Today is the International Day of Conscience, the fifth anniversary of this global day of awareness established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2019 and first observed in 2020. In honour of this remarkable day, Musical Cyberspace is curating a list of ten musicals that delve deep into the moral and ethical dilemmas that individuals and societies face. After all, if we accept that musical theatre is a medium capable of exploring complex themes, is any theme more profound at this moment in history than the human conscience as people worldwide grapple with their own values and the complexities of what’s right and what’s wrong.

10. Sarafina!

Mbongeni Ngema and Hugh Masekela’s Sarafina! is likely the most unconventional musical to appear on this list. On Broadway, it ran for 597 performances, but in South Africa, where it was created and first performed, it is almost ubiquitous, with several revivals having dotted the almost four decades since its premiere. At the time of writing, auditions are taking place for another major revival of the show being produced by Joburg Theatre later this year. Set against the backdrop of apartheid-era South Africa, Sarafina! portrays the courageous uprising of Soweto students. Their collective stand against systemic oppression is a tale of courage and resistance. While Sarafina! follows a fictional group of students, with the eponymous Sarafina inspiring her classmates to commit to the struggle against apartheid, their story recalls and commemorates the Soweto uprising of 16 June, 1976. It is a testament to the power of conscience in the face of institutionalised wrongdoing, with an inspirational battle cry:

Nkosi sikelela
Sikelel’iAfrika
Maluphakanyisw’uphondo lwayo
Maluphakanyisw’uphondo lwayo
Freedom is coming tomorrow!

9. Into the Woods

What would you do to secure your happy ending? Have you thought of the consequences of your actions? Was it even apparent to you that your desired ending is not the end of your story, and that life goes on? Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods uses classic fairy tales, the ultimate harbinger that a happy ending is on its way, to force us to ask these questions of ourselves. After leading Cinderella, Jack and Little Red Riding Hood, along side a Baker, his Wife, a Witch and a couple of Princes on quests that culminate in a happy “Ever After” the first act, the second act serves as a meditation on accountability, communal responsibility and the moral ramifications of personal — often selfish — choices. Ultimately, we learn that “No One is Alone” and that “Children Will Listen.” A precursor to the latter song was the original version of “Second Midnight.”

BAKER’S WIFE: How do you say to your child in the night
Nothing’s all black but then nothing’s all white?
How do you say it will all be all right,
When you know that it mightn’t be true?
What do you do?

PARENTS: What do you leave to your child when you’re dead?
Only whatever you put in its head.
Things that your mother and father had said,
Which were left to them, too.
Careful what you say.

CHILDREN: How do you show them what you want to see,
Still being true to what you want to be?
How do you grow if they never agree
To your wandering free
In the wood?

Was there any greater loss to the show in the material that was cut and reworked as the show moved towards its Broadway incarnation?

8. Wicked

Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked offers a reimagined perspective on the classic tale of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, presenting Elphaba as a misunderstood figure challenging corrupt authority. The musical delves into themes of perception, morality and the sacrifices one makes when standing up for one’s beliefs against societal norms. With the first of two films based on its hit stage production released last year, Wicked captures the zeitgeist of contemporary life in an incredibly accessible manner. What it lacks in subtlety and nuance is perhaps the very thing that makes it “Popular,” a song that grapples obliquely with the concept of populism in politics. More direct is the second-act number that those familiar with the stage show will already know well, “Wonderful,” in which the Wizard explains to Elphaba just how things work back in Kansas:

Elphaba, where I’m from, we believe all sorts of things that aren’t true. We call it — “history.”

A man’s called a traitor — or liberator.
A rich man’s a thief — or philanthropist.
Is one a crusader — or ruthless invader?
It’s all in which label is able to persist.
There are precious few at ease
With moral ambiguities
So we act as though they don’t exist.

It might be a little glib and on the nose, but I bet those words will resonate strongly with Donald Trump gearing up to finish the first year of his second term not long after Wicked: For Good hits cinemas.

