professorspork

[professorspork]

can I ask? Do you have a top three actresses who play elphaba and Glinda? I am curious about who are some of your favorite .

I was just going to refer you to the Ozcars where I did a more complex ranking awards system, and I do still recommend that post overall because I go into much more detail

but no i know that's the coward's way

so okay

OKAY

if you ask me this JUST TODAY and it's about WHERE MY HEART IS IN THIS MOMENT knowing that MY MIND CAN ALWAYS CHANGE

and understanding that these actors are listed ALPHABETICALLY BY LAST NAME and this is not A RANKING AMONG THE THREE

and that it is a HOLISTIC ALL-ENCOMPASSING CHOICE factoring in ALL KNOWLEDGE I HAVE

then my top three elphies are:

Carmen Cusack

Eden Espinosa

Lindsay Mendez (I know it in my heart i just do)

and my top three glindas are:

Annaleigh Ashford

Katie Rose Clarke

Kara Lindsay

key takeaways:

a) there's a lot of alliteration here

b) if they all got married in these orders they would, first of all, be some INCREDIBLY AMAZING FORBIDDEN GELPHIE PAIRS and second of all there would be a new alliteration actress in town, the most powerful of them all, "Lindsay Lindsay."

welcome to how my brain works, thank you for asking.

[professorspork]

do you weep

often

[professorspork]

The Golden Girls – 7.01: Hey Look Me Over

[professorspork]

lol sorry this is the first thing i had on my mind when i saw Blake’s outfit PFFFFFFFFF

[professorspork]

[professorspork]

ball-jointed doll by 山丘里的羊 on xiaohongshu.

[professorspork]

baffled at total misreadings of asoiaf characters. saw someone call Theon a "charismatic asshole." excuse me. what charisma. where.

[professorspork]

A Theory on the Periodization of Wicked: Part Two

FEB 2007 (LA Opening) - OCT 2013 (10th Anniversary): WICKED IS DEAD (LONG LIVE WICKED)

*rubs hands together* hooooo boy now we're getting into it

setting aside that there wouldn't be a Wicked without the previous era, this is probably the most formative period in the show's production history, and certainly my personal favorite. the most obvious reason for this is just the sheer amount of Wicked happening during this time. from 2007 to 2010 there were no fewer than four contemporaneous versions of the show running; after the last sitdown in San Francisco closed in 2010 this got pared down to three, but still: that's a lot of Wicked.

and EVERY one of these productions was doing something different. a lot of this can be attributed to changes made by higher-ups: as alluded to in the previous section, 2007 brought about sizable script and staging changes, which include but are not limited to:

adding a scene before Dancing Through Life where Fiyero almost runs Elphaba over and banter ensues

altering Fiyero and Galinda's dialogue at the Ozdust when Elphaba arrives to accommodate for him already knowing her

adding the dramatic moment where Elphaba stands up with her cloak during Defying Gravity

adding "to Fiyero," at the end of "announcing Glinda is engaged" in Boq's lines in Wicked Witch of the East

changing Elphaba's stated motivation for returning to the Emerald City from "i have unfinished business" to "i have to set the monkeys free," and having Nessa in turn accuse her of actually going back for Fiyero

altering the conclusion of Wonderful so that Elphaba interrupts the Wizard's attempt to woo her

shortening Elphaba's lines after she discovers Dillamond's fate so she immediately starts threatening the Wizard

i occasionally miss a few things from Wicked 1.0, but Wicked 2.0 is overall a much stronger show, with tighter character relationship and motivations. (it's especially astounding to me how Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzmann decided on a Fiyeraba endgame but didn't realize until years down the line that Fiyero should probably meet Elphaba FIRST.) so some of the unique flavors of Wicked we got during this time came from the actors literally saying different lines and adjusting their performances. the script changes also had the side benefit of releasing incoming casts of their obligation to be faithful to the original, because they were now doing some things the original cast (with some exceptions) had never done.

