occasionally ke

Tina Turner in a studio session with photographer Jack Robinson, November 1969.

So back in January of this year I was on the tail-end of one of my worst depressive episodes of my life and a German friend of mine (that’s you @gaymelie​ this labour is all your fault) and myself got talking about what music we were listening to and I mentioned I was listening to Six the Musical and found out she also liked musicals and what with her being German and all, she recommended me a few German musicals:

And I loved them.

Getting into musicals that aren’t in a language you understand can be daunting, but the thing is other countries are actually way better at making pro-shots / officially recorded musicals then the UK or America. You can buy Blu-Rays of recent German stage musicals, DVDs of most French musicals and Japanese musicals. I myself have a DVD of a Dutch stage musical from 2003. Most official DVD releases of musicals have English subtitles, but some of my favourite musicals like Tanz Der Vampire and Rebecca have no official video recording and so the only way to be able to understand it if you don’t speak German, is to rely on dedicated fans who make English subtitles. Where possible I’m going to provide links to where to listen (Spotify or Youtube) and where to watch (Youtube). Sticking with just Spotify and Youtube because most people have access to one or both of them.

This post is going to get a little long, so the list will be under the ‘read more’. They’ll be listed alphabetically and I will try and keep my summaries of them unbiased, but will mention which ones are my personal favourites. For some musicals there are different versions in different languages, and you may think oh well that’s just the same musical again, but that’s not always the case. A lot of the times musicals get non-replica productions meaning that the costumes and sets are different, sometimes entire songs are taken out or added, sometimes minor characters are changed to more be more major characters and so on.

(Also because of linking to Youtube and Spotify, Tumblr is likely going to block this post from showing up in tags so I would appreciate all the reblogs this can get. ❤️ Also because I worked for two whole days on this, it’s over 10,000 words long and Tumblr crashed and deleted half of it and I had to write it all out again.) And of course any can add their own recommendations in their reblogs. There are a lot more I know of, but I tried not to make this list too long. In a while I can always make a part 2 if this post does well.

There’s 32 musicals on this list. I tried to make sure they weren’t all German so there’s: German, French, Hungarian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Spanish and Polish. So, lets begin: