shrimpchipsss | Entries tagged with musicals

Happy Pride!

Fun Home is a great time; I was mostly familiar with Ring of Keys and knew I'd have to watch it eventually.

Probably Ring of Keys will continue to be the one song I really come back to from this musical, but I really enjoyed the setup of Small Alison (8 years old), Medium Alison (college age), and Alison (in her 40s) who gives commentary on her younger selves.

I watched this kind of distracted and tired so not much else to say but funny to me that with Fun Home and Falsettos and Rakugo Shinjuu we are 3 for 3 on a woman getting a sick solo about her gay* husband and how her gay husband is ruining their lives with their gay lover.

aAnother Sondheim! Another late musical; this was supposed to be for May.

I was going to watch a slime tutorial bootleg for this but I'm gonna be real with you I cannot be bothered. I know this is a beloved and lauded musical but it just isn't really sticking with me, the musical motifs are employed very nicely but they're just not to my taste I think.

The premise is about three friends who grow apart as fame and success take the place of genuine connection. Told in backwards order which I should be a sucker for seeing how obsessed I am with The Last Five Years. Maybe Sonheim's musicals are just a bit hit or miss for my taste in melodies? Because I do prize melody above all else.

Jason Robert Brown (The Last Five Years, Parade) is I think a musician who is particularly good at melodies. Mitski and PUP are also standouts. I thought my love for PUP meant that I loved pop punk as a genre but really it's just that their melodies are so clear and a cut above the rest (and also that I enjoy pop punk). It's just that Mitski sees melody clear in her mind, as an old YouTube comment put it.

It isn't that Sondheim is bad at melodies, I actually think he does really unusual ones. There's this thing where if you've listened to music for long enough you can kinda guess the note (or the options of notes) that's going to come next in a song if it was going to resolve the phrase in a typical way. Sondheim though tends to surprise. Here is an interesting YouTube video about some of the music theory behind why Sonheim's melodies are so interesting. It's something that when it's to my taste (Company) fills me with total delight, but when it isn't, or the motifs are almost overused (Into the Woods), I tire of it.

Merrily We Roll is on Broadway and has won a bunch of Tonys. A week before the Tonys I looked up ticket prices just to see and the cheapest seats available were $350. Post-Tonys I've heard the cheapest seats available are in the $400s. HP markup plus the Tonys markup.

I am behind, this was meant to be April’s musical. This was sick.

Ang Larawan takes place in Manila in 1941 with WWII and the Japanese invasion looming and centers around the struggle to hold onto a grand house that used to host soirees. The sisters Paula and Candida struggle to pay the bills and care for their father, a renowned painter who has been confined to his room after an accident.

They are haunted by a famous painting their father made for them titled A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino which depicts an old man on a young man’s back with a city burning in the background (Aeneas carrying his father Anchises as Troy burns). Reporters and gawkers flock to the house to see the painting but the sisters cannot bear to sell it even though that would help them secure their futures.

The music is haunting, sweeping, soaring and the conflict between Paula and Candida as they try to figure out what to do to survive is awesome to watch.

Some things:

A poet who has become a politician
A crowd of socialites shows up to gawk at the painting and when asked to interpret it, a woman who has lived in new york city offers no interpretation and jumps straight to how the painting can be turned into merch (an evening gown). Fucking typical!!
The older siblings are eager to sell the house and walk around making claims on the furniture and dishes and also on Paula and Candida who can come be their live-in maids :’(
The sense of scale of the Philippine peso in comparison to the American dollar as various siblings and friends flaunt (always foreign! always some American!) buyers for the house and the painting. I was almost rooting for them to sell it to the politician just because of the tragedy that all of their father's paintings were in Spain and Italy, but that wouldn't have felt right either
Throwing a grand party and filling the grand old house with people and music again as war looms, very Sound of Music, is this just what people do when it feels like you’re going to lose everything, like how neoclassicism gets a revival every time people get anxious about cultures of excess?
I'm just thinking about the opening of the movie again which starts with a crackly, static-y song, Intramuros, and black and white footage which bursts into color, and the crackle and static pulling back into clarity. There was a feeling of being transported through time and it made me think of how black and white photographs of the Civil Rights movement make us think that those events happened long ago when it was only some decades past
I have noticed that specifically with music that is in languages I don't know, I keep forgetting that I don't know what the characters are saying and neglecting to read the subtitles so that I can watch their faces. I never get confused like this with dialogue! Only with singing!

