Musicals are Funny

So, I'm listening to the Christopher Plummer Cyrano, specifically 'I Never Loved You' and 'Tell Her'. I really hate the moral, that you need to tell the person you love that you love them or else you'll live miserably for decades. Jeez. I wish life was that simple, all you have to do is say it and then it is. I just keep laughing inwardly. 'You love her, then why don't you tell her?... Demand that she say yes... For how the hell can a woman tell you love her, when she hasn't been told?' I find his friend's advice more funny than Cyrano's nose. I think the only show to tackle this realistically is Avenue Q, even with puppets. The unspoken hope in 'Mix Tape', 'He likes me, but does he like me like me like I like him', and the heartbreak in 'There's a Fine, Fine Line', 'I guess if someone doesn't love you back, it isn't such a crime, but there's a fine, fine line between love and a waste of your time'. 'There's a fine, fine line between what you wanted and what you got.' Most of my college papers have centered on love and romance, whether its farce in Shakespeare, the embarrassment caused by Louis XV's voracious appetite or the Modernist misguided form found in Woolf. I guess I want to explore this until the point that it interests me no longer or to quote the Boy From Oz 'I'd rather leave while I'm in love, while I still know the meaning of the word'. I'm hoping that by the time I find real love, that I won't realize I have, or else I would be forced to put it in perspective of my nearly life-long research from my very young idolization of Clark Gable and Sean Connery to my early school crushes to Hugh Jackman and Gerard Butler to my frustrating (lack of) love life as a young adult to my possible lifelong adoration of Errol Flynn. I don't think I'll ever tell the person I love that I love them, or at least not in the life-altering/affirming way. I may throw it around like when they do something hilariously out of context I'll say it. Or if they say it first, it really is the only polite response. But I am coming to think that once you start to define and label love, then it isn't love anymore. Love should remain a mystery. Even thirty years into marriage, you should still look at that person and smile to yourself for really no apparent other than that they are there and hopefully didn't notice your side-way glance. It's once you tell yourself that you love him, that you have doomed your relationship for you will always hold it to some higher ideal or if not you always run the risk that he doesn't 'love' you back. So don't tell him, don't read into that mix tape. Just let it be and as long as you are happy near him, that's really all that matters. What more can you ask from life, God and the mystery of it all?

Recommendations:
Listen to the Soundtracks of...
Cyrano (1973), 'Love Her', 'I Never Loved You', 'You Made Me Love'
Avenue Q, 'It's a Fine, Fine Line', 'Mix Tape'
The Boy From Oz, 'I'd Rather Leave While I'm in Love', 'You and Me'
Nine, 'My Husband Makes Movies', 'Unusual Way', 'A Call from the Vatican'

Particular Songs
'The Party's Over' from Bells are Ringing (1956)
'Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me' performed by Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas
'I've Got to See You Again' by Norah Jones, yes not part of a soundtrack, but listen anyway