7. Dear Evan Hansen

In Dear Evan Hansen, Benj Pasek, Justin Paul and Steven Levenson explore themes of identity, loneliness and the universal human need for connection. A web of deceit ensnares its eponymous protagonist, a teenager who has to face up to the moral dilemmas that arise when personal desires conflict with ethical integrity. Caught in a lie about being close friends with Connor, a classmate who has died by suicide, Evan finds himself pulled into the grieving family’s life — and closer to his crush, Connor’s sister Zoe. His own struggles with anxiety and depression complicate his ability to come clean, especially when the adults around him refuse to hear him clearly. A lot of people dismiss Dear Evan Hansen, arguing that the show is immoral because it doesn’t dramatise Evan getting his comeuppance or making enough reparations for his actions. That’s certainly one take on things, but would the show be any better if it did? Either way, the adjustment that Levenson has made in the final scene of the book is a great compromise.

EVAN: They never told anyone. About Connor’s, about the note. About… who really wrote it. I mean, I — I kept waiting and it just…
ZOE: They knew what would happen to you if people found out. They didn’t want that.
EVAN: I couldn’t let them just… I had to say something. I had to tell the truth.
ZOE: The things that people said about you after? The way everyone at school…
EVAN: I deserved it.
ZOE: Still…. It’s been … hard. It’s been a hard year.

This empowers Dear Evan Hansen to offer, in lieu of an easy moral parable, a genuine ethical dilemma that gets people talking after the show — and that’s where its real value lies.

6. Spring Awakening

Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s rock musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s classic play sheds light on the tragic consequences of a repressive society that withholds crucial information from its youth. It couches this lofty theme in its characters’ experiences of sexual awakenings and mental health crises, highlighting the ethical responsibility of societies to educate and protect their younger generations. Indeed, the complications brought about by this generational lapse of conscience are at the heart of Spring Awakening, the original play of which was a precursor to the Expressionist movement in theatre. Wendla’s payment of the cost of her mother’s silence on sex and Moritz’s isolation as a result of the institutionalised pressure represented by his schoolteachers and his father’s emotional neglect find expression in Sater’s songs, which give the musical a comparable metaphorical domain. Take, for example, the contradictions in this lyric from “Don’t Do Sadness” about the image teenagers are expected to present versus what’s actually going on when you peel back the layers:

Awful sweet to be a little butterfly —
Just winging over things
And nothing deep inside —
Nothing going, going wild in you.

Spring Awakening is not a comfortable show by any means — I’ve experienced first-hand the effects of listening to it for days on end — but one that leaves audiences with a lot of food for thought.

5. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s dark take on the nineteenth century penny dreadful serial, The String of Pearls, examines the corrosive effects of vengeance on the human soul. Sweeney Todd’s descent into murderous obsession, less aided and abetted than facilitated by Mrs Nellie Lovett, is a grim reminder of how negotiating an amoral world can obliterate one’s moral compass and lead to devastating consequences. While well-justified arguments framing Mrs Lovett as the true villain of the piece litter the Internet, it is just as well to consider Haymitch Abernathy’s advice to Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games:

Remember who the real enemy is.

When Sweeney Todd arrives back in London, he imparts similar wisdom to Anthony Hope.

There’s a hole in the world
Like a great black pit
And the vermin of the world
Inhabit it,
And its morals aren’t worth
What a pig could spit,
And it goes by the name of London.

At the top of the hole
Sit the privileged few,
Making mock of the vermin
In the lower zoo,
Turning beauty into filth and greed.
I too
Have sailed the world and seen its wonders,
For the cruelty of men
Is as wondrous as Peru,
But there’s no place like London!

