Fiddler on the Roof
The Tony Award winning Broadway musical first opened on September of 1964.  The music was written by Jerry Bock with  lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and libretto by Joseph Stein .  Fiddler was the first Broadway musical to surpass the 3,000 performance mark, running for 3,242 performances, and held the record for longest-running Broadway musical in history for almost 10 years. Originally entitled simply Tevye, the musical is based on Tevye and his Daughters, or Tevye the Milkman originally published by author Sholom Aleichem in 1894. The story centers on Tevye, the father of five daughters, and his attempts to maintain his family and religious traditions while the world and civilization around the shtetl change rapidly. These changes manifest themselves chiefly in the strong-willed actions of Tevye's eldest three daughters — each daughter's choice of husband moves progressively further and further away from established village custom.

West Side Story
The energetic, widely-acclaimed, melodramatic musical first debuted on Broadway in 1961. It is  a modern-day, re-telling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet  set in  the Upper West Side of New York City in the late 1950s.  Feuding families are replaced with conflict between rival street gangs. West Side Story is still regarded as one of the best film adaptations of a musical ever created, and as one of the finest musical films of the 60s. It arrived at a time when the silver screen was realizing tremendous competition from TV and other genres of cinematic entertainment. The stage book was rewritten and adapted for the screen by Ernest Lehman, and the film retained the beautiful and electrifying musical score, songs and lyrics of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.

Les Misérables
Translated variously from French as The Misérable Ones was written in 1892 by French author Victor Hugo and is considered to be among the best-known novels of the 19th century. It follows the lives and interactions of several French characters over a twenty year period in the early 19th century. The storyline focuses on the  struggles of the protagonist—ex-convict Jean Valjean. The plot examines the nature of good and evil while the sweeping story expounding upon the history of France, politics, moral philosophy, law, justice, religion, and the types of natural and familial love. Hugo was inspired by the real-life criminal/policeman François Eugène Vidocq, and split the personalities into the two main characters in his novel. Les Misérables is known to many through its numerous stage and screen adaptations, of which the most famous is the stage musical of the same name, commonly known as "Lés Miz."

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