The first opera I went to was on a free ticket at the invitation of a friend. I expected to be bored and confused, as opera here is always portrayed as overweight singers in way too much makeup screaming out lyrics in Italian.
Was I ever wrong! This one was very minimalist as far as sets and costumes went, and the story sucked me right in, because it was so sad and so tragic, and the main character, through the absolute best of intentions, lost her life and nothing could be done about it. I (and everyone around me) was wiping a lot of tears away by the end.
But it was more than that, because it also had a good amount of humor, and very risque at that, and when I wasn't crying, I was laughing my butt off. Just to give you an idea, the story contained some secondary characters, wood nymphs, which were supposed to slight little creatures like Tinkerbelle...well, they'd enlisted the help of a local drag troupe we have, so all the nymphs were played by those folks, and they played them as very...suggestive in their little woody-nymphy goings-on, and they had the audience laughing hysterically. They really stole the show.
Second one...complete opposite, a cast of thousands on a big stage, extremely elaborate costumes, fireworks, cannons going off, catapults, very detailed makeup (I was in the second row) - it was the equivalent of a big box office summer blockbuster, full of fighting and action and explosions and all that. I loved that one, too, and those two together made me a fan for life.
Since then, we've seen traditional operas done as a 1960 Hollywood party (with characters like James Stewart, Lucy & Desi, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn Monroe worked into the story), and one done as a Wes Anderson film, and probably the most adventurous of all was one where very little action took place on the stage. Instead, they'd constructed these massive set pieces, and everything took place above the stage, and it's hard to explain, but there were just little cut-outs for the performers' heads, and then their bodies were projected on, animated, so they'd be singing something, but their little cartoon bodies would be doing outlandish things. It was very psychedelic and surreal.
The Shakespeare in the Park company do similar things. The park performances are free, and they use it to break in new actors, so they have fun with it. One performance of Romeo & Juliet...the entire cast were dressed as modern-day superheroes. Why? Just for fun. And it was!
We once saw "A Christmas Carol" performed entirely in Klingon, actors dressed as Klingons, but the really cool part was, the story was completely rewritten as a Klingon story, meaning it was written as what if Charles Dickens had been Klingon, raised on Klingon, what would the story have been like?
Well, as Klingons value honor above all else, and "A Christmas Carol" is a story of redemption, the main character isn't a miserly old man who's lost his compassion for humanity, he's a Klingon who's lost his honor and has to find a way to reclaim it. Brilliant!
Ballets, we've only seen a couple, but we try to see The Nutcracker every time the ballet company changes up the production, so seeing "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as a ballet this year should be interesting.
Those are my favorite plays as well, the ones that involve some kind of supernatural aspect, or horror, because it's easy to pull off the special effects and makeup in a film, but much more fascinating to see how they do it live. We've seen Neverwhere, Jekyll & Hyde, Dracula, and a one-man production of Frankenstein that were all superb.
Musicals...well, if Spamalot couldn't convert me, I don't think anything can.