Musical Theatre Mondays

Broadway and Christmas make an excellent team. This week, I set out to gather Christmas songs from Broadway shows and was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of my favorite Christmas songs originated in a musical - "We Need a Little Christmas," "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," and "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas." So I made a little playlist to get you in the spirit. I like to think of Christmas music as a gateway drug into musical theatre - it's a great time to share songs with those non-musical loving people in your life. But, if you do nothing else with this list - at least do this for me: You must listen to Judy Garland sing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." It's beautiful and those low notes with her voice? That'll get you in the Christmas spirit any day of the year.

I'm lucky enough to have spent the last few months in rehearsal for a really special production of A Christmas Carol at Centerpoint Legacy Theatre (CPT). With music by Alan Menken (the man behind all your favorite Disney stuff) and lyrics by Lynn Aherns (the woman behind Ragtime and Anastasia ) it is so joyful and catchy. Now I'm always a little emotional when I'm watching something on stage. Sometimes it's from the music, sometimes it's purely just an outlet for how happy I am to be watching the show (or how happy I am for the people that get to be performing it it), but very rarely do I get emotional about shows that I perform in. I think you become sort of desensitized to the story and the touching moments because you've gone through the very rigorous process of rehearsing them over and over and over again. But as I sang the last few lines of our curtain call number during our final dress rehearsal on Saturday, I could barely hold back tears as I sa...