>>> I have to admit that opera is lost on me. I appreciate a good voice and a good song. If it's operatic, then that's fine with me. I even have a few CDs around here by opera singers, but to actually sit and appreciate a full blown opera from beginning to end is beyond me. Give me Les Mis anytime.
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>>We are on the same page. I can appreciate it in small doses but am nowhere near the real buffs. They will pay lots of money to attend complete presentations of The Ring, which goes on for four full evenings.
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>I can take the idea of a theatrical piece with sung dialogs, and I can take some of the instantiations of it, but generally the need to sing it all does negative miracles to the text. Mostly it sounds quite stupid, with maybe some pieces of "JC superstar" as an exception. Lots of repetitions (and not in the way people actually repeat their sentences for emphasis or while thinking what next to say), lots of stating the obvious or just describing what you already see. And then, over the centuries it has evolved into a genre of singing of its own, which resembles normal singing just as much as parade walk resembles a stroll. That kind of affectation sounds like abuse of human voice to me. The voice is so distorted, that I wonder what's the point of having a text at all - nobody can understand it anyway.
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>For a while I liked rock opera, "Hair" specially, but nowadays I retract that too. I liked what it was supposed to be, my projection rather than the thing per se. It's not even rock'n'roll, it's only dressed up so... which is why JCS is more to my liking, even despite the subject - it featured rock singers in each staging I know of (even the one in Belgrade in 1972).

Not to mention too that the stuff appears very dated. For example, the dance numbers in "West Side Story" literally make me feel embarrassed for the performers.