Worst:

1. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
2. The Odd Couple
3. The Silver Whistle
4. Dr. C's adaption of The Wizard of Oz
5. 45 Seconds From Broadway
6. Babes in Toyland
7. Cats
8. Nuncrackers (save for Sister Julia, Child of God)
9. A student play I watched about some illness, which I can't spell
10. ??? (can't think of anything)

Best:

1. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekylle and Mr. Hyde
2. The Phantom of the Opera (musical: Webber)
3. Fiddler on the Roof (musical)
4. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [abridged]
5. Oklahoma!
6. The Diary of Anne Frank
7. The Importance of Being Earnest
8. The Mousetrap
9. You Can't Take It With You
10. Arsenic and Old Lace

Oooh!

11. The Miracle Worker

and

12. Hitops

Best plays:
1. The Illusion (Tony Kushner)
2. Waiting For Godot (Samuel Beckett)
3. Angels in America (Tony Kushner again)
4. Macbeth (William Shakespeare)
5. The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Stephen Andly Guirgis)
6. Proof (David Auburn)
7. Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)
8. Endgame (Samuel Beckett)
9. Hot 'N Throbbing (Paula Vogel)
10. Julius Caesar (William Shakespeare)

In my limited opinion, by the way.

Worst plays:
1. Psycho Beach Party (Charles Busch)
2. Wrong Mountain (David Hirson)
3. Ghost, Bathtub, Windmill (which I saw at a college)
4. Lots of others...

Best Musicals (rated for music & story, not necessarily book writing):
1. Sweeney Todd
2. Into the Woods (I'm a Sondheim fan, can you tell?)
3. Jekyll & Hyde
4. Les Miserables
5. Rent
6. A Chorus Line
7. Sunday In the Park With George
8. Wicked
9. The Last Five Years
10. Singin' in the Rain (a movie, but also a great musical)

Worst:
Grease (the message is literally: Don't be yourself - you'll get the guy. Act like a skank, and everyone will love you. And if you get pregnant, no worries! It's probably a false alarm)

"The art of Illusion is the art of Love, and the art of Love is the blood-red heart of the World."
- Tony Kushner, The Illusion

Best Plays:
1. A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams)
2. The History Boys (Alan Bennett)
3. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard)
4. Lost In Yonkers (Neil Simon)
5. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You (Christopher Durang)
6. Suddenly, Last Summer (Tennessee Williams)
7. Glengarry Glen Ross (David Mamet)
8. Arcadia (Tom Stoppard)
9. Marvin's Room (Scott McPherson)
10. All In The Timing (David Ives)

Honorable Mentions:
-The Farnsworth Invention
-August: Osage County
-Indian Ink
-Burn This
-Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Worst Musicals:
1. Taboo
2. Mamma Mia!
3. All Shook Up
4. Grease
5. The Secret Garden
6. The Times They Are A-Changin'
7. Lestat (What the crap?!)
8. Starlight Express
9. Via Galactica
10. The Woman In White

-----------------
Et in Arcadia Ego.

Man, is this one ever tough. Let's see....

Okay, worst musicals/plays is probably pretty easy. In no particular order:

1. WICKED, hands down one of the worst in a long time. All singing, all dancing, trying desperately to be meaningful and simply winding up a parody of itself by the time it's over.

2. SPRING AWAKENING. Well, pretty much the same comments, actually.

3. PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. One song, forty-three variations on a theme.

4. LES MIZ. Sorry, guys, but I fell asleep during Act Two. Not a good sign.

5. MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN. Saw it about a year ago and, during Act Two, wanted to yell at both of them, "Get a freaking life!"

6. SYLVIA, OR THE PLAY ABOUT THE GOAT. Even Albee can have a clunker, but this one exceeded all expecations.

7. AFTER THE FALL. Not Miller's best, by a very long shot.

8. THE PRODUCERS (onstage). Sometimes you just have to resist temptation to make things bigger. The original film is a classic; the stage musical was a mess; the film of the stage musical was very, very sad.

9. THE GRADUATE (onstage). See point 8.

10. BARBARY COAST, a bound-for-Broadway musical written back in the 1980s that was horrendous in a traffic-accident kind of way. It's one of my favourite memories of truly awful theatre, because it succeeded in being bad in oh so many hundreds of ways. Truly, you had to see it to realize how monumentally terrible it was.

Honourable mentions:

ROCKABYE HAMLET (yes, I actually saw it)
THE WILD DUCK
HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL (which is probably too easy, all things considered)

Okay, to happier things:

1. COMPANY, arguably the perfect musical... but not that god-awful John Doyle revival. The original was perfection, period, end of story.

2. FOLLIES. Again, the original, not the Roundabout revival. Were it not for a few missteps, it would claim the Number 1 spot.

3. HARVEY. Has a better comedy ever been written?

4. SKIN OF OUR TEETH. Fascinatingly weird. I truly love this show and hope to design for it someday.

5. MAMMA MIA. A completely brain-dead, put-the-mind-in-neutral, wonderful evening of utter pap. Ive seen it five times and loved every performance.

6. HOTEL PARADISO/FLEA IN HER EAR. Two masterfully mechanical farces that are brilliant in both construction and execution.

7. STRIKE UP THE BAND. Gershwin songs and a wonderfully addled libretto about the US declaring war on Switzerland over cheese. "Someone to Watch Over Me" comes from this show; that should tell you something right there.

