Daily Dose of English 120
Musicals
Daily Dose of English 120
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about musicals, which I think is going to be a very fun topic because musicals are really cool, in my opinion. A musical is a play, so like a theater play that you might go to and see with actors and a stage and props and stuff, but with songs and singing and music. and they're called musicals. There's not really anything else that people think of when you say musicals. Music is like a general term, right, for listening to music on like your phone or whatever. But a musical is specifically a dramatical, not dramatical, like a drama production play with songs and music. And I wanna talk about a couple of different musicals and why I like them and hopefully you'll learn a little bit of something. So, I think I'll start by talking about specific musicals to sort of give myself a route to talk about, like a thing to talk about. And I want to start with the musical Grease, which is probably one of the most famous musicals, at least in English. And there's a movie that you can watch if you want, which is also a musical, and it's pretty fun. It's very old, right? It's definitely from a different time. But it's really well known. The songs are very famous and popular in the US still. You can still hear some of the songs on the radio even, especially during certain times of the year. And Grease was the first musical that I was in. And it was actually the first production that I was in, I believe, the first play in high school. I think I was a junior. I think I was a junior, so I was in the third year of high school, which is the 11th grade, I think, and it was like early-ish in the year. And I was taking some drama classes, and I was convinced to try out, which is actually called auditioning. I was told to audition, and so I did. And I worked on my audition. and relatively hard, I wanted to do well, and I thought that it would be fun and I decided to try it out and do things. And I got cast as Knicky, who's one of the main characters. He's sort of the sidekick of, not really a sidekick, he's like the leader of the gang of the boys. But the main character is Danny, who's his friend, his good friend. But that was really fun. I learned a bunch of stuff and that sort of was, I think that was the beginning of my time in theater in school. And I really wish I started earlier. I think it would have been, I think I would have enjoyed school a lot more if I'd been doing drama the whole time Because I made a ton of friends. It was a lot like it was something cool to do after school, it felt like I was part of something, making art. And anybody out there who's young and still in school, if there's a drama program, if you can be in plays, even if they're small and not very good, do it. You're gonna have fun with your friends and you're going to learn a lot of stuff. Even if you're just on the crew, which is another part, a very important part of the drama, the department of anything is the people that do the lights and the sound and the props and all that stuff. So even if you don't want to be an actor, definitely try it. It's fun. But Grease is a pretty good musical. The songs are fine. It's nothing that special, but it can be fun if you want. The movie is, I think, a good option because you can just watch it from home. I wouldn't really recommend anybody go and see it necessarily. But that was sort of what got me into musicals. Not really what actually got me into musicals because I've been seeing them before with my family. I think I talked about this in another episode about theater, about going to see plays and musicals. So I'd already liked them, but being in one was different. And then sort of after that, though, I started getting interested in listening to some of them. I'm not a huge listener of show tunes, is what it's called, when you listen to musicals just like the music itself, but I got into The Book of Mormon, which is another musical that I want to talk about, which is actually really, really good. I quite recommend it. I think it's probably my favorite musical. And I got started listening to that a lot in high school. And I ended up learning a lot of the words and things. And that is one of the musicals that I think is really made me like them more and see what they could do. Because it tells an interesting story while also being very funny and having good music and sort of turning a simple story into a spectacle. And it's the Book of Mormon, so it sounds religious, but it's actually very much making fun of the Book of Mormon. But it's really good. I definitely recommend it. I don't think there's a good way to watch it online. I'm sure you can find like a bootleg version. But the music is pretty good and it does a pretty good job of telling the story of the musical if you want to just listen to the music that you can find on any musical platform like Spotify or YouTube or whatever. But I finally got to see it when I was in London, oh geez, six years ago, seven years ago, I don't know when, but a while ago now. I was in London and I entered to win some tickets because I couldn't buy tickets, they were sold out. But I really wanted to see it and so I entered a raffle, they do before every show, and they give away some good seats in the front, some okay seats in the front. And I won, and I got to see the show for pretty cheap, which was fantastic. I loved it. It was great. And I would definitely recommend seeing musicals in person if you don't really like them. Not in person, because it's so different when you're in the theater. And they're really, really fun. And that leads me to the next musical that I want to talk about, which is kinky boots. Kinky boots again, sounds a little weird, but I got to see that also in London, the same trip. And it was also fantastic. Uh, it's. you might not expect it, like if you read sort of what it's about, you might not expect it to be that good, but it's just, it's so good, the story that it tells, it's so fun, and it's just, they're just a really cool experience. It's different than sort of any other entertainment that you can enjoy, because you're there, you're in the music, you're in the story, there's real people, you see them there, they're moving, it's live, it's just, it's hard to beat. And I think that's one of the reasons I like musicals is that, even plays actually, this kind of expands to, if you read the script for a play or you read the musical, you might not understand. You might be like, the hell is this? What? Why would this be interesting? But when you actually see it done and performed and done well, it can totally change the piece. Um, the best stuff does, it does sort of is obvious when you look at it, you're ready to go. Oh yeah, this is good. But it also takes like somebody who's experienced to be able to recognize that and understand in their mind what it can be. I think another good example actually is the Harry Potter play that came out a while ago at this point, like a decade ago, geez. I'm not even that old and I feel old. But when you read the story, it's kind of terrible. You're like, wow, this sucks. I spent how much money on this book? Like $40 on the book and it was like, wow, this is terrible. But if you go see the play, it's actually two plays, it's like four hours, you get it. Because the story is not the purpose, the purpose is the play. What you see, what they do, the movements, the characters, the lights, the sounds, the entire scene, or scene, the entire stage becomes alive in the play. And absolutely the same thing is true for musicals. And so even if you feel like you don't like musicals, what was that noise? Was that me? Sorry if you heard that, I don't know. But even if you don't think you like musicals and you have the chance to go see one, whether in English or in your native language, do it, try it. I think you might have a really good time, especially if you go with an open mind. However, it is possible to do them badly, especially if they're done by underfunded schools of children. Because I want to quickly talk about the worst musical that I've ever seen was a production of Into the Woods, which is an okay musical, at a friend of mine's school. It was an all, no, it wasn't an all-boys school, but it was a small school. It was a small Catholic school, private school, so there's not very many kids to choose from. And so a lot of like the important main characters were done by kids who cannot act. And so you get a bunch of these kids who are not very engaging, not very interesting, not very good at acting. Most of them can't sing. And then you get a play that's already kind of long and it becomes even longer. This play lasted for over three hours and it was bad. I really wanted to leave. My parents are with me because we had gone to go support my friend. We all wanted to leave. But we couldn't because we felt bad because, like, his family was there, he was there, his dad helped work on the play. But we're all like, at sort of the midpoint, the intermission, we sort of talked to each other like, is it this bad? Do we all agree? We're like, yeah, this is terrible. And so they can be really bad, so I definitely warn against that. But usually if you go see a professional production, it's going to be at least pretty good. Not always, but at least pretty good. So get some snacks, maybe have a drink or two, and go try to enjoy a musical. If you can't or don't want to go out or whatever, definitely look up some of the recordings. I think the Book of Mormon is a good one to listen to. Grease is actually a fine soundtrack. Kinky Boots is a good one too. Or one of the most famous ones recently is Hamilton, which does have pretty good music. I think it's a little overrated, but it is pretty good. There's nothing wrong with it. So definitely if you want some good experiences of listening to a story through music, try out those. That's all that I got for today. Thank you so much for listening to me talk about musicals, and I hope that you come back again tomorrow for another episode of A Daily Dose of English. I'll see you then. Bye.
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