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Valentine's Day is here and love is all around us. At this most romantic time of the year, we can't help but wonder... what is the greatest Broadway love song ever? BroadwayWorld continues our great tradition of finding that consensus- and this year we have more answers than ever! We've gathered responses from over 1500 performers, composers, industry professionals, and entertainment personalities from all over the world.
This year's list is presented by The Notebook, now in previews on Broadway. Based on the best selling novel that inspired the iconic film, this new musical follows Allie and Noah, both from different worlds, as they share a lifetime of love despite the forces that threaten to pull them apart, in a deeply moving portrait of the enduring power of love.
Creative
Hark! | Legend | Balancing Act | Nunsense | Nunsense 2 | Nunsense Jamboree | Nuncrackers | Meshuggah-Nuns | Nunsensations
My favorite song is "He Was Too Good To Me" by Rodgers & Hart. It was dropped from their show "Simple Simon." They were crazy to drop that song! Everytime a song is dropped from one of my shows I put it in the next one! Fortunately many singers have made "He Was Too Good To Me" a standard.
Performer
Significant Other
My favorite Broadway love song is "Two People In Love" from Baby. The music without any lyrics makes you feel good. It's already swelling before it starts. It's the beginning honeymoon part of the relationship where life is great and we're singing duets and we're singing in harmony. I could listen to that song at the gym, which is kind of embarrassing but true.
Performer
Tuck Everlasting | On the Town | A Chorus Line
As a hopeless romantic I'd have to say my favorite Broadway love song is "If I Loved You" from Carousel. Pure & beautifully haunting. That scene beneath the blossom trees is one of the most romantic in existence in my opinion. Undeniable love at first sight.
Performer
Aladdin | The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
My favorite Broadway love song is "Dear One" from Kiss of the Spider Woman. I think its a beautiful melody and the overlapping arrangement is gorgeous. It's very tender and sad, and I found it very effective.
Performer
Chicago | Hadestown | Jesus Christ Superstar | The Lion King
My favorite Broadway song is, “What About Love”, from The Color Purple. This song has always held a special place in my heart for many years, especially now that I had the absolute pleasure to perform it night after night at the Portland center stage. After recently having my wedding, something additional inside me has changed. I appreciate the love of life and the people in it even more! My life is filled with love and I know that to experience it every day is what it is all about.
Performer
Call Me Madam | Bring It On | Spider-Man
The classic Sondheim love songs, I'm counting some West Side Story, but "Move On" from Sunday in the Park, "Children Will Listen" from Into the Woods
Performer
Fiddler on the Roof | A Class Act | High Society | Les Miserables | Grease
I don't know if it's my favorite of all time, but it is my favorite right now. I recently got to sing "Next Best Thing to Love" and I was reminded what a great love song it is. Not the typical love song. A love song for the kind of love that just misses, but is still a big love. And definitely for those of us who have been around the block a few times!
Performer
The View Upstairs
"Love I Hear” from Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. "I pine, I blush, I squeak, I squawk, today I woke to week to walk, what's love I hear, I feel, I fear, I know I am, I'm sure, I mean, I hope, I trust, I pray, I must be in!"
Performer
The Lyons | Guys and Dolls | Proof | An American Daughte
"Til There Was You." I mean, you don't even need to explain it. I could cry just thinking about the song, I don't even need to hear it.
Performer
Next to Normal
My favorite Broadway show love song is “When the Sun Goes Down” from In The Heights.
Performer
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory | Sister Act | School of Rock
I'm gonna take it back, old school - "Something Good" from The Sound of Music. I love a love that is staring at your right in the face for a while before you realize it.
Performer
The Heart of Rock & Roll | Holiday Inn | How to Succeed... |
I would say "Carousel" from Jacques Brel, which was one of the first shows I directed in New York. In French it’s “La Valse a Mille Temps” which means a waltz played in 1000 time (as opposed to being played in three). It’s a gorgeous love song that spins out of control as life gets messier, but it’s still the same love that underpins it right to the end.
