Starvard.Starvard.Starvard University · Musical Theatre
The most moving moments from thirty years of Broadway: ten landmark performances on video, and twenty essential songs to listen to right now. Broadway is the greatest live art form in America, and it should not be a luxury good. This Starvard course turns the guide into a way of learning: watch like a student of the theater, and every famous number becomes a lesson in how musicals work. The guide was first published by our friends at E2; this is its home at the university.
The whole course in brief
Four short lessons. You need nothing but a screen, speakers, and one evening.
Lessons
A musical number is not a song that happens to be on a stage. It is the moment in the story where feelings get too big for talking, so the characters sing. That is the whole secret of the form, and it gives you three lenses that turn any famous performance into a lesson.
Lens one: the turn. In every great number, something changes. A witch decides. A nobody becomes a founder. A lonely kid is found. Before you press play in Lesson 2, ask: what is different at the end of this song than at the start? If nothing changes, it is decoration. In these ten, something always changes.
Lens two: the staging. Watch the bodies, not just the singer. Where people stand, what rises, what freezes, what the lights do on the biggest note: staging is the argument the show is making without words. Several Watch for notes in Lesson 2 point at staging that literally acts out the song's meaning.
Lens three: the voice. Ask what the singing does that speaking could not. A held note is a held feeling. A rap verse at double speed is ambition outrunning doubt. A whole company singing one line together is a community deciding something. When words fail, in life as in musicals, people sing.
The moments people still talk about, in the order they shook the theater world. Each one teaches something specific about the form: read the Watch for note, then watch with that one idea in your eyes.
Idina Menzel, the original Elphaba, performing the song that ends Act One with a full symphony. The moment a good witch decides she would rather be good on her own terms than great on someone else's.
The song that introduced the world to Hamilton, performed for the show's 10th anniversary in New York. A room full of people rapping about not throwing away their shot, a decade after the shot landed.
The opening number of The Lion King in 360 degrees. Julie Taymor's puppetry turned a cartoon into theater history, and this sunrise still gives people chills thirty years later.
The original 1996 Broadway cast performing at the Tony Awards. Jonathan Larson died the night before the show opened off-Broadway; this is the song his friends sang to keep him in the room.
The Broadway and touring companies, assembled on the Music Box Theatre stage for the official video. A song written for anyone who has ever felt invisible, performed by the company that won six Tonys with it.
Renée Elise Goldsberry's tour-de-force: the entire first act of Hamilton retold in four minutes from Angelica Schuyler's point of view. The fastest rap on Broadway, and somehow the saddest song in the show.
Alfie Boe and Ramin Karimloo, two of the great Valjeans, singing the show's prayer side by side. Les Mis has run somewhere in the world every year since 1985; this is why.
Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, the original Elphaba and Glinda, reuniting for the song about how people change each other. Twenty years of friendship, one song.
Leslie Odom Jr. performing Burr's anthem at a Public Theater gala. The villain's song that half the audience secretly claims as their own: patience as a survival strategy.
The closing cast of Phantom's record 35-year Broadway run. The longest-running show in Broadway history took its final bow in 2023; this is how it sounded at the end.
The cast recordings, mostly the original Broadway companies. Press play on any of them. Listen the way Lesson 1 taught you: find the turn, hear what the arrangement is saying, and notice what the voices do that speaking could not. Grouped by show, so you can hear how one score builds a whole world.
Courses end. Traditions continue. Your graduation assignment is to host one Broadway night for at least one other person, in a living room or over a call, and be their guide the way this page was yours.
Where to go next at Starvard: if the performances lit a fire, Acting teaches the craft from the other side of the footlights, and Learn Piano puts the instrument under your own hands, so the next singalong has an accompanist. The original guide, with new additions as they come, lives at E2's Guide to Broadway.
Sources
This course adapts A Guide to Broadway, first published by E2, and keeps its performances, recordings, and descriptions. The ticket figures are the Broadway League's, reported by BroadwayWorld.
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