Das Rheingold at the Seattle Opera, with Greer Grimsley as Wotan.
I saw Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady in the early 1980s.
I saw Neely and Anderson in Jesus Christ Superstar.
A Chorus Line. No idea who was in it, but gosh, did it hit home.
Most notably, I saw Yul Brynner in The King and I on his last tour with it. 1980s, I’d guess. He was old, but he gave it his all, and was it ever good! There will never be another King like him.
I saw Sweeney Todd on Broadway with Michael Cerveris and Patty Lupone.
I saw Godspell in London with the original London cast, including David Essex as Jesus. They actually invited the audience to come up on stage and have a drink with the cast at intermission, which was cool.
'Laughter on the 23rd floor. Gene Wilder, London 1996. He hadn’t aged a day since Wonka 25 years earlier.
‘A Life in the theatre’ London 2005 Patrick Stewart and some guy from Dawsons Creek.
‘Krapps last tape’ London 2000, John Hurt. The only play that has moved me so much that I went straight from the theatre to a bookshop to hunt down a copy. It’s by Beckett, so the script is only a few pages long, most of what is said on stage is non verbal.
I saw Topol in Fiddler in 1990 ( was 10 years old… don’t really remember the show at all. It was my first Broadway show, and ).
I also saw the Ted Neeley Superstar tour in the 90s that made it to my small “city”.
I saw In The Heights with Lin Manuel Miranda. I was not paying much attention to Broadway at that time and I hadn’t done my homework before showing up as a chaperone with a bunch of students. I said to a colleague afterwards something like “that guy playing Usnavi is captivating!” Colleague: “Um, yeah, he wrote the thing too!”
Maybe it’s too fresh to be truly “notable”, but I saw the original cast of Darren Criss and Helen Shen in Maybe Happy Ending, both of whom were excellent in an excellent show.
Oh, one more I forgot. I saw the Rocky Horror Show in Atlanta around 1985 with RuPaul as Riff Raff. It was one of his first professional appearances. He had been part of a funk band called Wee Wee Pole. Knew something was up because the program referred to him as “Miss Thang” and the news stories noted that his dressing room was with the ladies. 1985, remember.
Are you sure that wasn’t Godspell? I think there is a recent documentary about that production and its soon to be famous cast (which also included Gilda Radner).
ETA
Blue Man Group (in NY before it got franchised and sent to Vegas)
Stomp
Penn & Teller
Then there was this:
The Flying Karamzov Brothers in Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors”. What a crazy, wonderful show.
Ah, thanks for the correction.
I’ve seen
Hello Dolly on Broadway with Ginger Rogers
Fiddler on the Roof on its original Broadway run with Harry Goz (who?). I later saw it in Boston with Zero Mostel on a revival tour, and I also saw it in Boston with Topol.
I saw Dracula on Broadway with Raul JUlia
Sant Joan with Lynn Redgrave (it was shortly after she had appeared as Saint Joan in Jules Feiffer’s Knock! Knock!, so I suspect someone thought she ought to do a serious version)
I was supposed to see Man of la Mancha on a Broadway revival with Richard Kiley, but he was sick, so we got the understudy.
Amadeus on Broadway wih Frank Langella as Salieri (!)
1776 on its original Broadway run, with Wiliam Daniels and the rest of the original cast.
Sherlock Holmes on Broadway with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and John Wood as Holmes. (I had an SRO ticket for this, which cost $2.50 !)
Sleuth on Broadway with Patrick MacNee (John Steed!) as Andrew Wyke.
Rex!, Richard Rodgers’ last musical, with Nicol Williamson as Henry VIII (Six was not the first musical about Henry VIII’s wives). Saw it on a pre-Broadway run in Boston.
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in an off-Broadway production. I don’t recall seeing them at the time, but this 1971 revival starred William Devane and had Danny Devito (who four years later appeared as the same character in the film version).
Good Evening– revue starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Some of the bits came from the play they’d done with Jonathan Miller and Allan Bennett, Beyond the Fringe. Moore played the piano a lot.
I saw Glengarry Glen Ross on its original Broadway run, but I’m not sure if I saw the big names – Robert Prosky, Joe Mantegna, James Tolkan – in it.
Saw Spring Awakening with Camryn Manheim on Broadway
Saw Yul Brynner in The KIng and I on revival on Broadway.
Richard Harris as King Arthur in Camelot on tour.
Cats at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway, but with no big names
I’ve seen a lot of other shows in other venues – Big River, The Madness of George III, Camelot (again), Phantom of the Opera, Oklahoma, Little Shop of Horrors , Jersey Boys, Cats (again) , and lots of others. Also a ton of small theater an student productions.
I’ve also seen three Operas in different places – The Met in New York, a theater in Salt Lake City, one in Rome.
Th Troubies’ thing is welding rock & roll to Shakespeare. So far I’ve seen:
Fleetwood Macbeth
Hamlet, the Artist Formerly Known As the Prince of Denmark
A Midsummer’s Saturday Night Fever Dream
OthELO
As U2 Like It
Other the The Bard:
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed ReinDoors
ABBAmemnon
Alice In One-Hit Wonderland
Santa’s Coming to Motown
Always hilarious shows, with a good band, great singers and dancers, and lots of improv and audience participation.
