared pulse can feel like a live event in a way quieter plays sometimes don’t.

• They’re often more “accessible” on first contact. 

  Even when the plot is complex, music can guide an audience’s attention and emotional interpretation like a soundtrack does in film.

• They can externalize the unsayable. 

  Desire, shame, grief, faith — stuff that can sound abstract or self-conscious in dialogue — often lands with less embarrassment when it’s sung.

  
  

Musicals and Magical Realism

Musicals and magical realism are basically built for each other: songs let a character’s inner reality become literal (the world bends to emotion), and magical realism thrives when the extraordinary is treated as casually true.

A few musicals that hit that “magic inside the everyday” voltage:

• Caroline, or Change — a grounded household drama where the basement appliances (radio/washer/dryer) sing like a living chorus, turning routine labor into mythic pressure.

• Ghost Quartet — a boozy, haunted song cycle that spirals through interwoven stories across centuries; the surreal is the format.

• Once on This Island — folkloric storytelling where gods actively meddle in human love and fate, presented as the island’s normal rules.

• Big Fish — a father/son story that keeps sliding between “real life” and tall-tale encounters (witch, giant, mermaid) without treating imagination as a lesser truth.

  
  

• Amélie — stage versions lean into whimsy and everyday enchantment; the source story is often framed as magical realism rather than straight fantasy.

• Hadestown — myth retold as a lived-in world (folk/blues-inflected) where the underworld feels like an economic system you can clock into.

If you’re making something in this lane, a simple rule set that keeps it magical realism (not “fantasy musical”):

1.     One impossible rule, obeyed consistently (a city where regrets can sing; a jukebox that predicts deaths).

2.     No explanatory spotlight — characters don’t gawp; they cope.

3.     Songs are the magic’s “proof” — The number doesn’t comment on the miracle; it runs on it.

4.     Keep the stakes human — The magic changes rent, grief, sex, hunger, parenting (mundane forces)

That said: plays can be sharper tools for silence, ambiguity, naturalism and language-forward precision — and they’re often cheaper to produce, so they can be riskier and weirder.

What’s your opinion?  Musicals better than plays?  Or vice versa?