Dear Evan Hansen

Dear Evan Hansen got out about 45 minutes ago. I've been listening to the soundtrack, off and on, for the past year.

The play was excellent. I highly recommend those with the means to see it. However, there are a few elements that I found harder to deal with on the stage than simply listening to the songs.

The play's about a socially awkward and depressed high school senior who tries to do a good thing for a family after their son kills himself and they find a letter addressed to Evan Hansen in the son's pocket. Evan tries to tell them he wrote the letter to himself, but the parent's, in their grief, can't hear what Evan's saying. Evan let's them believe what they want at first, but soon starts actively lying to them because he wants to help and knows that the truth will only hurt the family. And that's what really rubbed me the wrong way. The lying.

I knew from the soundtrack that Evan lied, but it was easier to handle in songs because that's all it was: songs. On stage I saw Evan continuing the lies and adding to them every time he spoke to the family. He dug himself deeper into the lie-pit and the jumped in after. He liked making them feel better and he liked spending time with a "normal" family.

The family not only ate up the lies, but they began actively changing their memories of the dead boy to fit what THEY WANTED him to be. The sister says that her brother pounded on her door saying he wanted to kill her. (This info is not in a song.) Then she sings about how awful he was to her and how she will not sing a requiem for him. She knew he was a monster and didn't want the new information to paint him in a better light. She does read it, though, and begins to forgive the heinous things he did and, maybe, even forget them.

The lie gets spread to the school and then the rest of the world, to the point that our main characters defraud the public out of $50,000 on a Kickstarter campaign. (Yes, the farm gets refurbished and whatnot, but it's still based on a lie and is therefore fraud.)

When the truth comes our the family hate Evan and never want to see him again, but in the end they admit that they are better for Evan's lies. Evan is punished by his girlfriend, the sister, breaking up with him. Even then there's still room for them to be friends, we learn in the end.

I did enjoy the show. I enjoyed it a lot. This just stuck in my craw during the play and after because, ultimately, the play isn't about the lie. It's about isolation and loneliness and family and kids and parents and depression. And all of that is lovely and sad and hopeful.

"Did you know the clitoris is a holy sacred thing?"

NPR has posted the cast recording to The Book of Mormon, the Musical.

While I recommend you listen to the whole thing, if you won't here's where the individual songs are found. To get the best gist of the play, listen to "Hello!" then "All-American Prophet" followed by "Making Things Up Again" next "Joseph Smith American Moses" and finally move to 3:16 of "Tomorrow is a Latter Day" to finish the story.

"Hasa Diga Eebowai," "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream," and "I Believe" are pretty spectacular, too, but the first is purely funny and the other two are about a character rather than the mission he's on.

I really don't want to travel to New York, but I'd really like to watch this play.

The Book of Mormon, the Musical

First, I'm going to scream my head off, again, because I don't live in, or near, New York.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Okay, now that that's out of my system there's an interview with Parker and Stone done by John Stewart on the front page of The Book of Mormon website.

Once again, I must curse the world and how far it put New York City away from California. Son of a bitch.

Losing the Heights

In The Heights is in SF for the next couple of weeks. Its a show that I'm very curious to see. It won a Tony, so it's probably petty okay, even if it might not be great.

There are three problems with going to see the show:
1. The with work, cheapest ticket is $64 dollars, since it hast to be bought through TicketMaster, the fuckers.
2. Doing overtime, which is what will give me some extra money next month, I could only get into SF on a Sunday to see it.
3. The show is leaving on June 18th. That give me four Sundays, one of which I will not be here for and all of which are before the overtime check will be in my chubby hand.

*sigh*

Maybe I'll just wait and go see Young Frankenstein when it gets back to SF in July. That might be fun.

Wicked Cool

Wicked is going to be around during WonderCon. I'm seriously considering staying the night in SF on Saturday and going to Wicked after WonderCon.

