Conceptually, you’re interested in Broadway. Realistically, you live thousands of miles away from New York City. Where do you start, when it comes to immersing yourself in the medium of musical theater?

I wrote at length yesterday about my recent Broadway vacation, but I’m well aware that kind of trip is not an option for everyone. I’m always talking to fans of musical theater all around the world who rarely, if ever, have gotten the chance to go there, and I’ve also had a lot of conversations with people who are keen to understand the whole Broadway thing, but uncertain about how it’s even possible to be a Broadway fan if you don’t live in New York and see all the shows.

Obviously, there’s the music. Cast albums are great (who am I kidding, they’re amazing) but for people who aren’t already used to being a Broadway fan from afar, or who might be dipping their toe in the water for the first time because a certain show made their heart go boom and now they want to know about more, it can be hard to engage with songs out of context until after you’re bowled over by seeing the production live.

I’m always trying to get more people to like musicals, but unless I take them to an actual performance where the are forced to understand, I’ve often gotten told that they just can’t get into it, because they’re listening to a style of music they wouldn’t usually choose, without context for why it’s important to a story. They kind of end up just being like “what’d I miss?”

If you, too, find it difficult to make people appreciate Broadway without actually dragging them there, or if you’re a new fan who feels helpless when faced with of all these shows you haven’t seen and doesn’t know where to start, then this article is for you. For me, appreciating a musical that I have never gotten to see is all about building a picture of the show in my head. Here are a couple of suggestions about how to do that. Hopefully, they leave you feeling… satisfied.

Seek out sung-through shows

The biggest hurdle in becoming a fan of a Broadway show that you haven’t seen is not knowing everything about the story from the songs alone. I’m sure that some people are perfectly happy listening to an OBCR (Original Broadway Cast Recording) without having ever seen the show, but I really need to know the context and story surrounding the songs in order for them to truly hit home. Musical theater is the reason I started caring about music at all — it was my first experience of music invoking emotion, and it’s the reason that even today, my favorite lyricists in any genre are always storytellers. So if I listen to the songs, I have to know the story.

This can be really difficult with book musicals — that is, shows that have scenes of spoken dialogue interspersed with standard-length songs. I have a friend who was determined to get into The Book of Mormon when it premiered, long before it went on tour or overseas, and in order to do this, she paid a decent amount of money to get the show’s official companion book, which includes the full script, shipped to her from New York, so that she could read the play before listening to the OBCR. Quite a few shows do have their scripts available in some format, so if you do fall in love with the potential of a book show that you’re not able to see, hope is not lost for you.

However, if you’re seeking out new musicals to enjoy, sung-through shows often offer the listener the opportunity to hear an entire performance from start to finish, without missing any plot or character moments — it’s all there in the songs.

One of the reasons why Hamilton is so massively successful — aside from the sheer quality of the work — is that you don’t actually have to see it to know it. It’s the perfect example of a sung-through show, and by using rap, Hamilton allows for scenes that in other shows would most likely need to be spoken dialogue rather than part of the score, giving us the chance to hear the entire story unfold like an audiobook or radio drama. Sung-through shows are an excellent way for musical theater fans to experience a performance as fully as possible without seeing it, and there are a ton of them out there waiting for you to love them.

Les Misérables is probably the world’s other most popular sung-though show, and their many, many cast recordings include everything from the definitive Complete Symphonic Recording to the movie soundtrack of random single songs. It’s pretty common for a sung-through show to sell a single disc “hits” CD and a double disc complete recording, so if you want the full show, make sure you’re looking out for the right version. Some shows that are considered sung-through have small scenes of dialogue or spoken lines which may be included or omitted on the cast recording, depending on the production — I obviously prefer when they’re included.

Aside from Les Mis and Hamilton, here are 10 sung-through shows you need to know: Rent, The Last Five Years, Jesus Christ Superstar, A New Brain, Evita, Miss Saigon, Bare: A Pop Opera, American Idiot, Next to Normal and The Phantom of the Opera.

Make the most of movies

Watching a movie isn’t the same as watching a Broadway show, but if you are jumping in to the genre of musical theater, there are dozens of great films which will help you get to know the story behind a lot of the world’s most beloved Broadway shows that you might, one day, get the chance to see live. Broadway and Hollywood have always fed off each other, to the delight of some and the dismay of others. The era of the movie-musical as a cinematic staple is long gone, but there are still constantly movies being made into musicals and musicals being into movies, not to mention the current trend of live musicals being performed as major television events.

Most people grow up knowing the family-favorite movie versions of musicals like Grease, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins and The Wizard of Oz, so new productions of these are extremely accessible even to new Broadway fans, because you know the characters and context already and are able to sit back and enjoy the show or the album. Similarly to this are Broadway adaptations of Disney movies — you may not ever end up seeing the show live, but you can listen to the OBCR of The Lion King and appreciate the hell out of it.

A lot of classic shows, dating back to the 1930s and ’40s, have film adaptations as well — the older the musical, the more likely it is that it was quickly made into a movie during the golden age of Hollywood. A lot of the shows by iconic composers like Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter have movie versions out there, so if old movies are your jam, you can get to know a lot of early musicals which are still revived and performed regularly today. Every decade has a handful of iconic movies that have stood the test of time as the best-known interpretation of that particular musical: West Side Story and My Fair Lady in the ’60s, Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof in the ’70s, Annie and A Chorus Line in the ’80s, and Newsies and Gypsy in the ’90s.

