To be a musical theater kid in the days before "The Phantom of the Opera" was a dark time.
No one was wearing black, off-the-shoulder sweatshirts with artful logos on them. No one was humming Rodgers and Hammerstein in the school hallways or quoting lines from Stephen Sondheim at each other or saving yellow-framed playbills, at least that they admitted to. My school in rural Ohio certainly didn't have the budget — or ticket-buying audience interest — to stage musicals.
