Top 10 Most Memorable Scenes from Our Musical Season

Nobody says "nobody puts Baby in a corner" and walks across a ballroom toward a frozen crowd without understanding exactly what they are doing. Patrick Swayze as Johnny Castle — and the filmmakers as the filmmakers — knew that everything in the final scene of Dirty Dancing depended on the lift landing perfectly, and on the audience believing it could fail. The lift works because the audience knows it nearly didn't. Jennifer Grey broke her concentration twice before the final take. Swayze caught her every time.

The song — (I've Had) The Time of My Life, written by Franke Previte, John DeNicola and Donald Markowitz — won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1988. The melody's build from the opening bass line through the brass section to the moment the lift begins is the finest example of a song and a scene achieving their climax simultaneously in film musical history. Every beat of the choreography is calibrated to a beat in the music. The result is three minutes of cinema that has made every subsequent audience member want to learn the lift.

Dirty Dancing was made on a budget of $6 million and grossed $214 million worldwide. The soundtrack album spent eighteen weeks at number one on the Billboard 200. The lift became so culturally embedded that it has been imitated at weddings, at hen parties, in school plays and in every moment where someone needs to demonstrate to a crowded room that they have seen and loved this film.

The structural genius of the Grease carnival finale is that it works backwards from its conclusion. Sandy's transformation — the black leather trousers, the off-shoulder top, the cigarette — is the punchline to a joke the entire film has been setting up. Every scene in which Sandy was the good girl to Danny's greaser was the setup. Every song in which they failed to meet in the middle was the setup. The finale delivers the punchline by having Sandy arrive as Danny's ideal rather than her own, which is simultaneously the film's most crowd-pleasing moment and its most morally complex one.

You're the One That I Want was not in the original stage musical. It was written specifically for the film by John Farrar and has since become the most recognisable song from the Grease soundtrack. It has sold over fifteen million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling singles in history. The "ooh ooh ooh" introduction is one of the most instantly recognisable musical moments in popular culture — heard for one second, the entire scene is visible.

The Grease film (1978) is the highest-grossing musical film in history when adjusted for inflation. You're the One That I Want is its centrepiece: the moment the film commits entirely to spectacle and earns it. The 98types lyric print is the print for the person who considers this scene the correct ending to every story.

The Griffith Observatory sequence in La La Land is one of the most formally beautiful scenes in contemporary cinema — Damien Chazelle lifting his characters off the ground entirely, having them waltz through a twilight sky above Los Angeles while City of Stars plays, and doing it with the specific quality of a dream that knows it is a dream. The magic realism is not disguised. The moment is explicitly impossible. And it is the most romantic scene in the film precisely because of that: the characters are shown as they imagine themselves to be, not as they are.

City of Stars won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song. Justin Hurwitz wrote the melody with Benj Pasek and Justin Paul writing the lyrics — the same team responsible for Dear Evan Hansen and The Greatest Showman. Ryan Gosling learned piano from scratch for the film. Emma Stone learned tap dancing. The result is a musical number that communicates genuine effort underneath the cinematic gloss, which is why it feels real despite being explicitly fantastical.

La La Land received fourteen Academy Award nominations — the most in Oscar history at the time, tying with All About Eve and Titanic. City of Stars is the film's emotional centre: the song that Mia and Sebastian share before the plot separates them, the four minutes in which La La Land is completely and purely itself. The 98types lyric print is the print for the household that has watched La La Land at least twice and discussed the ending at length.

The Do-Re-Mi sequence in The Sound of Music is the only musical number in cinema history that actually teaches you something. By the end of three minutes of Julie Andrews and seven children cycling through Salzburg and the surrounding countryside, you know the solfège scale. The song is a learning tool disguised as entertainment, which is the definition of the best kind of teaching and the reason it has been used in music classrooms continuously since 1965.

Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote Do-Re-Mi as the pedagogical centrepiece of the original 1959 Broadway production, but the film version — directed by Robert Wise with cinematography by Ted McCord — expanded it into a sequence that moves through multiple locations across a narrative day, from morning to evening, from the garden of the von Trapp house through the fountains and arcades of Salzburg to the hills above the city. The sequence establishes Maria's relationship with the children in the time it takes to teach them a scale, which is a screenwriting achievement as remarkable as the song itself.

The Sound of Music won five Academy Awards including Best Picture. It has been the most watched film in the history of many national broadcasters. The hills are still alive in the specific way that only a perfect song in a perfect sequence can make them — which is to say, permanently.

The Time Warp is unique in the history of musical cinema in that it is impossible to watch in isolation — it can only be experienced correctly in the context of a Rocky Horror midnight screening, with rice and toast and water pistols and a cast of regulars who have been performing the callbacks for decades. The scene in the film is approximately three minutes. The scene at a midnight screening of the film is approximately forty-five minutes, and involves the entire audience dancing in the aisles, shouting responses to every line of dialogue, and participating in a ritual that has been performed without interruption since 1975.

Rocky Horror has been showing at midnight screenings for fifty years — a run that has no precedent or equivalent in cinema history. The film opened to mixed reviews in 1975 and was considered a commercial failure. The midnight screening phenomenon began by accident at the Waverly Theater in New York, where audiences began talking back to the screen and developing the call-and-response tradition that defines the Rocky Horror experience. Tim Curry's Dr. Frank-N-Furter is the performance that the entire structure is built around — extravagant, funny, genuinely transgressive for 1975, and still the most committed piece of musical theatre acting in any film.

The Science Fiction / Double Feature opening — Richard O'Brien's love letter to 1950s science fiction, sung by a pair of disembodied lips against a black background — is the sequence that tells you whether you are going to enjoy the film or not. If those lips make you want to know what comes next, you are in the right place. If not, the Time Warp will not change your mind. The 98types Rocky Horror poster is for the households that have been going to midnight screenings for years and wanted to put it on the wall.

The bow sequence in Titanic is the scene that everyone who has seen the film has thought about reproducing on a ferry. Jack tells Rose to close her eyes. She steps onto the bow railing. He wraps his arms around her. She opens her eyes and it is the horizon. Celine Dion begins. This sequence has been recreated on cruise ships, at seaside resorts, on the decks of boats of every size on every ocean, in every country in the world, by every couple who saw the film in 1997 and felt something they did not have words for at the time.

My Heart Will Go On was written by James Horner and Will Jennings for the Titanic soundtrack. Celine Dion reportedly recorded the definitive vocal take in a single pass — one take, no warmup, the version you hear on the soundtrack. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, the Grammy for Record of the Year and the Grammy for Song of the Year simultaneously in 1998. It is the best-selling single by a Canadian artist in history. It has been streamed over one billion times on Spotify.

Titanic (1997) won eleven Academy Awards — equal to the record set by Ben-Hur. James Cameron held the bow sequence back until ninety minutes into the film, which is why its impact when it arrives is disproportionate to its actual running time. By the time the bow appears, you care about both characters completely. By the time My Heart Will Go On begins over the closing credits, you are in no state to leave the cinema.

Defying Gravity is the act one finale of Wicked — the moment that every audience in the twenty-one years since the original Broadway production has been building toward since the first scene of the show. Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West, who is the protagonist and not the villain) refuses to compromise, takes her broomstick, rises into the air against the combined forces of the Wizard's authority and the expectations of Oz, and sings a song about the specific courage required to defy what the world wants you to be.

"I'm through accepting limits / Because someone says they're so" is the lyric that every person who has ever felt constrained by other people's definitions of them has heard as a direct address. Defying Gravity works as a musical number because it is built structurally to escalate — the orchestration adds layers systematically through the song, and the staging in both the original Stephen Schwartz production and Jon M. Chu's 2024 film uses the physical ascent literally to mirror the lyric's emotional argument. By the final note, the audience is standing.