In this day and age, movie adaptations of new Broadway shows do not dominate the box office in the way they once did, but they do certainly exist. Some of the best 21st century film versions of musical theater include Chicago, Les Misérables, Into The Woods, Rock of Ages, Mamma Mia, Jersey Boys, Rent, Sweeney Todd, Phantom of the Opera, Hairspray, Dreamgirls, The Producers, The Music Man, Reefer Madness, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, London Road, The Last Five Years, and Once.

Every Broadway fan should have a collection of movie-musicals to enjoy in the privacy of your own home, and then if a new production of one of these shows gets made and you’re pining for it, you can relish in listening to the OBCR, complete with context.

Look for legitimate live recordings

Okay, so what if there isn’t a movie adaptation of a show that you know, conceptually, that you’d be a fan of and are desperate to see, in some format, whatever it takes, before putting the OBCR on your iPod? I had this experience with In The Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first hit, and I ended up finding a great solution to my predicament — I watched the show on YouTube. Now, I am not suggesting that you should support the bootlegging of professional productions — bootlegs exist, and will continue to exist until Broadway shows take a leaf out of the National Theatre’s book and start filming their live productions for cinema distribution, but this is a) stealing and b) a constant source of contention in the Broadway community between people who feel like the access to Broadway shows is too privileged and exclusive and people who value the importance of the live theater experience and what bootlegging takes away from that.

Instead of attempting to track down a bootleg of In The Heights, I found a better option — I watched a fairly decent non-professional version put online by a community theater who had recently put it on. I also got to know one of my favorite shows in the world, Bare: A Pop Opera, through online videos like this. In this day and age, especially since YouTube removed their length restrictions on videos, it’s becoming increasingly common for local theater companies or even colleges and high schools to film their productions and put them online, to share with family and friends (this is the origin story of how A Very Potter Musical went viral, by the way) and as a Broadway fan looking for a fix, you can really benefit from this. It might not be a perfect production, but it’s better than nothing, and you get to see a musical that you’re desperate to see without breaking the law, offered up to the world by the people who performed it. And as we’ve mentioned, it’s all about building a picture of it in your mind. Once you get to know what a show is meant to be, the OBCR is your oyster.

The old-school Broadway community is, to be frank, privileged and exclusive, but as the internet makes the world a smaller place, we must keep praying that professional shows do find a way to share their work with all of the fans out there who are desperate to support them but who can’t just drop everything and fly to New York. Options like Les Misérables’ 10th and 25th anniversary concert DVDs and Jesus Christ Superstar‘s arena tour DVD are great, as are simple but high quality filmed-in-theater recordings of the stage production, like MTV’s taping of Legally Blonde: The Musical and the BBC with Imelda Staunton’s Gypsy last Christmas. Professional recordings of live shows do exist, if you poke around for them.

Love your local theater community

Listen. If you want to see shows — what are you waiting for? Go and see shows. Go and find them! I guarantee that somewhere nearby, some other musical theater nerds are pouring their hearts into a little local production that’s just as capable of moving you profoundly or introducing you to a new work as something at the Rodgers or the Belasco.

Community theater, high school theater, and shows put on by college drama programs or their extracurricular clubs are all well worth supporting. Talent is everywhere, and the performers are extra-passionate, because they’re people who are taking the time out of their lives to get involved in musical theater because they love it so much. Colleges in particular often have the resources to pull off some very creative and polished productions, but see whatever you can, wherever you can, especially if you find out they’re doing a musical you’ve always wanted to see. It might be your only chance to see it staged. Or better yet, get involved — why not audition for your community theater or ask to join the backstage crew?

Small-scale professional theater companies, if your town or city is home to some, are also well worth a visit. Some of the most innovative and evocative work I’ve ever seen has been done in tiny theaters — the limitations of the space forces actors and directors to think outside the box in how they present a show that may have been typically done very differently. Plus, official Broadway-sized productions do tour constantly, doing a residency of several weeks or months in each city or town on its schedule — there’s sure to be one headed to your area sometime soon. Most major cities will have at least one huge-scale show running at a time — you may even be lucky enough to live in one of the small cities where Broadway productions in the making are tested out in front of audiences before making the final move into Manhattan!

Another benefit of local theater is the variety. Reviving a show for Broadway is a multi-million dollar decision that works on a very long cycle, so you’re actually more likely to get the chance to see an old show you wish was still running in a community theater or school who has the entire history of musical theater to pick shows from than you ever are to see it on Broadway again, because a lot less is at stake. For example, my first ever musical, which was at a community theater, was Fiddler on the Roof, and I’ve only just gotten to see it done as a Broadway-scale production, over 20 years later. When I was growing up, I was taken to see lots of shows by our local musical societies, and it was through this that I got the chance to see productions like Anne of Green Gables, Rags and The Boy Friend that I will probably never get the chance to see again. Do not throw away your shot.

How do you cope with being a fan of Broadway from afar?

This article is a part of Hypable’s inaugural Broadway Week in celebration of the 2016 Tony nominations. For more theater articles, click here!