What appears noble to one person, may appear treacherous to another. We all state opinions as fact and leap to make ethical judgements in a world that has been characterised, at times, by cancel culture — but do we always do so knowing the whole story? Are we sometimes swayed by a narrative spin someone puts on something? What does justice look like in a world where injustice is the order of the day? How differently would Sweeney’s journey have been had he known the secret Mrs Lovett omitted in her telling of the tale of the barber and his wife? Or was it inevitable? This early lyric already shows Sweeney’s ability to dehumanise the society whose systems enabled Judge Turpin to cast him out: they’re vermin and the population of a zoo, and their behaviour is worth less than a pig’s spit. When that’s what you’re seeing when you lay eyes on the person walking ahead of you in the street, sitting opposite you in a pub, living next door to you in your flat, how difficult is it to have an “Epiphany?”

4. South Pacific

Stepping back a little further in time, one of the earlier musicals to confront racial prejudice head-on was Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan’s South Pacific. Hammerstein was, of course, no stranger to grappling with this theme, having done so just more than two decades earlier in Show Boat. There was a great deal of controversy at the time about one particular song that was written for South Pacific, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” which proposed the idea that racism was modeled by one generation and learned by the next. There was a great deal of pressure to drop the song from the show, with lawmakers of the time, who made the following argument:

A song justifying interracial marriage was implicitly a threat to the American way of life.

In the show, Joe Cable, who sings the song, has had an affair with Liat, the daughter of a local vendor, Bloody Mary, while Emile de Beque, to whom he sings the song, was previously married to a local woman, having had children with her. Nellie Forbush, around whom the narrative of South Pacific is built, has just recently broken off an engagement to Emile because she cannot get over her prejudice about his previous marriage and his mixed-race children. The show ends with Nellie returning to Emile, having reconsidered her views and apparently overcome her racism, an ending that many modern-day critics of the show feel is too easy and unearned. It’s certainly indicative of Hammerstein’s optimism:

What we’re saying is that all this prejudice that we have is something that fades away in the face of something that’s really important.

Perhaps we’d be better off reading it as meaning that Nellie is like many white people, a recovering racist who is simply taking a first step in a journey towards dismantling white supremacy and anti-racism. Everyone has to start somewhere — but its starting that means something, and seeing it through that matters.

3. Caroline, or Change

There is a vocal group of Broadway fans who will die on the hill that neither Wicked nor Avenue Q should have won the Tony Award for Best Musical and that it should have gone to Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change. With Kushner writing the book and lyrics, Caroline, or Change was poised to stimulate the same kind of awareness and complex conversations about race, social justice, access and transformation that Angels in America had done in its exploration of the AIDS crisis, homosexuality, politics and religion. Set in 1963 Louisiana, Caroline, or Change delves into the life of Caroline Thibodeaux, an African American maid facing personal and societal upheavals. Caroline works for the Gellman family and things get tricky after young Noah’s stepmother, Rose, tells him that any money he leaves in his pants pockets will be Caroline’s to keep. A forgotten $20 bill quickly strips away the facade that holds racism at bay in the Gellman household. Meanwhile, Emmie, Caroline’s daughter, has no illusions about the same facade in wider society, clear in her convictions that Kennedy never fulfilled his promises to uplift the African American community. Conversations between the characters about Martin Luther King, Jr, and the disappearance of a statue of a Confederate soldier from the local courthouse shape the show’s conflict and Caroline’s journey through the final curtain. While the show was admired, it failed to resonate with audiences and closed after 136 performances. I thought that — perhaps — Caroline, or Change was ahead of its time, not in its social commentary, but in its complex structure and composition, making it a difficult sell on Broadway in 2004. When the show returned to Broadway in 2021, post-pandemic and with the Black Lives Matter movement fresh in our minds, I thought the show would resonate more widely. Having also followed the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa in 2015, I felt audiences might be more receptive to grappling with the themes of decolonisation, institutional racism, and the role history has played in shaping today’s social problems. But the curtain fell on Caroline, or Change after 85 performances. As “Moon Change” tells us:

Change come fast
And change come slow —
But change come.