Expensive, but probably worth it.

10:17 AM PST: Wait and go with friend for birthday, if she's up for it. Save money on hotel!

Excellent.

10:43 AM PST: Well, my friend is going to see it a week or two before my birthday. Still, I'd rather go around my birthday than during WonderCon.

Spread the fun around, right?

Many Plays, 2

There's still plenty to do, but I have to take some time for myself. Which is funny since I'm at work and getting paid, sort of, maybe, that should be my focus, but I'm going a little crazy.

Anyway, like I wrote before, this last month I went to see a lot of plays and I thought it'd be fun (for me) to go over what I saw and what I liked and didn't like about each.

The Women:
At its most, it's the story of a bunch of women in New York and how they deal with men. Divorce, cheating, dating, and remarriage are all big parts of the story. Not that the play's a downer, because it's not. It's really funny. The only real problem with it is that the playwright didn't do a very good job of transitioning from comedy to the drama and them back. It's like laugh, laugh, laugh, and then get hit upside the head with melodrama and weeping; new scene: laugh, laugh, laugh, hit with melodrama. And it does this over and over again.

Still the good far out weighed the overwrought drama and most of the women were spectacular at the comedy and those that weren't were really only important to the drama aspects.

The Producers:
Only one of the most fun musicals ever written. People cheating old ladies out of lots money after having sex with them to put on the worst play ever and after it closes take the extra cash and run off to Rio, with flaming gay men, a Nazi, and songs, what's not to enjoy?

In fact, I enjoyed this version almost as much as I did the touring company Wings and I saw years ago in SF. I did wish that Ulla had a better blonde wig and that we could see the dancers in their swastika formations during "Springtime for Hitler," but an overhead mirror would have cost too much for this little theater.

The Crucible:
This power of this play, when it's performed, rest on the shoulders of one character: John Proctor. Which was the problem with this performance. The guy playing John was too young and he just wasn't that good of an actor. When he's having dinner with his wife, Elizabeth, and she's poking at him because he screwed around on her, John should be played with righteous fury, like he's about to blame his affair on Elizabeth because she got sick and he couldn't have sex with his wife; the actor played it more like a teenager whining to his girlfriend about how sick he is of her teasing. The lust between John and Abigail Williams should be hot and animalistic; she draws him in with her sex appeal and he simply can't resist, but, again, this actor played it more like a first time crush, all awkward and bumbling and clammy.

The rest of the cast was spectacular, though. They took the words of Arthur Miller and really turned them into a morality tale and saved me from being totally bored with the play.

Kiss Me, Kate:
With this play, Cole Porter was trying to move his writing from what Broadway used to be -- a show with songs that were good, but had little to do with the plot -- to what they were becoming -- shows with songs that were integral to the characters or plot -- but didn't quite succeed. There may not be a lot of songs that are useless to the story, but the very first one, "Another Op'nin', Another Show" sure is and so is one of Porter's best songs ever, "Too Darn Hot." And it really bugs me.

Yeah, I enjoyed the show and really all the songs are wonderful, and the actors were great, especially the women who played Lilly/Katherine and Lois/Bianca and the show are extremely strong. I guess that why the non important song, like "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," bother me so much, the play is nearly perfect and these songs, as fun as they are, just take me right out of the story.

A Chorus Line:
Talk about you musical for those who love musicals.

It's all about the casting of a chorus for a play. It's one act of like 17 characters standing on an empty stage dancing, and talking about themselves or their love of dance, and practicing. And the dancing is amazing. From the perfect solo dances, to the practice groups where people misstep, to the high kicking finale.

Spectacular.

Snoopy!!! The Musical:
This play so wanted to be You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, but it just couldn't be and doesn't ever come close.

Frankly, to me, Snoopy is the most boring character in Peanuts. Yes I like his imagination, but everything always works out for him, or, if it doesn't, he just says it did and then moves on to something else. He's just so boring.

