Musical Mondays

A Kansas farm girl is swept away by a tornado to a Technicolor wonderland where she follows a yellow brick road to find a wizard who might send her home. The template for every 'there's no place like home' story ever told — and still the best.

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The untold story of the witches of Oz — how a green-skinned outcast and a perky popular girl became unlikely friends, and how good and wicked are never quite what they seem. Defying gravity, indeed.

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A genderqueer East German punk rocker tells her life story through a concert in a chain of failing restaurants. John Cameron Mitchell's indie triumph.

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A squeaky-clean couple stumbles into a castle full of aliens, fishnets, and sexual liberation. Tim Curry in a corset invented the midnight movie, and every audience participation tradition that followed.

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A summer fling between a greaser and a good girl gets complicated when they end up at the same high school. Sandy and Danny's leather-jacket love story defined a generation's idea of 1950s cool.

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Johnny Depp is a teen greaser tear-jerker called Cry-Baby who falls for a 'square' girl in 1950s Baltimore. John Waters' technicolor send-up of teen rebellion movies — gloriously stupid, completely earnest, and bursting with songs.

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A plus-size teenager in 1960s Baltimore dances her way onto a local TV show and fights to integrate the program. Big hair, bigger heart, and a John Travolta fat suit that somehow works.

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Three Detroit singers ride the Motown wave from backup act to superstardom, watching their sound get sanitized and their bonds tested along the way. Beyoncé shines, but Jennifer Hudson detonates.

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Prince plays a version of himself — a Minneapolis musician battling his demons, his band, and a rival for the spotlight. The music transcends everything else.

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A fading country-rock musician discovers and falls in love with a young singer, boosting her career as his spirals downward. Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga make the fourth version of this story feel like the first time.

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A jazz pianist and an aspiring actress fall in love in Los Angeles, chasing dreams that might not have room for each other. Damien Chazelle's valentine to old Hollywood that dares to ask: what if you can't have it all?

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Hollywood's transition from silent films to talkies wreaks havoc on a studio — and one star's voice isn't up to the task. Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, and Debbie Reynolds in the most joyful movie ever made.

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A washed-up movie star tries to reinvent himself on Broadway, clashing with a highbrow director who wants to turn a simple musical into art. Fred Astaire proves he's anything but over in this sparkling backstage gem.

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An ex-GI stays in Paris to paint, falls for a French girl, and dances through the city in a legendary 17-minute ballet finale. Gene Kelly and Gershwin in glorious Technicolor.

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A young couple in a French port town are separated by the Algerian War — every word is sung, every frame is candy-colored, and the ending is quietly devastating. Jacques Demy's masterpiece.

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A young poet falls for a courtesan at the Moulin Rouge nightclub in 1900 Paris, while Baz Luhrmann throws pop songs, Bollywood, and MTV editing into a blender set to maximum. Operatic, excessive, heartbreaking.

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An American nightclub singer in 1930s Berlin parties through the Weimar Republic's last days while fascism rises outside the Kit Kat Klub. Liza Minnelli and Bob Fosse create something dark, dazzling, and unforgettable.

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A free-spirited nun becomes governess to seven children in Austria, teaches them to sing, falls for their stern father, and faces the Anschluss. Julie Andrews on a mountaintop, forever.

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A Jewish milkman in Tsarist Russia tries to hold onto tradition as his daughters choose love over arrangement and pogroms loom. One of the great adaptations.

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A British schoolteacher arrives in 1860s Siam to tutor the king's many children, and the clash of cultures becomes a battle of wills — and something more. Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr in Rodgers and Hammerstein's most complicated romance.

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A professor bets he can transform a Cockney flower girl into a proper lady by teaching her to speak properly. Audrey Hepburn is luminous, Rex Harrison talk-sings magnificently, and the Pygmalion question lingers: who really changed?

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A young Parisian girl is being groomed for a life as a courtesan, but a bored socialite falls genuinely in love with her instead. Lerner and Loewe in Belle Époque Paris — gorgeous and more subversive than it first appears.

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A London orphan escapes a workhouse, falls in with a gang of young pickpockets, and searches for belonging in the fog-choked streets. Dickens as a lavish musical with real grit underneath the songs.