attributing this period's innovation just to script changes giving the show a much needed jolt, however, obscures how much the casts--and particularly the Gelphies--were here for it. the ambition to give unique portrayals was such that in one evening (and an especially fast jet) you could be getting four radically different interpretations of the same character, each of them in conversation with their peers. it likely helped that the hierarchy among the different productions wasn't strictly asymmetrical during this time. the sitdown shows were often led by Broadway alums: Megan and Eden left Broadway to open (and then close) LA, Kendra left Broadway to open San Francisco, Annaleigh Ashford left Broadway to close Chicago, and so on. 1NT could have turned out to be the runt of the litter, but. uh

then some absolute unit put Carmen Cusack and Katie Rose Clarke onstage with each other, leaving Wicked to forever reckon with the consequences

between the two Carmen is the less volatile game changer, but like i discussed in the previous part Elphabas don't tend to evolve so dramatically anyway. she's definitely more of a shit-stirrer (see: teehee perhaps i shall end TWAI on the DG battle cry, perhaps i shall tuck mineself within Derrick Williams' bosom during ALAYM) than people give her credit for, but Carmen's most significant contribution, imo, was a) fostering innovative and unconventional acting choices in both herself and her castmates (something Katie and Donna Vivino have talked about in interviews), and b) absolutely mcfucking committing ONE HUNDRED PERCENT to those acting decisions, no matter how apeshit they are.

Carmen is an Angry Elphaba, and so can be considered an inheritor to Eden and Julia; but while those two at least tried to mask their rage, or worked their way up towards it, Carmen's Elphaba is almost entirely just raw untempered emotion. she says "something just comes over me sometimes" when trying to explain what happened with Nessa's chair, and spends the rest of the show proving just how true that is. where other Elphabas try to make meaning out of how they feel, Carmen's Elphie just...lives in every feeling she experiences. the reason she's an Angry Elphie is because Elphaba is textually angry for much of the show, but Carmen is equally uncompromising when it comes to other emotions as well. when she's disdainful it oozes out of every pore of her body; when she's touched she has no reservations about showing it; when she has been pushed to the brink you are genuinely afraid of her--not because she means you harm, but because she has no control of what she will do in that moment, either.

and when she loves Glinda she'll KISS HER ON THE MOUTH okay that's probably just Carmen nvm

in terms of sheer feral rage no Elphaba has matched Carmen before or since. even Mamie's Elphie, who shows up arguably angrier in her first scene, presents her anger as a performative defense mechanism (in contrast to Carmen, who ends up scarier precisely because there's no pretense). yet Carmen did end up contributing to a reading of Elphaba which would increasingly gain traction, which is an Elphaba who either lacks self-awareness or is truly incapable of regulating her emotional response. earlier actresses developed their Elphabas from things that Idina still might plausibly do; Carmen ended up pushing this beyond the brink, demonstrating that an Elphaba without restraint could still be recognizable and compelling as Elphaba. this expansion of Elphaba-the-character paved the way for a slew of Elphies with unique acting vision AND those classic belts--including those who had never done the role before but made an impact anyway, like Nicole Parker and Lindsay Mendez.

and then there's Katie, who...

actually you know what? Katie makes talking about the development of Glinda during this time very straightforward! because she was there THE WHOLE TIME.

literally!!! literally this is true. Katie was a principal Glinda for at least a part of EVERY SINGLE YEAR from 2007 to 2013. this alone would put her in the running for most influential Glinda of this era (if not the next), but it goes deeper than that. Katie did not invent Weird Glinda; between Hilty's "dumb pubby" Glinda, Kendra's "hit hit hit hit hit hit hit" Glinda, and Annaleigh's "expressive prancing gazelle" Glinda the character was already pretty far removed from her alpha bitch origins. in this context Katie showing up and behaving as if each of her individual limbs were independently autonomous shouldn't have been so beyond the pale, except for how--just like Carmen--bloody-minded she was about playing that weirdness to the hilt, particularly in dramatic moments.

