Nazis persecuting Jews in wartime Warsaw: a grim subject, you might think. Hardly suitable material for the cheery, sing-a-long format of the musical.

Yet last night Imagine This, a show set in the 1942 Warsaw ghetto opened in London. Already bookings have been taken until 2009, and as our reviewer reports, dark, tricky themes are handled sensitively. Religion and the musical might seem an odd match. In fact, as the list below suggests, a healthy appetite for the faith-themed musical exists on both the West End and Broadway.

Top of the list, without question, is

Jesus Christ Superstar.

The definitive religious musical, though once banned as irreligious in South Africa. First staged in New York in October 1971, and now the fifth-longest running musical of all time, the sound track to this Andrew Lloyd-Webber/Tim Rice funk rock opera narrating the final seven days of Jesus on earth has thrice topped the US charts. A film, made in 1973 and starring Ted Neeley as Jesus, took £8.6 million at the box office. The show's first UK run, beginning in August 1972, lasted eight years, and 3,358 performances. Few changes have been made to the original - bar a reorchestration of the last scene - which retains even in modern productions a slight 1970s feel

Youtube: Jesus Christ, Superstar

Its success helped with a Lloyd-Webber/Rice production prepared earlier - Joseph and the Amazing Technicoloured Dreamcoat

A perennial school play favourite, Joseph and the Amazing Technicoloured Dreamcoat, based on the Old Testament story, emerged from a request by the head of Music at St Paul's junior school: He asked Lloyd Webber (whose younger brother he had taught) to compose a "pop cantata" for the school's choir's concert in Easter 1968. The first performance occurred in March that year in Hammersmith, lasting a mere 15 minutes. The album, a commercial flop, was issued a year later. The full musical emerged in the early 1970's, following the success of Jesus Christ Superstar. And of course, now, is forever associated with Jason Donovan, who starred in the lead for three years at the London Palladium.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicoloured Dreamcoat

Third on the list comes The Sound of Music

The sight of a smocked, aproned Julie Andrews schmalzing through the Austrian hills as she swaps convent life for tutoring a nursery, is almost as much part of Christmas as turkey trimming. Based on a memoir of the singing von Trapps who fled Nazi Austria for America, it was produced on Broadway in 1959, and the film, an Academy Award-winner, with music by Rodgers and lyrics by Hammerstein came out in 1965.

Youtube: The Sound of Music