March Musicals Madness First Round Results

Did you have fun choosing your favorite musicals in the first round of March Musicals Madness? 

It is time to discuss the results and advances to the next round! Excited yet?

I am curious, what were the match-ups you struggled with choosing? Mine was Phantom vs. Cats and In The Heights vs Newsies.

Now let’s talk a little about how the shows faired..

Here are the Knockouts!

Waitress trounced Once with Once only receiving 6.3% of the vote. I hate to see Once go down like that. Don’t get me wrong, Waitress is one of my very favorite modern musicals for many reasons. I just would have loved to see Once get a little more recognition. After all, it is a Tony Award Winner, the music is lovely and the story was really nice and unsuspecting. I just don’t think it is a well known show outside of the Broadway community. And it has been quite some time since it has toured. 

The were two other landslides with just slightly less of a gap between them that I will discuss below. 

Cats performed  poorly with only 11.8% of the vote, but it was going against the beloved Phantom of the Opera. I have really only ever heard one person ever say they loved Cats, while there are tons of people that rave about Phantom. Besides the fact that more people have seen it for class trips and such, the music is so much better and the story, albeit a bit off, at least is cohesive and makes sense. When you are watching Cats, it is hard to even grasp the concept of what is happening. 

Miss Saigon also only received 11.8% of the vote as well. Although I think this show was amazing, I believe that Les Mis just has more of a following and better known songs. Even people that don’t know too much about theater have heard Can You Hear the People Sing and could probably hum along with it. Given the right cast and chorus, the songs from Les Miserables can really move an audience. The power from the numbers gives all the goose bumps so it is just more…memorable. 

Could Have Went Either Way

But which math-up found itself too close to call?

Jagged Little Pill vs. Mamma Mia tied. I had to post a late night post on my personal page in order to get enough of a response to decide Mamma Mia ended up on top.

The other musicals that had to went tit-for-tat with the next closest margins were:

Music Man vs. Guys and Dolls 

Evita and Gypsy

Hair vs Pippin. 

Chicago vs Cabaret

In the Heights vs Newsies

Evita vs Gypsy

These were probably all 1 vote away and many of these are long standing shows.

And the Bracket Advancements are…

*For the next round brackets, I will likely have to redo them to help with the resolution and overall look of the brackets.

The shows advancing are:

• Hamilton
• Guys and Dolls
• The Lion King
• Jesus Christ Superstar
• Phantom of the Opera
• The King and I
• The Prom
• Tina: The Tina Turner Musical
• Aladdin
• La Cage aux Folles
• Beautiful: Carol King Musical
• Dear Evan Hanson
• Into the Woods
• Gypsy

• Pippin
• Les Miserables
• Cabaret
• Annie
• Fiddler On the Roof
• Spamalot
• Kinky Boots
• Waitress
• Mama Mia
• Jersey Boys
• Beetlejuice
• Hadestown
• A Chorus Line
• Moulin Rouge

Time for Next Round Voting

If you want to know more about this overall March Musicals Madness game and brackets you can check out the original post where you will also find the schedule.

Keep in mind, you absolutely did not need to vote in the first round to vote this time. It is likely you are more familiar with the shows that made it to this round and future rounds.

Originally I was having participants comment on my posts, but someone mentioned using Google Forms and offered to help set it up. This format is much much simpler and easy to gather information on. Thank you Ian! 😊

For this round, I ask that you use the link https://forms.gle/GAoZKWoGXeDWrqai7 to make your picks. If you wouldn’t mind commenting something on this post or my social pages to help get others engaged, I would greatly appreciate it.

Now let’s get to voting and see which shows will live to see another day!