Performer
Porgy and Bess | Race | The Wiz | A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum | Dreamgirls
"I Loves You Porgy" from Porgy and Bess and "Look to the Rainbow" from Finians Rainbow.
Performer
Funny Girl | A Soldier's Play | After Midnight
“I Want To Be With You” by Sammy Davis Jr and Paula Wayne from Golden Boy. It’s my favorite because the song emphasizes the reality of losing someone and the pain that comes with it while at the same time using that pain to stress the importance of not taking love for granted.
Performer
Charlie and the Chocolate Factor | Motown
I have two favorite Broadway love songs...they are "Love Changes Everything" from Aspects of Love, and "So In Love" from Kiss Me Kate! I think that both of these songs are beautiful, both melodically and lyrically, and they perfectly capture so much about what it can feel like to be in love.
Performer
Trip of Love
I love "I Can Hear the Bells" from Hairspray. It just captures what you feel when you really like someone.
Performer
Pictures from Home | My Fair Lady | Fiddler on the Roof | The Addams Family |
My favorite Broadway love song is “Where or When” by Rogers and Hart from Babes in Arms. Aside from that achingly beautiful melody, I love the mystery of déjà vu in the lyrics. How can this person we’ve just met and that we’re falling for seem so wonderfully familiar? It’s as if we “met before and laughed before and loved before” on some stellar plane outside of time and space, “but who knows where or when?” And suddenly they’re now here with us, where they’ve somehow always been, and where they always belong.
Performer
School of Rock | Legally Blonde
My favorite is "Love to Me" from The Light In the Piazza.
Performer
Sunset Boulevard | Carousel
Being a father of five, the one that comes to mind is the one that the father sings in The Addams Family, "Happy/Sad". I find it so charming that he is singing a love song to his daughter, handing her off in marriage.
Industry
Project Runway
From Follies, "Losing My Mind." I have to tell you, it brings me to tears everytime I hear it. It's very emotional, it's very moving- and who among us hasn't experienced that kind of pain? And it's such a beautiful lyric and such gorgeous music.
Performer
Tuck Everlasting | Amazing Grace | All the Way
The two Broadway love songs that found their way into my heart during my adolescent cast album binge period are still very much there today: "Love Song" from Pippin and "I Won't Send Roses" from Mack & Mabel. That dichotomy explains me about as well as I can be explained.
Performer
Tales from the Guttenberg Bible | Relatively Speaking | The Exonerated | Prelude to a Kiss
"Some Enchanted Evening" from South Pacific stirs my soul. Rodgers and Hammerstein created a love song that defies time , changes in culture, and an ever evolving society. Love stays put, as the world keeps spinning.
Performer
Billy Elliot Broadway & West End | City of Angels
What an impossible question. But if I go with the first song to come into my head, it would have to be 'If I Loved You' from Carousel. Ravishing combination of harmony & lyrics. On another day, it might be 'In Buddy's Eyes' from Follies. Complicated & ambiguous, it blows me away when I hear it.
Performer
You Can't Take It With You | Anything Goes | Twentieth Century | Gypsy | Hairspray
"Our Love Is Here to Say." It's one of my husband's favorite songs and they sang it at our wedding 23 years ago.
Performer
The Lion King
My favorite love song is "What About Love" from The Color Purple. It is the perfect example of how two unlikely hearts find love, throwing all caution to the wind amidst a ton of doubt and many obstacles. Sort of like the most beautiful orchid can grow in the rockiest soil, because love is love is...you know the rest.
Director
Tony-nominated Director | Rock of Ages
"The Street Where You Live" from MY FAIR LADY. It kills me! And the right person singing it gives me chills... And, of course, "Being Alive" from COMPANY, which I think summarizes the paradox of love.
Performer
How to Succeed | Cry Baby | In My Life | Rent
'Say It Somehow' from The Light in the Piazza is by far my favorite Broadway love song.
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