8. THE CRUCIBLE. Even more resonant today than it was when written fifty years ago.

9. THE TROJAN WOMEN. It's three thousand years old and sounds like it was written yesterday.

10. LYSISTRATA. See point 9.

Honourable mentions:

IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
THE FANTASTICKS
DAMN YANKEES
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
THE THREE SISTERS

Regina - I forgot about Rosencrantz & Guildenstern! What a great play.

Sean - I think you mean "The Goat, or Who is Silvia?" I don't think "Silvia, or the Play About the Goat" exists. It might though.

"The art of Illusion is the art of Love, and the art of Love is the blood-red heart of the World."
- Tony Kushner, The Illusion

You're right: I was thinking of SYLVIA and writing THE PLAY ABOUT THE BABY. Thanks for the correction.

Not listing ten, but I just have to give my two cents on this point.

WORST MUSICALS:
-Just about anything by Rogers and Hammerstein. I will never understand why people are so attached to crap like South Pacific. Bad plots, bad dialogue, boring and repetitive music ... I know I might get flak for this, but I honestly think that they wrote some of the worst stuff to come out, but people eat it up. I just don't get it.

And I have too many favorite plays to even begin to list (without realizing ten minutes from now that I forgot a really great one).

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

South Pacific does majorly stink. Though, that song "Happy Talk" (at least, from the older movie version) cracks me up it's so horrible.
_________________________________
2007 WINNER!: "The Method" (screenplay)
Plot Machine plot of the day: "In a town called Sandwich a fed up lab mouse gets lost in an ancient cheese maze."

The problem, IMHO, isnt the material as how it's presented. Most productions of R&H fail to see that almost every play in the canon has a very dark underside; it's only recently, with some of the major revivals of plays like CAROUSEL and OKLAHOMA that folks are starting to understand just what these plays are *truly* about.

Like you, I grew up pretty much loathing anything with the saccharine R&H label to it. THE SOUND OF MUSIC was, like, so last season. Then, when I was in London about ten years ago, I saw the revival of CAROUSEL and felt like I was seeing a whole new show. Not a word had been changed, but now I understood how deeply the themes of abusive relationships and (forgive me for using the now-too-trendy term) co-dependency are built into the structure. I'm looking forward to the revival of SOUTH PACIFIC, because it's my hope that the director will push the sub-story of racism back out into the spotlight where it belongs.

So dont blame R&H. Blame the directors who short-handed the productions under the delusion that R&H is "easy". It's not. In the right hands, it can be riveting theatre.

Well, let's see...

In no particular order, the WORST I've ever seen, though for different reasons.

1. Grease (on stage): While the movie has a plot, albeit the moral of the story is rather screwed up, the stage production, while it might be fun to watch, is more like a musical review with a few smatterings of storyline in there somewhere.

2. Little Shop Of Horros - While catchy, it's just too much of a B-movie plot to be called good.

3. Titanic! - What the hell is the plot? Is there a plot? Or are they depending on special effects as heavily as George Lucas did to try and make Star Wars Episode One seem worthwhile?

4. Cats - It's a two-hour long character introduction, and then it's over. Whoever thought this was a classic is deranged as hell.

5. Avenue Q - Cute, hilarious, and yet lacking all that much substance except for social commentary.

6. Cinderella - While the songs are rather nice, Rogers and Hammerstein doll up what was originally quite a dark story to make it something completely lacking of worth.

7. Aida - Disney's one fuck-up, as far as stage shows go.

8. Evita (stage & screen) - Overrated. Seriously overrated.

9. Rent (movie version) - They took a wonderful show and took away quite a bit of what it was supposed to be for the sake of mass marketing.

10. High School Musical (stage) - Whoever thought this would be a good idea pretty much spit on the entire idea of what theatre should be. I mean, c'mon, who the hell would be so deliberately obtuse? And the musical in the musical is called TWINKLE TOWN. What is this, the 30's? Even Cole Porter wasn't that idiotic.

And now the best

1. Godspell - A fun version of the gospel, really.

2. Rent (stage version) - Great show when it's done right.

3. Victor, Victoria (stage version) - I LOVE IT!

4. Les Miserables - It's quite a good operetta.

5. The Phantom of the Opera - Others may object, and I did list two ALW musicals in my worst list, but this is rather good when you think about it. The set design, the music, the main themes - all of it combines to create this atmosphere that just overwhelms you. Also, he did capture the idea behind opera, i.e. repeated themes for certain characters, all lines being sung or said in rhythm, and costumes that seem a bit over-the-top.

6. Mamma Mia! - Scoff if you want, but this is quite possibly the best suiting of popular songs to a plot that I've ever seen. The writers gave great consideration to what they were doing, and it worked quite well. Maybe the fact that I saw it the day that it opened has something to do with it, but there you are.

7. Flower Drum Song - What? So I criticized Rodgers and Hammerstein. Doesn't mean I can't like some of their stuff, too.

8. Anything Goes (1954 stage version) - Sure, it's a pot-boiler, but that's sort of the point to the entire thing.

9. Into the Woods - You can't make a top list without mentioning Sondheim. Seeing as this is the only musical of his which I've seen live, and I think the casting of the movie version of Sweeney Todd was more about celebrity value than actual value to the show, this wins out by default.

10. West Side Story - And finally, Bernstein. Pain in the ass to play, somewhat difficult to sing (who naturally knows how to sing a sixth, I ask you?), and yet it is a wonderful update of Romeo and Juliet, especially since neither lover technically commits suicide, and one of them in fact lives.

So there's my dollar's worth.

"You're insane."
"Has it really taken you this long to figure that out?"
- Batman: The Long Halloween

>> Aida - Disney's one fuck-up, as far as stage shows go.

I gather you didnt see TARZAN. :)