The 25 best movie musicals of all time

The American Film Institute picks the best song-and-dance stories ever put on film.

10. 'Funny Girl'

1968's "Funny Girl," directed by William Wyler, stars Barbra Streisand as real-life actress Fanny Brice. The movie portrays Brice's rise through stage ranks, including starring in the "Ziegfeld Follies," to fame and fortune. "Funny Girl" also delves into Brice's marriage with gambler Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif).

Streisand made her name as Brice in the 1964 Broadway production of the story, but when a film version was pitched to Columbia Pictures, executives weren't too excited over the idea of a film unknown carrying the picture. Producer Ray Stark insisted on Streisand. "I just felt she was too much a part of Fanny, and Fanny was too much a part of Barbra to have it go to someone else," he told Turner Classic Movies.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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