Sometimes being the voice of conscience on Broadway isn’t profitable; at the same time, the failure of Caroline, or Change to take tells us something about the way people consume art in the space that is the symbolic home of the musical theatre genre.

2. Cabaret

No list detailing the theme of human conscience in musical theatre would be complete without John Kander, Fred Ebb and Joe Masteroff’s Cabaret. Set on the eve of the 1930s in Berlin, as the sun set on the Jazz Age and each new day saw the Nazis take a greater stronghold in Germany, the show dives into how apathy, complicity and postured neutrality paved the way for Hitler’s tyranny. In the timeline covered in Cabaret, as Sally, Cliff, Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz are put through the paces of this classic musical’s plot, support for the Nazi Party grew sixfold — the first step in an exponential rise that would see, just a couple of years later, Hitler in control of the sole legal party in Germany. Quite a lot, it seems, can be achieved in four years and change, and this is one of those times when Cabaret is frighteningly relevant. We’re quite accustomed to seeing plays that reveal the personal effects of political policies, but Cabaret attempts something more sophisticated by showing how personal policies have political effects, using the framework of the Kit Kat Klub to do so. What starts out as something seductive in “Willkommen,” drawing audiences further into the world of the club with its commentary on sexual repression in “Two Ladies,” soon becomes more threatening with the promise of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” before lulling us into the self-congratulatory space of “Sitting Pretty” or “Money.” After all, we can see the bad things the Emcee and his crew are pointing out, can’t we? It’s a very difficult dynamic to get right. Never has this been more apparent than in the current revival of the show, during a performance of which the 2024/2025 Emcee, Adam Lambert, interrupted a performance to scold the audience for their reaction to the number “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes,” in which the theme of antisemitism is explored and exposed. Speaking on The View, Lambert commented:

Sometimes it gets a laugh as if it were a joke and there have been a few shows — one in particular — where this person commented, and I stopped, and I just looked at the audience, and said, ‘No, no, no, no, This isn’t comedy. Pay attention.

Lambert’s impulse is right, but the situation and this kind of reaction raises questions about whether the current production of Cabaret is getting the job done when it comes to its presentation of the show’s themes and how the Emcee relates to these. In some ways, the show is built so that audiences reveal themselves in this way, shifting from only being the audience of Cabaret into a complicit role as the audience of the Kit Kat Klub, with the audience members themselves acting as one another’s consciences if they are not being lulled into complicity, and the show’s ending, if realised well, catching out those of us who have been. The show’s power lies in this uncomfortable recognition: when audiences respond to the provocations of the Emcee, they unwittingly mirror the very moral failures the musical seeks to expose.

1. Les Misérables

Possibly the most redemptive of the shows on this list is Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, Jean-Marc Natel and Herbert Kretzmer’s Les Misérables, a show which started off as a French concept album before being adapted for the stage in France in a version quite different from the English-language production that most people know today. At the heart of the story is the profound transformation of Jean Valjean, who evolves from a hardened ex-convict to a paragon of virtue. His journey, juxtaposed with Inspector Javert’s unwavering adherence to the law, offers a compelling exploration of justice, mercy and redemption, all as a consequence of one act of grace early on in the show when the Bishop of Digne pretends to have given Valjean some silver that Valjean had stolen, so Valjean can not only avoid imprisonment but also start a new life.

And remember this, my brother —
See in this some higher plan.
You must use this precious silver
To become an honest man.

By the witness of the martyrs,
By the Passion and the Blood,
God has raised you out of darkness —
I have bought your soul for God!

It’s a gamble, to be sure, but it is merely the beginning of a rich narrative that compels audiences to ponder the true nature of morality.

These are just ten of many musicals that aim to both entertain and provoke introspection, challenging us to examine our beliefs and the moral complexities of the world around us. As we observe the International Day of Conscience today, let us draw inspiration from these fabulous shows so we may too foster empathy, understanding and integrity in our own lives — because the most powerful acts of conscience are those that begin in the everyday choices we make.