Top Ten Musicals to Go See

I love musicals. I really do. I can’t read them but I do love to watch them. These are next ten are from my personal collection.

10. Wicked

The story of the Wicked Witch of the West.

9. Repo! The Genetic Opera.

Who loves rock operas? This is a post apocalyptic story about a girl who wants to see the world but she has a blood condition and an overprotective dad.

8. The Phantom of the Opera

I love this opera. I have several versions of if on dvd.

7. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, Helen Bonham Carter, musical, gore. Sweeney Todd is wanting justice against one judge who banished him from London.

6. Les Miserables

A man who has been on the run from the french police decides to take in a worker’s daughter.

5. The Wizard of Oz

Follow Dorothy as she tries to get out of Oz and back to Kansas.

4. The Sound of Music

Maria, a nun, is to become a governess for the von Trapp family.

3. Grease

Follow Danny and Sandy at Rydell High School.

2. Hairspray

Tracy Turnblad is a pleasantly plum girl who wants to be on the most hip show in town.

1. The Nightmare Before Christmas

One of my all time favorites from when I was a kid. Jack Skellington is bored with the same old routine, then he finds out what is behind the door shaped like a Christmas tree.

Now I haven’t seen all of the great musicals that are out there. This list may change in the future. Do you have a favorite that you think should be on this list?

It by Stephen King

My edition: Library book ISBN: 9780451169518
Pages: 1093
Rating: 3 stars
Synopsis:

The story follows the exploits of seven children as they are terrorized by an eponymous being, which exploits the fears and phobias of its victims in order to disguise itself while hunting its prey. “It” primarily appears in the form of a clown in order to attract its preferred prey of young children. The novel is told through narratives alternating between two time periods, and is largely told in the third-person omniscient mode. It deals with themes which would eventually become King staples: the power of memory, childhood trauma, and the ugliness lurking behind a facade of traditional small-town values.

Review: Okay so I had watched this movie when I was little. I couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6. My mom and dad were watching it when they thought me and my brother went to sleep. Well I wasn’t asleep and I sat there watching it. (Eventually I did get caught and was unable to see the rest of the film till I was 14.)

I wasn’t scared of clowns. It was actually the first time I ever really knew clowns existed. (Mom doesn’t like them.) Here I was, a little kid, thinking from my first experience of clowns was a horror movie so they must be like mom’s vampires. They just can’t be real. Well if memory serves me, I was taken to a circus the next week or so. Guess how I found out clowns were real.

I have long gotten over my fear of clowns. I still don’t like them but I’m not afraid anymore.

Now I do have people recommending me to read this. I have heard both good and bad reviews. My best friend’s mom hates this due to King’s use of the N-word. I don’t blame her. It was used a lot. Too much for my liking too. King tends to have very colorful language. I did have to put the book down a few times do to the language. I’m no saint when it comes to cursing. (Granted I am trying to stop.) But sometimes there is to much cursing for me.

Along with language I have found that in some novels of King’s he tends to drag on a bit. The story will pick up then it will hit a snag due to a drawn out scene. An example of this would have to be Stan Uris’s wife’s back story. I do mean the part about her hating that she was a Jew in high school. That doesn’t pertain to the story so who cares. I understand her back story with Stan but the self hate that she has I really couldn’t have cared about. It could have been taken out. There were a lot of scenes like this or that were drawn out that could have been shorten or even cut all together. A good 20%-30% of this book could have been cut out and nothing would have happened to the story.

With this being over a thousand pages it will be the longest book I have read to date. It has taken me about three to four weeks to read this. An abundance amount of people said that this book gave them nightmares, and it was on Goodreads 16 book that will give you nightmares. I did not get any nightmares. (No, I had to have dreams about work.) Was this book creepy? Yes, yes it was. It just didn’t affect me like it did other people. I will say that this is creepier than the movie. After reading this and then watching the movie, the movie just doesn’t compare. The movie isn’t even scary, but then again I love horror movies so it just might be that. (Granted the movie is also very lack luster.)

Now while this is about a clown, it’s not about a clown, dig? It’s really about good ole Pennywise the killing dancing clown. He is an entity of some sort. He’s IT. He captures and kills children. George Denbrough, brother to Stuttering Bill, being one of them. Poor dear old Georgie.

A group of kids out of school for summer in 1958 are being terrorized by IT. They fight together against IT and prevail or so they thought. Twenty-seven years later Mike Hanlon calls them all back to go up against Pennywise and end this terror once and for all.

I can say that IT is by far the creepiest book I have read by Kind but it just didn’t scare me. Most of the book was actually kind of boring. Also I’m not a huge King fan. I do like some of his work but I am not one to read all of his books.