Fame or Famine

Survivor: 50 Performances You Should See LIVE

by Gray on February 25th, 2008

As part of a competition here at B5Media, we’re trying to come up with lists - namely, lists of 50 that fit the theme of our blog. I think I’ve got the easiest one of all: my beat is the performing arts, so I can come up with lots of things. 50 Best Plays; 50 Best Dancers; 50 Best Theatres…the ideas are infinite.

But let’s make it useful. Let’s make it “the 50 Performances You Should See Live”, and then you can print them out and check them off as they happen (or as they’ve already happened). I’m also going to divide them, sort of, by genre.

Because while I’m a fan of the arts on the tube, there’s something about being there, hearing the performers actually breathe, that makes it special. And to feel the music, rather than just hear it…

Here we go:

10 Plays:

1. Hamlet
2. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
3. A Raisin in the Sun
4. The Homecoming
5. Radio Golf
6. Osage County
7. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
8. A Servant of Two Masters
9. Faustus
10. Cyrano de Bergerac

10 Musicals

1. RENT
2. The Lion King
3. Urinetown
4. Gypsy
5. Cabaret
6. Hello, Dolly
7. Xanadu
8. Chicago
9. Wicked
10. Phantom of the Opera

10 Musical Works to Hear Live

1. Hallelujah Chorus
2. 1812 Overture
3. Schubert’s Mass in G
4. Mozart’s Requiem
5. Chopin’s Nocturne
6. Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra
7. Leonard Bernstein’s “Requiem”
8. Philip Glass
   
9. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9
10. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6

10 Dancers to See

1. Bill T. Jones
2. Heidi Latsky
3. Savion Glover
4. Ethan Steifel
5. Maximiliano Guerra
6. Nora Stephens
7. Nancy Stark Smith
8. Li Chiao-Ping
9. Jin-Wen Yu
10. Joe Goode

10 Performances That Defy Categorization

1. Washington Square Park (NYC)
2. Goat Island Project (Chicago)
3. Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (Chicago)
4. Red Herrings (Madison, WI)
5. Bread & Puppet Theatre
6. Burning Man
7. Dell Arte
8. Anything by Cirque du Soleil
9. Laurie Anderson
10. Corpus Delicti

I wish I could say that this was a hard list to create, but really, it wasn’t. This was literally off the top of my head. With it really being this easy…is there any reason we aren’t out there supporting the arts all the time?

What did I miss? Let me know what you think should or shouldn’t be on the list!

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POSTED IN: General: Peforming Arts