The Broadway 2 A Day Challenge: Looking Back on a Year of Musicals (Part 1)

In the winter of 2020, I was scrolling through TikTok when I saw a video by Stacy Moscotti (@theatrekidauditioncoach), a vocal coach specializing in musical theater.  She had a crazy idea: listen to every Broadway musical.  In order.  When Stacy crunched the numbers, she found that, if she listened to two shows every day, she could cover 1950-2020 over the course of a year.  When she started talking about it on TikTok, hundreds of people seemed into the idea, and so began the Broadway Two-a-Day Challenge.

This challenge – listen to “all” of Broadway in a year – intrigued me.  There were plenty of shows I’d heard about but didn’t really know, and plenty of shows I’d never even heard about!  I thought it would be nice to broaden my theater knowledge as a general sort of enrichment, but also, I thought I might find some forgotten gems that would be good for community theater.  As a reviewer, I may get tired of seeing the same shows repeatedly, but I’ve also been on a theater’s selection committee and I know how hard it can be – it’s hard to find new options and it’s hard to assess shows that are unfamiliar.

Of course, in 2020 I also had a lot of time on my hands and I didn’t foresee that changing in 2021.  If I were ever going to do something as ridiculous as a year-long musical theater challenge, this was the year.  What else was I really going to do with all my time?

I was one of over 4000 people who signed up to take on the challenge.  The guidelines were straightforward.  Stacy put together a spreadsheet of every known Broadway musical, season by season, starting in 1950 with Call Me Madam and leading up to the present (ending with A Strange Loop).  Revivals were included only if it was the show’s first time on the list, meaning that many pre-1950 shows (like Anything Goes) made it in eventually.  Two shows were assigned to each day, excluding musicals that didn’t have any kind of recording.  Occasionally recordings were found later and shows were added back in, or if there was only a song or two available, there might be three shows to cover in a day.  Finding recordings was the most difficult part of the challenge overall; many shows didn’t have a recording available anywhere on the internet.  But people in the B2AD community searched the internet, and local record stores, to find as much as possible and upload it.  For some shows, it was a bootleg audio recording of the entire show (usually with terrible audio quality); for others, it was one or two songs.  Sadly, for some shows, no recording of any kind was found.

In all, I listened to 735 shows in 2021.

I don’t recommend doing that, in general.  Two musicals in a day is not a big deal on its own, but two musicals a day every day over and over again is a difficult schedule to keep up with.  There were a handful of operas in there (and some operettas) that could get up to three hours just for one show!  In the summer, when I was actually performing in a musical, I got behind on my list and had to do four-show days to catch back up.  At the end of a day like that it felt a little like my brain had been stirred up with a spoon.  I honestly can’t believe I kept up with this challenge and made it to the end of the list.

I do have a real sense of accomplishment, having done it.  What a marathon!  I’m a musical theater endurance athlete!  Can I tell you about the development of Broadway over time?  Not really.  The sheer number of musicals made some things a bit of a blur.  I can’t even name many shows I hated (although I know I hated plenty), because I simply couldn’t spend the mental energy on remembering them.

What I did make a point of remembering were those shows that I thought would be good options for local community theater companies to consider.  I have been adding to this list all year, and I am excited to finally share these shows with other people and to start some new conversations about what shows we could be putting on. 

** Check back on this blog next week to see which underappreciated shows I think have the most potential! **

Then, the week after that, check back to see my honorable mentions – shows that aren’t available for licensing (and will probably never be), shows with too specific of casting requirements, and shows that I don’t think anyone should perform but I just can’t forget them.  There are some amazing albums in there, and I’ll tell you where you can listen to all of them.

Until next week!