Picoreview: Wicked (both acts): not bad, but way, way, WAY too long I have avoided the musical Wicked in all its formats because I hated the book with a deep and committed loathing, but many people I trust told me repeatedly that the stage show/movie is only barely based on the book. That, frankly, was not enough, last year, to commit myself to a 2 hour, 40 minute first act film of a stage show that is in and of itself only 2 hours and 30 minutes long. However, the…
Picoreview: Cats: I have seen it twice and have no regrets. Simultaneously, there are an awful lot of things I’d have done differently. I’d have started by not casting Rebel Wilson, or doing *that* with her song. Especially the latter. A great deal could have been forgiven if they’d stuck with the stage show’s method of creating the cockroaches and mice (which is “have the cats dress up as the cockroaches and mice”, which was funny rather than horrifying and mind-bleeding, and as I use those words, I remind you…
Picoreview: The Greatest Showman: I am conflicted about The Greatest Showman. I wanted to love it unconditionally. I went in prepared to. Unfortunately, I ended up liking it conditionally, perhaps because I grew up doing musical theatre and I have Far Too Many (Entirely Correct) opinions about what makes a musical work, and The Greatest Showman…missed a lot of them. I felt like it’s a musical by people who don’t fully understand how musicals work (which, given that the music was written by the people who did the IMHO excoriable…
There’s a part of me that wants to go check out all the Hamilton fic that I’m sure exists, all the alternate universes where things went…better. And the rest of me is like NO NO NO because that way lies doom. But there’s also the part of me that keeps thinking of the Neil Gaiman bit where somebody is talking to a late 20th century Earth person & says something to the effect of, “Who’s President? Ah. Clinton? And Bush before him, and Reagan…? Ah. Yes. You live in one…
We’re watching a tv show where one of the storylines is set in India. In the second episode there was a spontaneous song and dance routine. Ted said, “I’m pretty sure people in India don’t actually spontaneously burst into song and dance all the time, but if they do, we’re really living in the wrong country.” I then got into a discussion on Twitter about how movies from America in the 1950s also suggest that Americans drop into song and dance at the drop of a hat. A friend said…