The 2024 Wicked film adaptation directed by Jon M. Chu, starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, was one of the most anticipated film musicals in cinema history and delivered a Defying Gravity sequence that fully matched those expectations. The 98types Wicked poster is the print for the household that has been waiting for this film for two decades.

The Dancing Queen sequence in Mamma Mia (2008) is not the most technically accomplished scene in the film. Meryl Streep does not hit every note. The choreography is not precisely synchronised. The women running down through the white-walled village toward the harbour are not professional dancers and you can tell. None of this matters. The scene works because of the specific quality of joy it captures — the joy of a group of women in their forties and fifties running toward something together, in sunlight, to one of the most joyful songs ever recorded.

Dancing Queen was released in 1976 and has never not been relevant. Its specific function in Mamma Mia — as the catalyst for collective female joy, the song that causes Donna (Meryl Streep) and her friends (Christine Baranski and Julie Walters) to abandon whatever they were doing and run — is the clearest articulation of what the song has always been for. It is not a song you listen to alone. It is a song that requires a group of people who are already happy and want to be happier.

Mamma Mia (2008) grossed $609 million worldwide against a budget of $52 million — the most successful British musical film in history. The sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018), added Cher and Young Amanda Seyfried to the formula and grossed a further $395 million. The 98types Mamma Mia lyric print and Dancing Queen lyric print are the prints for households where ABBA is not a nostalgic choice but an ongoing commitment.

"What's this? What's this? There's colour everywhere. What's this? There's white things in the air." Jack Skellington's discovery of Christmas Town is the pivotal scene in The Nightmare Before Christmas — the moment the film's central conflict becomes visible: a character from one aesthetic world encountering another aesthetic world and misunderstanding it completely. Jack does not understand Christmas because his entire frame of reference is constructed from Halloween, and the song is the sound of that misunderstanding expressed as pure joy.

Danny Elfman wrote the score and the songs for The Nightmare Before Christmas and also provided Jack Skellington's singing voice — while Chris Sarandon provided the speaking voice. The What's This? sequence is Elfman's most complex piece in the film: an accelerating, spiralling number that mirrors Jack's mounting excitement as he moves through Christmas Town, touching everything and understanding nothing. The contrast between the minor-key Halloween aesthetic and the major-key Christmas visual world is the film's visual argument compressed into a single song.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is the only film in cinema history to be marketed and celebrated as a Halloween film and a Christmas film simultaneously, every year, since its release in 1993. The Jack Skellington silhouette is one of the most reproduced pieces of graphic design in pop culture. The 98types Nightmare Before Christmas poster is the print for the household that decorates for both holidays without contradiction.

We Don't Talk About Bruno was the first Disney song to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 since A Whole New World in 1993 — a gap of almost thirty years, bridged by a song that achieves in four minutes what most musicals spend an act trying to do: establish multiple characters, their relationships, their individual anxieties, and the family's collective mythology, simultaneously, through overlapping musical voices that converge on a single truth.

Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote We Don't Talk About Bruno as a structural challenge to himself — a song that would function as a narrative accelerant, introducing the Madrigal family's mythology while also telling three separate story threads simultaneously. The way the song layers Isabella's grievance, Dolores's whispered secret, Camilo's theatrical retelling and Félix's premonition story over each other before bringing them together in the chorus is the most sophisticated piece of Broadway-style musical construction in Disney animation since Be Prepared.

Encanto (2021) is one of the most culturally specific mainstream animated films Disney has ever made — set in Colombia, drawing on Colombian folklore, architecture and family structure — and one of the most universally accessible. We Don't Talk About Bruno's global success was the proof: a song about not talking about something became the thing everyone was talking about. The 98types Encanto print is the print for the household that has watched Encanto more than twice and knows every word of the song they're not supposed to talk about.