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A plucky Depression-era orphan charms a billionaire, foils her scheming orphanage matron, and insists the sun will come out tomorrow. Relentlessly optimistic and completely aware of it.

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P.T. Barnum rises from nothing to create a spectacle that celebrates the outcasts society rejects. Hugh Jackman leads a jukebox-style original musical that values heart over historical accuracy — and the songs are massive.

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A poor boy wins a golden ticket to tour the world's most magical chocolate factory, where eccentric genius Willy Wonka tests each child's character. Gene Wilder is wonderfully unhinged. The Oompa Loompas judge you.

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The young Willy Wonka arrives in a city of chocolatiers, dreaming of opening his own shop, and discovers that the chocolate cartel will stop at nothing to crush him. Timothée Chalamet sings and charms in an origin story nobody asked for but somehow works.

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Cinderella, Jack, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel get their fairy tale wishes in Act One — then Act Two asks what happens after 'happily ever after.' Sondheim's brilliant deconstruction, with Meryl Streep as the Witch.

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The Pumpkin King of Halloween Town discovers Christmas and decides to take it over, with beautifully disastrous results. Tim Burton's stop-motion masterpiece — spooky, sweet, and endlessly rewatchable.

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A meek flower shop worker discovers a plant that feeds on human blood and grants him everything he ever wanted. Doo-wop, sci-fi horror, and Rick Moranis at his most lovable — a cult classic that refuses to die.

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A wrongfully imprisoned barber returns to Victorian London seeking revenge, and teams up with a pie shop owner who has a creative solution for disposing of bodies. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp at their darkest, with Sondheim's razor-sharp score.

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A masked musical genius lurks beneath the Paris Opera House, obsessively tutoring a young soprano and terrorizing anyone who gets in his way. Andrew Lloyd Webber's gothic romance, brought to screen with full bombast.

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A Czech immigrant going blind in small-town Washington escapes into musical fantasies while the real world closes in. Björk + Lars von Trier = emotional annihilation.

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A Mexican cartel leader enlists a lawyer to help her transition and disappear, setting off a chain of events that spirals into opera, crime thriller, and musical all at once. Jacques Audiard's wildly ambitious genre collision.

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A provocative comedian and an opera singer have a child with a remarkable gift — Leos Carax directs a Sparks-written rock opera that is completely, gloriously unhinged.

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A chain-smoking, pill-popping director-choreographer works himself to death while editing his latest film and staging a new Broadway show. Bob Fosse's thinly veiled autobiography — brilliant, narcissistic, and haunted.

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Students at New York's High School of Performing Arts sweat, dream, and break over four years of grueling training. The original, not the remake — raw, diverse, and pulsing with the energy of kids who want it too badly.

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Two murderesses in 1920s Chicago manipulate the press and a slick lawyer to turn their crimes into celebrity. Rob Marshall's film proved movie musicals weren't dead, and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger proved they could dance.

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Fanny Brice rises from the Lower East Side to become a Ziegfeld star, but her marriage to a charming gambler can't match her career's trajectory. Barbra Streisand's debut — she arrived fully formed and incandescent.

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The rise of Eva Perón from provincial nobody to Argentina's most powerful woman, narrated by a skeptical Che. Madonna, Antonio Banderas, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's most political score. Don't cry for her — she wouldn't for you.

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Elton John's life told as a fantasy musical — the lonely kid, the songwriting partnership, the costumes, the addiction, the survival. Taron Egerton disappears into the role and the musical numbers soar beyond biography into emotional truth.

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Baz Luhrmann's maximalist take on Elvis Presley's life, framed through his manipulative manager Colonel Tom Parker. Austin Butler disappears into the role and the musical sequences absolutely soar — Luhrmann doing what only Luhrmann can do.

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Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter, with both actors doing their own singing. The biopic that proved performers could embody legends — Witherspoon's Oscar was earned, and the songs hit like trains.

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Jamie Foxx vanishes into Ray Charles — the genius, the addiction, the women, the music. Foxx won the Oscar and deserved it. The film that made the modern music biopic template that Walk Hard would soon obliterate.