So is the play. Between the songs are short sketch like things that are supposed to be like a daily strip brought to life. Some of them are funny, but none of them connect to each other except that they include Charlie Brown, Lucy, Sally, Linus, Peppermint Patty, and Snoopy, other than that, nothing.

Most of the songs are light and airy and useless. Snoopy almost always sings about how great his life is or how great he is and how everything should focus on him.

And then there are the two songs that Focus on Peppermint Patty that completely mischaracterize the Peppermint Patty I remember from the strips. She has a crush on Charlie Brown. We all know it. (And yes, I'm aware of the lesbian jokes with her and Marcie, and even if Peppermint Patty's gay she can have a crush on a boy that's kind to her. I'm sure it happens all the time out there in the real world.) In the strips she constantly denied it, but she also called him up or sat under a tree with him and talked about love to him, but he never got the hint and she'd get frustrated. She'd never admit to the crush, though. But in this play she first asks him about her looks and when he mentions her big nose and how she might grow into it she then sings a song about how she wants her face to catch-up to her nose and later she sings Charlie Brown a song where she calls him "poor, sweet baby." It was all just so overt. The strip tended to balance her crush by having Marcie mock Peppermint Patty by insisting the crush was there. The play just has Peppermint Patty throw the crush in the audience's faces.

The last song, "Just One Person," while having a nice message, wasn't earned. You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown earned the sweetness of it's final song, "Happiness," by sort of tearing down Charlie Brown and showing him as a failure, so him and his friends finding happiness in little, everyday things was earned. This Snoopy!!! play shows some disappointment, but every time something happens to him, Snoopy turns it into a victory up to the point where he's actually proclaimed the Head Beagle. There is just too much winning to then delve into such a super sweet song.

The acting was decent. The guy who played Snoopy really hammed it up, but the woman who played Peppermint Patty was wonderful, I wish she'd had a bigger role in one of the other plays. It's too bad they had such a poor play to perform in.

---

And there we have it. All the plays I've seen in the last month, or so. It's pretty obvious which one I saw last, isn’t it? Here's hoping, if I'm still around then, next year is as enjoyable.

Many Plays

I'm going to be in The Bay in July for work. Three days and two nights, so I wrote to Wings to see if there was anything good going on. She said it's too bad I couldn't be there in June because Hairspray was playing, but that A Chorus Line would be in town while I was there. That got me excited. It's a classic, right? I've never seen it before, but I hear it's a singular sensation.

It would have been the first play I've gone to since Wings and I saw Avenue Q last August.

It's not, though.

As I drove back from the supermarket over the weekend, past the junior college, I saw a huge poster advertising the plays that their summer rep company are performing. The one that really caught my eye was The Producers. Saw that in SF many years ago, but it's really funny and I'd like to see how this company handles it, so I thought it'd be fun to see again.

I also noticed that they're doing The Crucible, which is a play that I absolutely adore. Can't get enough of it. Saw on production where the stage was slanted so the back was higher than the front and it was lit from below by red lights. Very cool.

This morning I went to their website to check out times and days of shows and ended up ordering tickets for all five shows their doing. And they all happen in the next five weeks. Tonight is something called The Women, which I've never heard of before.

I'm going to see The Producers on Saturday. Next Thursday will be The Crucible. Then, the weekend before I head down to The Bay, I'll be watching Kiss Me Kate. Later that week I'll be enjoying A Chorus Line. And, finally, after all my "training" is done, a week and a half later, it'll Snoopy!!! The Musical.

At least I know there'll be some good things coming up in the next month, even if my next interview blows barnical balls.

Be Jealous of Me...

For in a couple of months Wings and I will be going to see Avenue Q in a couple of months.

For those who don't have any idea of what Avenue Q is, here's a clip of the cast performing "It Sucks To Be Me." That pretty much explains the show.