Thank you

pineapplekita for the recommendation!

This is a perfect movie musical. to me.

Funny coincidence to choose it for March and watch it during holy week but I wanted very urgently to understand Pio's insistence that some of the songs work really well for chengxian.

It's so nice seeing human beings look like human beings in a movie. These hippies were so sweaty and gritty and glowing, like you could reach out and touch them. The world pre- "Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny."

This is yet another musical or play adapted into a movie where they make nods to this being a production of a book or a musical or a play in the movie. Like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with the actors shown in their civilian clothes or Joe Wright's Anna Karenina with the moving set pieces.

With Jesus Christ Superstar, they decided to intentionally keep certain anachronisms as parts of the set; people selling guns and grenades and postcards at the temple market, Judas running from a row of tanks, guards carrying swords and spears but also machine guns. It's really evocative of [literally any conflict in the Middle East since the US has been fucking things up in the region for oil and power since like WWII]. Unfortunately it does not matter when you watch this movie for it to feel relevant in this aspect. Appreciated the nod to the US being the new Rome. One empire for another.

I'm obsessed with the Mary - Jesus - Judas love triangle, and also white Jesus and Black Judas, incredible choices going on here and really cool depiction of Judas wanting Jesus to come to his senses and not get swept up in the cult of personality forming around him.

There is something so comfortingly crinkly about the style of the music and its recording. I grew up listening to my dad's music which was a lot of Elton John and a lot of stuff from the 70s so there's a feeling of familiarity there. I also just like rock operas I think? Queen's A Night at the Opera was one of my favorite albums as a high schooler.

I recommended the movie to people at my church today citing that it was camp and felt very queer and that the humanness of Jesus felt incredibly poignant. Feeling very lucky for my beloved queer church this Palm Sunday.

No other notes. I long to watch a screening of this at a movie theater.

This was the musical for February, another Sondheim one! Watched the 1991 movie with Bernadette Peters whose name I didn't know before but I definitely know now.

Into the Woods takes a bunch of well known fairy tales and weaves them together into one with the characters all tumbling into each others story lines. It's hilarious and really well written and also THE LONGEST MUSICAL EVER.

A lot of musicals are 2.5 hours long but you feel every minute of it with this one. One theory I have is that it's because it is not an opera, there's dialogue in between each song so you can't just ride the continuous never-ending thread of melody. I tend to listen to musicals first before watching a pro shot (or a bootleg slime tutorial) or movie but this musical was a bit incomprehensible to only listen to because you miss out on important plot stuff that only happens in dialogue. I think I personally prefer operas to song-dialogue-song-dialogue so there is that also.

But in addition to that, Into the Woods goes REALLY HARD on repeating musical motifs. This might be one case in which the repetition is done so frequently that you feel like you're stuck in a time loop. Maybe this is intentional and a statement about the cyclical nature of fairy tale stories? But it's maddening.

Chris who played piano for a school production of the show agreed that though it's technically the same length as tons of other shows it is the longest fucking show of all time "it aged me five years in a weekend. it's basically the odyssey." so.

Other notes... loved Mister Wolf. Love that he had an eight pack and that his cock and balls were gloriously, flappingly out. 80s sensibility...... we need her back

Enjoyed the subversion of found family when Little Red Riding Hood is like "I'll be your mother now" and Jack says "I don't want a mom, I want a friend."

I think Little Red was one of my favorite characters for how funny her impetuousness was

I don't think I'll be re-listening to this any time soon but the proshot was an incredible work of performance.

i've decided to listen to (and watch, if there's a slime tutorial) a musical every month and january was falsettos based on chris saying that if i'm ever in a musical mood I should prioritize it. here is my little book report about it.

