Towards the end of my time as a student, I sat in a lecture on theatre-making that has stayed with me ever since. One of our lecturers, Professor Mark Fleishman, offered a deceptively simple breakdown of how theatre works. A play, he explained, is divided into acts, acts into scenes, scenes into beats and beats into moments. And it is those singular moments that an audience remembers. At the time, this felt like a neat structural observation. With the benefit of distance, teaching and two decades of making and watching theatre, I’ve come to realise that it goes much deeper than that. It speaks directly to the heart of what makes musical theatre magical, why so many of us fall in love with it so young and stay in love with it for life.

A truly magical musical moment is never accidental. It emerges from a kind of collective intuition: music, movement, text, design, performance and timing all aligning so precisely that the audience stops analysing and simply feels. When it works, you don’t notice where one department’s contribution ends and another’s begins. You just know that something has landed. When I reflect on my own love of musical theatre, some of these moments have absolutely lodged themselves in my memory.

Some of my first magical moments were given to me by my grandmother. When I was a toddler, she would play cast albums while I was put down for naps, gently feeding my imagination with The Sound of Music, South Pacific and My Fair Lady. I was so young that the music simply offered a comforting presence and an endless source of wonder. There is even an old cassette recording of me earnestly singing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” proof, if any were needed, of how impressionable young minds can be.

Ask most people about the magic of The Sound of Music and they will point, quite rightly, to Julie Andrews spinning through the Alps at the start of the film. When I later directed the show myself, it became abundantly clear that the musical’s true emotional core lies elsewhere for me. The key moment, to my mind, is when the children sing “The Sound of Music” and Captain von Trapp joins in. In that instant, music restores something that was broken and a family begins to heal. That is the moment I always carry with me.

South Pacific offers a quieter moment of magic that is no less emotional. As the final curtain falls, Nellie and Emile clasp hands, a small gesture freighted with all the cost of what they have been through and the hope of what they might achieve as a new family, along with Ngana and Jerome. And in My Fair Lady, the sequence that builds towards “The Rain in Spain” is not just about phonetics or Eliza’s triumph: it’s the precise moment where effort, frustration and joy tip into transformation.

More recently, I watched Maybe Happy Ending, which delivered an instantly recognisable magical moment. Oliver and Claire, two obsolete Helperbots living in near-future Seoul, travel to Jeju Island so that Claire can see the fireflies before her imminent deactivation. As they walk into the forest, pinpricks of light begin to appear. Slowly, the stage fills with glowing fireflies in a final build and some of the production’s musicians are revealed as part of the landscape. Light, sound and movement coalesce into a sequence of breathtaking simplicity and beauty. It’s pure theatrical alchemy, the kind of thing that makes you hold your breath without realising it.

I have been lucky enough to encounter many such moments over the years. When I was about ten, Peter and the Darlings soared through the air in Peter Pan and the boundary between the stage and my imagination dissolved entirely. Audra McDonald delivered several when I saw her in Gypsy last June. None of these is an isolated flourish that happens without a great deal of effort from everyone who plays a part in bringing it into being. Each is the product of meticulous collaboration and shared intention, moments where everything converges on stage.

Perhaps this is the miracle of musical theatre. It gives us a language for feeling before we have words for it. It can shape us long before we know we are being shaped. Our families, our teachers, directors, performers and collaborators help guide us, whether we know it or not, toward moments that stay with us.

Acts fade. Scenes blur. But moments endure. If we believe that this is true, then maybe the real measure of a musical’s impact is not how often it is revived or how lavishly it is produced, but how many moments it gives us to carry forward.

I’ll leave you with a question, one I keep returning to myself. What are your magical musical theatre moments? Head down to the comments and share them with us.