Edit: 12:18
Okay, if you enjoyed the clip above you may enjoy the meeting between Avenue Q and Fiddler on the Roof, which is brilliant.

A Little Night Music

I've been moving old post from an old blog that isn't used anymore over to this blog. (For those who need to know the Idiot is dead.) During the course of the moving the ones worth saving, I've also been reading the posts. I discuss my addiction to Sondheim's Into The Woods in one of them.

Reading that got me thinking about my most recent musical addiction, Sondheim's (with a book by Hugh Wheeler) A Little Night Music. (For a while it was Avenue Q, but not anymore.) My biggest problem when trying to talk about most of these plays is that I haven't seen them performed. I've only listened to the soundtrack. There are very few soundtracks which print out the entire book of the play (The Phantom of the Opera soundtrack spoiled me.), so I'm stuck just listening to the lyrics of the song and reading the few notes included to set the scene in which the song takes place.

That written, I'm gonna do my best to write about my new favorite musical.

A Little Night Music is based on an Ingmar Bergman movie (Smiles of a Summer Night according to the Wikipedia entry on the play.) and is about a bunch of rich Europeans trying not to be bored, for the most part.

There's Frederik and his new wife Anne, who's younger than Fredrick's son, who have yet to consummate their marriage, which is exquisitely laid out in the songs "Now" and "Soon" (which are grouped onto the same track with "Later" in between). Frederik wants to have sex. Anne doesn't, but she wants to keep the "good" life she has with him. The odd thing is when she finds out that Fredrick was visiting (and probably screwing) his old girlfriend, Desiree, she get's jealous, but she still doesn't sleep with him. While Frederik is visiting with Desiree, he sings of his wife and how wonderful she is, she even "gives [him] funny names-- / Like? / 'Old Dry-as-Dust.'"

There's Fredrick's grown son, Henrik, who's as sad as he can be because his father has married someone younger than he is and because he feel like he's foreshadowed by his father's accomplishment. In "Later," Henrik sings, as if he were someone else, "'Henrik? Who is Henrik? / Oh, the lawyer's son, the one who mumbles. / Short and boring, / Yes, he's hardly worth ignoring...'" Oh, he's also in love with his stepmother.

There's also Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm who is cheating on his wife, Charlotte, with Desiree. He finds Frederik with Desiree, who's an actress, in her dressing room when he comes for a "visit" and starts to worry about Desiree's fidelity toward him. He sings about how everyone should be honest and should have "fidelity like [his] to Desiree, / and Charlotte [his] devoted wife." He says the last part in a sort of aside, as if his wife's an after thought.

Charlotte and Anne are friends and talk about nearly everything. Charlotte knows her husband is cheating on her and laments it in the song "Everyday a Little Death."

The first act ends with Frederik and Anne being invited to Desiree's mother's, Madame Armfeldt, villa in the country. Anne doesn't want to go, but Charlotte insists she should go to show how much more beautiful she is than Desiree, and Charlotte figures it's a way to get her husband to herself for a weekend. When the Count learns of the weekend, he insists that he and his wife go because his wife "hasn't been getting out nearly enough." Charlotte's not happy.

The second act has some wonderful songs and some wonderful ideas, but I don't have time to discuss them right now. There are also more wonderful songs in the first act, but since I haven't seen the play, I'm not quite sure how they fit into the play overall. It's almost time for me to be away from work, and I've decided that's more important than finishing this.

I doubt I ever will.

I hope that one day, soon, I'll actually be able to see this play being performed. Until then, I'll be singing along with the soundtrack.

Wanna Go!

The more I think about it, the more I want to go and see Wicked again. Too bad I could only find tickets for $200 or more. Sometimes, rarely though, I wish I lived in New York.

What To Say About Wicked?

Wicked is, on one level, an attempt to answer the debate over nature vs. nurture. Elsewhere, it's about growing up, or the lengths people go to gain power, or how some idealists are forced to do bad things to get their message across, or how fear unites people, or how much people just want to be liked by others. But, mostly, Wicked is about a friendship between two very different girls.