premise:
falsettos takes place in 1979 through the early 80s and is about a family conundrum: marvin, a gay jewish man has divorced his wife trina (also jewish) and left his child jason (also, jewish) for his gay lover whizzer while still wanting the trappings of a picture perfect family. marvin talks about all of this to his also jewish psychiatrist mendel (i realize this bit might not be landing. the opening number of this musical is "four jews in a room bitching") who has recently taken trina on as a patient and is falling for her and breaking like every rule of his job ever by talking about all that with marvin. jason is a little weirdo who plays chess by himself and resists his parents urging him to see a psychiatrist and whizzer is noncommittal and demanding. whizzer reminds me a lot of fanon modern gay man meng yao, cursed statement sorry

hot takes:
not a hot take: this thing fucks. the first several songs are one punch after another. the second act does sort of blur together in my mind before "what more can i say" partway through and the absolutely GUTTING "what would I do?" as whizzer dies from aids—this sort of tonal dissonance is partially due to falsettos originally being two of three separate musicals that were stitched together. but this is a fantastic story about a nontraditional family and their little community (act two introduces the two lesbians from next door)

which speaking of aids, this video essay says everything about how falsettos works as a story about aids while rent fails, which kind of boils down to that falsettos takes aids and death (and relational drama) more seriously than rent does. disclaimer I haven't seen rent, only heard rants, but they and this essay have mostly reinforced for me that rent did important things for the culture but is only really great if you grew up with it

speaking of two lesbians from next door it's so funny to me that from the age of 4 I grew up with two lesbians next door, my next door neighbors [redacted] and [redacted]. chris once asked me if i ever saw in their lives the life I might want to live one day, any kind of a queer awakening a la ring of keys from fun home (which i may watch this year), and I answered that i never did, because they were a white couple and so their happiness or unhappiness, the happiness they were allowed to have had nothing to do with me or what i would be allowed by my family. which is depressing as fuck and there is a lot to unpack there. i was going through it at the time!!! anyways [redacted] and [redacted] got gay married and gay divorced and i'm sort of ambiently sad that it was [redacted] who moved out. she made the best brownies. my family was never really close with them (maybe because my parents are HOMOPHOBIC) but we were good neighbors and even that kind of bare minimum thing still stands out in my childhood memories as a type of script for what neighborhood-based community can be like

which takes me back to how falsettos, like company, is about community and nontraditional family structures.

pineapplekita was talking about how falsettos resolves some of the lingering ache that company carries because company is about a single bachelor living in a world of cishet couples. bobby admitting that he needs love (in whatever form that may be) is the triumph of the story but the character remains in a sort of stasis of not being able to realize it, with the addition of the audience knowing exactly what he is up against (detailed out in the rest of the musical). i've written about this already, over here though. falsettos takes all that desire and longing and shows you what it can be. with the overhanging horrors of the aids crisis.

which is why falsettos is like but unlike company, and these two are perfectly triangulated by ang lee's the wedding banquet (1993) which is about a gay couple pretending they are just best friends and that the chinese son is marrying a chinese daughter in law so his parents will leave him alone (they don't)

last little note, i think jason's low level homophobia which is targeted solely at his dad and not at whizzer or anyone else is HILARIOUS. it's about equal to a kid thinking it's gross when their parents kiss. when they say traumatize your parents back...

I was really lucky to watch the limited revival run of Parade this year with my friend who flew across the country specifically to see it live.

Parade takes place in Marietta, Georgia 50 years after the American Civil War and is about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who is accused of raping and killing his young employee, the spectacle of the court case and his wife’s efforts to help him, and the case’s aftermath in the community and the South.

This one is heavy as far as musicals go and it's suffused, and really quite blatant with the reality of antiblack racism and Jim Crow in the post-Civil War South, as well as antisemitism and the way marginalized people are pitted against each other (for example, Black characters who are blackmailed into false testimony, and what choice do they have?).

One of the things about this show, especially the incredible, awful opening number The Old Red Hills of Home, is the way the music simultaneously soars and is menacing in its soaring, and is interspersed with a honestly demented sounding classic American marching band tune. You know, the kind you’d hear in a parade. My friend talked about how the opening number had always been her favorite song but seeing the way it’s not simply a heartbreakingly beautiful song about your home but that it’s being sung by a Confederate soldier, that the song is about the total dissonance of American patriotism changed the meaning of the song for her.

And in a nutshell that is what Parade is about: the way the South has this wretched history and they haven’t dealt with it, and so you need a scapegoat that you can crucify while calling yourself pure and good and an upholder of justice. I gave this summary to coworkers in a meeting the next Monday and my cool older lesbian coworker who is from Atlanta was like yup you summed it up.

Doesn’t it just make you want to scream? Well you’ve got a whole musical soundtrack to do it to if you want.

The way the story ends is the way history goes: Leo Frank is kidnapped from prison and lynched by a mob. The antisemitism of his trial inspired the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. Frank was pardoned in 1986 and the case was reopened in 2019.

