It's God who really has the best songs, according to a University of St Andrews theologian - at least, if you disregard The Sound of Music.
The Rev Ian Bradley from the school of divinity believes musicals like Les Miserables and The Lion King provide their audiences with a distinct philosophy of life, as well as entertainment. Churches have a great deal to learn from modern musicals and could usefully incorporate their spiritual and theological values, and the pastoral care they offer, into their services, he argues in a book published next week.
In You've Got to Have a Dream: the Message of the Musical Dr Bradley reveals that musicals have focused on serious and social issues as far back as Showboat in the 1920s, which dealt with racial prejudice and family breakdown.
The musical version of The Wizard of Oz, filmed in the late 1930s as the US emerged from the depression, offered the message: "Believe in yourself, stick by your friends, fight for what's right and things will get better."
Less optimistically, during the cold war the BBC lined up the Sound of Music as the first film to be broadcast after the bomb dropped in order to reassure a traumatised population.
Dr Bradley also argues that the musicals of the late 1990s and early 2000s have taken over from the late night Sunday television documentary slot as the vehicle for portraying contemporary conflict and debate in the sphere of religion.
For example, the Beautiful Game deals with terrorism and Catholic-Protestant divisions and Whistle Down the Wind explores the nature of faith and belief. Even Disney's The Lion King carries ecological and moral messages about sacred kingship and facing up to responsibility.
The theme of dreaming is also central to the ethos of the majority of musicals. However, Dr Bradley argues it has developed and changed from the more optimistic message of the 1940s and 50s, which suggested that 'you can do it if you follow your dream' (and, therefore, that you've got to have a dream), to the more realistic message in musicals of today that dreams unfortunately don't always come true.
Dr Bradley hopes to appeal to fans of musical theatre interested in probing under the surface of their favourite shows as well as students of liturgy and contemporary Christianity.