Elphaba, who eventually becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, was born green and was always very smart and, therefore, immediately is disliked by everyone. Galinda, later Glinda the Good, was blonde and beautiful and, therefore, immediately liked by everyone. They met at Shiz, an Ozian University, and were forced to be roommates. One day, Galinda accidently did something nice for Nessarose, Elphaba's sister, which led Elphaba to do a kind thing for Galinda who then realized that just because she has a creepy skin color doesn't mean that Elphaba was a bad person and Galinda helped to get Elphaba accepted by the other students. And they started to become friends, sometimes despite their differences and sometimes because of them.

From there, the audience watches the making of a wicked witch and development of one of the most unlikely, but wonderful, friendships I've ever seen.

I've read and enjoyed the novel (Wicked by Gregory Maguire) which the play is based on and was worried that I'd hate the play, but I didn't. They cut down some of the plots to focus on the friendship between the two witches and I think that was a smart move. I liked Elphaba from the start, probably because she's a lot like me, and couldn't stand Galinda, but as their friendship grew, I saw Galinda grow as a person as her love for Elphaba grew and I ended up liking Galinda as much as Elphaba did. One of the songs they sing together (I lost my playbill, so I can't give the title, sorry) they say to each other that they're not sure if knowing the other changed them for the better, but it changed them for good. I think that's a great statement for their friendship.

The second really smart thing that the play did was mix it up with the mythology everyone knows from the Judy Garland movie, rather than the books, like Maguire did. We see the creation of the Cowardly Lion (which actually is in the book), the Tin Woodsman, and the Scarecrow. That was fun for most of the audience because it really put the story in the Oz that they've know for their whole lives. For me, who's read many of the Baum books, I found the creation of the Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman distracting because my insides were screaming, "That's not how it happened in the Oz books, dammit!" I got over it, for the most part.

Dorothy is in the play, but you never see her. She takes Nessarose's shoes, she weeps in the castle, and she melts the Elphaba, but the audience is never allowed to see her or get to know her. If we did get to see Dorothy, would we have a harder time seeing Elphaba as a decent, but flawed, person? If we saw her, would it ruin the original that so beloved because she melts the hero of the play? I'm not sure, but maybe.

The sets were simply amazing. A giant moving puppet/robot head for the Wizard to speak out of. An enormous clock face with moving gears. A huge map of Oz as the curtain. A giant bubble for Glinda to fly down on. Flying monkeys. And a witch that flies because of a broom.

My only problem with the play, which is usually my problem with everything, is the ending. Maguire ends his book in the way he has to. I'm going to put it here for you all to see:

And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no after, in the ever after of a Witch, there is no happily; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of life, there is--alas, or perhaps thank mercy--no telling. She was dead, dead and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.

For me, it was like seeing/reading Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. These characters have to die because it's written. The play, however, ends on a much happier note. I'm sure most of the audience was pleased with this, but sometimes isn't it nice to have things end in a way that's not so perfect?

So, go and see and enjoy. It's not the Oz you grew up. It's better.

Amazing

The play was absolutely spectacular. If you have the money and a day to get to The Bay (or NY, if you're on that side of the country) go and see Wicked.

I'll try to do a better post on it tomorrow. I'm tired now.

Play

Tomorrow, I'm off to see Wicked in The Bay. I adore the book and hope that the play lives up to it.

"Many different herrings."

Well, this is the last post of the month. I don't really know what to write, but felt like I should some how celebrate the last post of the month. Is that weird? It probably wouldn't be if I did it each end of the month, huh? Oh well.

I guess it wouldn't be so weird if I did this each month, but I just never thought of it before today. So, here's to the end of one crappy month and the beginning to a new one.