One last note, and sorry for the sudden tonal shift here, I knew nothing going into the musical other than that it was written by Jason Robert Brown who wrote the Last Five Years which I’m always yelling at people to listen to the original cast recording and not the Anna Kendrick movie, and I’ll say that man the guy knows how to write a melody.

Fans will enjoy the documentary on the original cast recording which shows Sondheim in all his exacting specificity, and the ensuing Documentary Now! spoof, "Co-Op."

It is highly recommended to watch the original documentary first for maximum inside joke potency.

I’ve given versions of this post as a rant to any friend who would listen because Company, beloved Company! haunts me as an example of heterotemporality media that might make a case against heterotemporality. Which, for those unfamiliar with the term, describes the life path of [education->career->(het)marriage->(probably biological)children] that patriarchal society would have us believe is the only script that exists or can give us a rich and good life. Company isn't a manifesto against this but it does show how societal expectations and pressure to adhere to it alienate us from ourselves and each other.

One of my oldest friends took me to see Company on Broadway this spring and I spent the week feverishly listening to the 2007 recording with Raul Esparza in preparation and being totally charmed by Bobby, a single guy in New York City who is turning 35 years old and has an entire group of friends who are in various stages of marriage, divorce, nth marriage, about to be married, etc.

He dates and sleeps around and comes off confident, fun, and to use the word again, charming. He plays to his friends egos and insecurities and whims and it’s clear how much they all love and care for each other.

The recent runs of Company have genderswapped a few characters so that we have a female Bobbi and one gay couple (Matt Doyle as Jamie, absolute anxiety inducing tongue twister) and man. Bobbi. Love her but wonder how much of her we really get to see.

Original Bobby feels self assured and like he’s having the time of his unattached life. He’s involved in his friends’ lives in a meaningful way and seems to be enjoying himself and satisfied. Bobbi feels messier, anxious and acting out the pastiche of a fun single life. She is more reactive in dialogue with her friends and feels lost. Which in one way might be a really realistic depiction of the dissociated modern millennial woman. My good friend Augie brought up that Bobbi felt timely and real, the contemporary manic pixie dream girl who is good at social scripts, doesn’t stand out, blends into the social scene. Who can be anyone and therefore is no one at all. (And she did feel like someone I could know, like a coworker or a friend of a friend. Like, I know that woman. We all do.)

Bobbi is swiping and floating along, going from event to event to party to date (she does get head on stage by the ultimate himbo flight attendant, another win for feminism), but it comes off as a distraction. The current run of Company misses out on the richness of the original Bobby’s integration in his friends lives, swapping out a line about Bobby being the godparent to a bunch of his friends’ children for modernity’s sake but losing the extra weight of seriousness to the friendships, which was what really sold Company to me as a story at all.

Both the original and genderswapped versions of the story give me a vague sense of grief among all the fondness, I think it shows beautifully the way your friends are your family, but the limits to how much your friends can be your family under a societal model where marriage and the nuclear family is the ultimate goal, where heterotemporality is the only script people's lives are based on.

Still, the characters are trying! And the story continues to be compelling to me because it ends not with Bobby finding a significant other but admitting that they keep love at arms distance and want love and need to face the mortifying ordeal of being known and the risk of it all blowing up in your face in order to have love. And though Bobby realizes this through romantic love I take it to apply to his friendships too. It is his opening up to Joanne that sparks this realization after all.

Will end this post by saying that Patti LuPone onstage works stillness in a way that made me want to scream, that the line “keep me company” rewired something in my brain, and that the total fondness that carries through the musical is one of my favorite things about it.

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danielle

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Page Summary

Fun Home
Merrily We Roll Along
Ang Larawan (2017)
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
Into the Woods. The musical that never ends.
falsettos: in spite of one guy's assholery the nontraditional queer family is real and exists
Parade and the unreconciledness of the American South
Following up on Company
Stephen Sondheim’s Company, heterotemporality, and adult friendships

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Entries tagged with musicals

Fun Home

Merrily We Roll Along

Ang Larawan (2017)

Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

Into the Woods. The musical that never ends.

falsettos: in spite of one guy's assholery the nontraditional queer family is real and exists

Parade and the unreconciledness of the American South

Following up on Company

Stephen Sondheim’s Company, heterotemporality, and adult friendships