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Every music biopic cliché — the childhood trauma, the drug spiral, the comeback — lovingly demolished through the life of fictional musician Dewey Cox. John C. Reilly commits fully, and the songs are genuinely good.

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The boys sneak into an R-rated Canadian movie and the resulting profanity starts a war. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's gleefully obscene cartoon somehow contains one of the best musical scores of the '90s — nominated for an Oscar, no less.

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Trey Parker's ultra-low-budget student film about Alfred Packer, the only person convicted of cannibalism in the US, reimagined as a bright, cheerful musical. The movie that started it all — you can see Bigger, Longer & Uncut germinating here.

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Marionette puppets fight terrorism while satirizing Hollywood, jingoism, and action movies. Parker and Stone's puppet spectacular features original songs that have no business being this catchy.

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Two Broadway producers discover they can make more money with a flop than a hit, so they stage the most offensive musical imaginable: Springtime for Hitler. The musical adaptation of Mel Brooks' comedy is a satire of Broadway, performed on Broadway.

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Jonathan Larson, the future creator of Rent, panics as he approaches 30 with nothing produced, questioning whether he should give up on theatre. Andrew Garfield gives everything in Lin-Manuel Miranda's directorial debut — knowing how the story ends makes it devastating.

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Struggling artists in NYC's East Village navigate love, loss, and the AIDS crisis — the film of Larson's landmark rock musical, warts and all.

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A bodega owner in Washington Heights dreams of his late father's homeland while his neighborhood faces gentrification and change. Lin-Manuel Miranda's first musical, bursting with Latin rhythms, community, and summer heat.

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Romeo and Juliet on the streets of 1950s New York, with rival gangs, finger-snapping choreography, and a Bernstein score that hits like a freight train. The original that defined what a movie musical could be.

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Spielberg's reimagining honors the original while giving it new depth — Ariana DeBose's Anita is a revelation, the streets feel lived-in, and Rita Moreno's return closes a circle 60 years in the making.

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A young Oklahoman arrives in 1960s New York and falls in with a tribe of hippies facing the Vietnam draft. Miloš Forman's film captures the counterculture's ecstasy and its cost — the party ends, and the war doesn't care.

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The last seven days of Christ told as a rock opera, with Judas as the tortured narrator questioning the whole enterprise. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice before they were institutions — raw, provocative, and electric.

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The Who's deaf, dumb, and blind pinball wizard brought to screen by Ken Russell with Tina Turner, Elton John, and pure psychedelic chaos.

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An Irish busker and a Czech immigrant connect through music over a few days in Dublin. Micro-budget, intimate, and completely disarming. Won the Oscar for Best Song.

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Cowboys and farmers clash over land and love in the Indian Territory as it becomes a state. Rodgers and Hammerstein's first collaboration set the template for the modern musical — and 'Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'' still delivers.

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A backwoodsman's six brothers decide they want wives too, and their solution is... kidnapping. Problematic premise aside, the barn-raising dance sequence is one of the greatest pieces of choreography ever filmed.

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A traveling con man arrives in small-town Iowa to sell instruments and fake band lessons, but a sharp librarian and the town itself start to change him for real. Robert Preston is irresistible. You will believe in River City.

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A year in the life of a St. Louis family as the 1904 World's Fair approaches — first love, seasonal rituals, and the threat of moving away. Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli crafting pure, aching Americana.

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Three sailors get 24 hours of shore leave in New York City and chase love, adventure, and a subway poster girl. Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and the city itself — shot on location when that was revolutionary.

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Times Square gamblers, Salvation Army missionaries, and Marlon Brando attempting to sing — a classic screwball musical romance.

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A magical nanny arrives to sort out a troubled London family, armed with a bottomless carpet bag, a chalk-painting adventure, and a philosophy of finding wonder in the mundane. Julie Andrews is practically perfect in every way.

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A bride-to-be on a Greek island invites three men who might be her father, and ABBA songs paper over every plot hole with pure, uncut joy. Meryl Streep belting 'Dancing Queen' on a hilltop is cinema.

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Jean Valjean's decades-long pursuit of redemption in revolutionary France, with every word sung and every emotion maxed out. Tom Hooper's close-up-heavy approach is divisive, but Anne Hathaway's 'I Dreamed a Dream' silences all debate.

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