I had my first "real" week of school this week. Two of the Design: Fundamentals classes. We cut pictures out of magazines and were given many different terms that I may or may not remember for the quiz that we may or may not have before the middle of the term. I also had the one Elementary Drawing and Comp class (it's four hours each Friday). In that class I got to draw three things. One in pencil (and I need many more pencils than the lady told me to get because I don't like pushing too hard on them), but I drew two things. One in charcoal, which I didn't care for, not enough control. And one in conte, which is sort of like charcoal, but isn't, but was easier to control than the coal was, for me. For home work, I need to do a picture in ink, joy. The teacher said that she's more interested in how we experiment with the uses of the media we use than if it looks a lot like it's supposed to, but I think she'd like it more if we could get it to look like what we are aiming for. Only Jebus knows what's going to be done next week, but I'm sick of terms and would rather just get to work, these are art classes after all.

It looks like The Producers is going to be turned back into a movie. I like the original a lot and have a great fondness for the musical. I hope they can pull it off as a movie. And I hope they're not squeamish about having Nazi pigeons.

Into the Woods

Right now, as I write, my favorite musical is Into the Woods. I thought it was Caberet but as much as I love The MC and Sally, I have to say that, at least for now, Little Red Ridinghood and The Baker are just right for me at the moment.

For those of you who don't know, or hate musicals all together, Into the Woods is a story about our favorite fairytale people. These characters aren't taken from Disney, they're straight from their Grimm beginnings. Cinderella's sisters cut their feet and lose their eyes. Rapunzel's Prince is blinded by thorns. And one of the main characters is killed. It was written and originally directed by James Lapine (I meantion his direction because I have the soundtrack and this is what I'm working off of) and the lyrics and music are by Stephen Sondheim (who did the lyrics to West Side Story).

There are two things that make this play so wonderful: 1. The fact that this play is willing to take, what most like to think of as, kids stories and make them much more adult. And 2. the music.

The music was not what I expected, not traditional, harmonic, simple tunes, but hard, somtimes dissonant tunes. If you want to learn the songs, you really have to listen because the music and lyrics don't alway follow the same track, but are beautiful togeter. At first, I thought it was just the strength of the performers, but the more I listen, the more I think that the performers are using the strenght of the songs to make their performances even better.

As for the play being more adult, the song that really stands out to me is Little Red Ridinghood's "I Know Things Now." When I first heard it, it struck me as an innocent song about Red facing her fears and learning not to stray from her path, but the more I hear it, the more I think it's about her first sexual experience. First, the title. What sort of things does she know? That a wolf is dangerous? She already knew that. Then there are lines like "And he showed me things, / Many beautiful things / That I hadn't thought to explore." Take a guess at what she hadn't explored and the things he showed her. These lines "Once his teeth were bared, / Though, I really got scared-- / Well, excited and scared" who wasn't "excited and scared" the first time they had sex? I know that I was. Sometimes when I listen, I think the sex is consentaul, other times rape becuase the guy is a wolf, a predator, and rape seems more likely. Hell, when she meets the wolf in "Hello Little Girl" (a couple of songs before Red's) he as he "devours her with his eyes, mutters to himself":
Grandmother first,
Then Miss Plump...
What a delectable couple
Utter perfection--
One Brittle, one supple...
And then he ends the song with "Goodbye, little girl, / And hello..." These songs aren't just about eating her in the food sense, as much as some may insist they are. Red even sums up the lesson her tale is supposed to embody when she sings:
Do not put your faith
In a cape and a hood
They will not protect you
The way that they should
Toatally two of my favorite songs because they mean so much more than what's just on the surface.

Other songs that are, what I consider, the bes, but not very sexual, except one, are these: "Prologue: Into the Woods," "Giants in the Sky," "On the Steps of the Palace," "Agony" (the second one), and "No More." I can't say what I thinks so amazing about these, they just give me chills every time I listen to them.

Oh, and my favorite line in the enter play is "Once upon a time-- / later"