it can be tricky to navigate the transition from Mostly Comedic Glinda in Act 1 to Mostly Dramatic Glinda in Act 2. even the three luminaries of Weird Glinda mentioned above had trouble with it, because they still felt somewhat compelled to serve Glinda-the-Entertainer from the show's earliest days. their Glindas were weird because Glinda being Too Much is the cornerstone of getting laughs, and the oddness faded to the background as the show's overall tone darkened in Act 2. the strangeness of Katie's Glinda, by contrast, remains both consistent and pivotal throughout Wicked's dramatic shifts. she is still impulsive in Act 2; still sensitive, still emotional, still physically expressive. it's just that...those things really aren't funny anymore after the timeskip, and even prior there are moments where Glinda feels--and wants--so much and so deeply it's almost uncomfortable to watch her. the Glinda who is hysterical in Act 1 is the same, hysterical, Glinda in Act 2, but the world around her has changed so drastically it upends how we perceive her as a person. and because Glinda sets up the frame narrative of the show, an Act 2 Glinda who is distinctively recognizable as her earlier self tightens Wicked's overall tonal consistency.

it's difficult to say how much immediate impact Katie had on her peers during this time, since afaik the Midnight Bark Gelphies have with each other now hadn't been established yet. Glindas did begin trending towards dramatic seriousness as a whole in 2008--the most prominent example of this is probably Hilty, who in returning to close the LA sitdown chucked pretty much all her Glinda's previous ditziness in the bin. a lot of this undoubtedly has to do with the fact that Megan, Kendra, and Annaleigh were all coming to the end of their tenures, and all determined to finish at the top of their games; at the same time, i find it interesting that these previously very disparate Glindas were now overlapping quite a bit in when and how they chose to depict their character's tragic vulnerability.

in any case, the combination of all four of these performances meant Serious Glinda was here to stay. Katie, obviously, was the Glinda Who Would Not Leave, but it's not like she was singlehandedly maintaining this darker read of the character either. the interpretation struck a chord with a lot of Glinda Girlies, several of whom ended up in the bubble dress themselves. and by 2013 Playing Glinda for Drama had so become the norm that when Alli Mauzey (whose tenure perpetually circled Katie's, and vice versa) returned, it felt like a nostalgic rarety. her Glinda--Glinda the Entertainer, here to excite the audience with opt ups and make them lose their shit during Popular--which had once been the ONLY version of the character imaginable, was now being left behind.

[professorspork]

Hobbit AU where everything is exactly the same except that Bilbo wears the same outfit and radiates the same disaster gay energy as he did in the USSR in 1982.

[professorspork]

i need these so i can flex both

[professorspork]

Today I met happiness

[professorspork]

people are really fucking clueless about generative ai huh? you should absolutely not be using it for any sort of fact checking no matter how convenient. it does not operate in a way that guarantees factual information. its goal is not to deliver you the truth but deliver something coherent based on a given data set which may or may not include factual information. both the idolization of ai and fearmongering of it seem lost on what it is actually capable of doing

[professorspork]

being a humanities major who’s friends with stem majors is so funny because you’ll ask your friends what they’re doing today and they’re like “UGH it’s so stressful i have to stabilize the reactor core for my nuclear power midterm and then i have to build the supercomputer from i have no mouth yet i must scream for my electrical engineering homework :/ what about you” and you’re like “oh well i have to read a fun little book and write an essay about gender.” and they still think you have it worse

[professorspork]

Remi is a small princess who likes to lay her head on a pillow when she naps, so I used my new sewing machine to make one just for her.

To my delight she uses it and I'm so happy

[professorspork]

RIP Lydia Bennet you would’ve loved watching tik toks at full volume in public

[professorspork]

idk who needs to hear this but if you have been putting something off bc it doesn't need to be done until the end of the month. we are almost done with the teens we are approaching the big numbers (the twenties). that date shall dawn upon you swiftly and without mercy before you know it. psa for everyone except me i got plany off time

[professorspork]

Listening to a non-fiction book about maritime disaster and the way this author is describing the ship sinking is so sexual