When I was a kid my mom took me to the stuff my stepfather didn’t want to see (and he didn’t want to see much), so at our local dinner playhouse we saw Mickey Rooney in Three Goats and a Blanket and Sal Mineo in Sunday in New York. Sal Mineo I don’t remember, but Mickey Rooney basically abandoned the script and played to the audience the whole time, that I remember.
I saw The Flying Karamazovs I think three times; they were always great date material.
Hamilton in the original theater, but the second run of cast. We got to meet ‘Hamilton’ (Javier Munoz) as one of those corporate deals, and he talked about Miranda testing dialogue with him during the writing.
Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. I think the main actor of note would have been Peter Gerety (the judge on The Wire).
We also saw Wallace Shawn in a black box theater doing his own play (in supporting roles), but it was Aunt Dan and Lemon. I’d never heard of the guy but recall finding him funny.
Inconceivable!
In 1972 one of the history teachers at my high school organised a bus trip to Chicago to see 1776, but I’ve no idea who was in the cast.
Wouldita killed ya to provide a link to that thread? Just sayin’ 
Hmm, I’ve been trying to think of any stage shows I’ve seen that weren’t either comedy shows or music concerts, that had any ‘names’ involved, or were otherwise notable, other than local high school / college / amateur ensemble level stuff. I feel like there must be something, but I’m coming up mostly blank right now.
I will say I remember a couple Shakespeare plays I saw live that were notable to me, for very different reasons.
The first was when I was pretty young-- early High School or even Junior High. In English class, we were starting to study Shakespeare, and the teacher took us on a field trip to a showing of MacBeth. I was amazed at how much those stuffy-seeming, old-fashioned words on the printed page came alive, watching it acted out. It really cemented at a young age a love, or at least strong enduring appreciation of, his works. Every English teacher should do this, or at least show a good Shakespeare movie or two, like Kenneth Branaugh’s Henry V, in the classroom.
The second one was an offbeat, avant-garde multimedia presentation of Hamlet, put on by a local college, I think. I went to see it in the late 80s with my girlfriend. It was notable for just how unconventional it was. For example, after a scene between Hamlet and Ophelia (probably the ‘get thee to a nunnery’ scene) the Fine Young Cannibals song She Drives me Crazy started playing, and the entire cast started dancing and doing a conga line under flashing colored disco lights. People in the audience were walking out muttering “well, I never! This is insulting! An outrage!”. My girlfriend and I were laughing at this, since Shakespeare himself was an innovator, and his plays were meant first and foremost to entertain, not be this lofty, high art, getting dusty up on its pedestal.
Shows with particularly notable actors I’ve seen:
No Man’s Land with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart.
The revival of Sweeney Todd with Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford’s understudy.
I already mentioned it in the comedy thread, but technically Sleepwalk With Me with Mike Birbiglia was an off-Broadway one man play, not a comedy show (although it was very funny), so it might belong in this thread.
Other shows I’ve seen on Broadway, but AFIK no one particularly notable was in them, and it was no longer the original cast by the time I saw them:
Avenue Q
In The Heights
West Side Story
Spamalot
And I’ve seen the touring productions of:
Wicked
The Book of Mormon
Hamilton
I’ve seen lots and lots of broadway and London shows, but few with notable cast members. A few exceptions:
If/Then with Idina Menzel
Chess with Lea Michele (just a few months ago)
Hapgood by Tom Stoppard, starring Felicity Kendal, Nigel Hawthorne, and Roger Rees
Lettice and Lovage by Peter Shaffer, starring Maggie Smith
Growing up, my mom insisted on taking us to shows in NYC. This instilled in me a burning hatred of Broadway musicals. As a kid I sat through the original productions of Annie, Grease, and Cats. I hated them all and resented my mother for dragging me to them. But there were some gems too, because mom also took us to off-Broadway shows. We saw Mummenschanz, which I loved, before it went to Broadway. Later in life, my former junior high school girlfriend was cast as Sandy in the 1994 revival, and I went despite my experience as a child. I enjoyed it a bit more that time. Later in life, my mom had better results with my daughter and I reluctantly joined them for Wicked but I opted out of Mary Poppins so my niece could use the ticket instead. They had fun at the show and I sat drinking in a bar across the street. It was probably my favorite Broadway experience.
Saw Donnie Osmond in the touring version of Joseph…
My wife is a huge Nathan Lane fan, so I was able to get her to see the pre-Broadway run of The Adams Family.
I also got her to sit through 4+ hours of The Iceman Cometh with Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy.
Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks starring Mark Hamill and Polly Bergen at the Belasco in 2003.
That’s right, I was able to catch this one on Broadway before it closed after 4 weeks, and without having to wait like the rest of you for the 2014 movie starring Cheyenne Jackson and Gina Rowlands. On further review, the movie earned just over $100k at the box office worldwide, so I don’t suppose many of you were waiting for your chance.
I got to catch this one because Mrs. Cheesesteak worked on the production, and I even got to meet the leads, which was lovely and I can say that Mark Hamill was genuinely nice for my then fiance to work with. That’s really the only notable thing about it, the show itself was ok, the Mrs. thought the script held promise that the show (and, apparently, the movie) ultimately didn’t deliver on.