#Maria Lund

[fyeahfinnishmusicaltheatre]

A promotional image for Samppalinnan kesäteatteri's upcoming summer 2024 outdoor production of Bonnie & Clyde.

Featuring Marketta Tikkanen as Bonnie, Karlo Haapiainen as Clyde, Maria Lund as Blanche and Jonas Saari as Buck.

Photo by Otto-Ville Väätäinen.

[lessirussolvr]

[adamwatchesmovies]

The Banana Splits Movie (2019)

No one was doing anything with The Banana Splits so I don't think anyone will be upset when they learn the "beloved childhood property" is being repurposed as a horror comedy. For those who want that Five Nights at Freddy’s film adaptation, this should keep you at bay for a little while, though you’ll be eager to ditch it once something better comes around. That shouldn’t be hard.

Although he’s considered too old for the show, Harley Williams (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) loves The Banana Splits: a children’s television series featuring a band of four anthropomorphic animals - dog Fleegle, gorilla Bingo, lion Drooper and Snorky the elephant - and their human co-star Stevie (Richard White). On his birthday, Harley is given tickets to a live shooting of an episode. He, his half-brother Austin (Romeo Career), his classmate Zoe (Maria Nash), his mother Beth (Dani Kind) and his father Mitch (Steve Lund) all go, never suspecting a malfunction will soon cause the animals to go on a killing spree.

There are laughs throughout, which means The Banana Splits Movie is a successful horror-comedy. Before the blood begins flowing, the characters are so broad and cartoonish it’s hard not to chuckle. As soon as Mitch opens his mouth, you know his days are numbered. Same for Stevie. Same with the annoying Instagram-obsessed couple (Kiroshan Naidoo and Celina Martin). You can probably predict everyone who will die, and in what order. You can predict most of the plot, in fact. What the love plot will be like, what will trigger the Banana Splits to become murderous, what certain characters are up to when they’re lying, etc. It’s a by-the-numbers slasher film with some pretty good child actors but plenty of clunky dialogue. As for the adults, most of their performances will make you wish for a prompt death. Needless to say, the selling points of The Banana Splits are the kills and the central gimmick.

Horror films are notorious for working on a tight budget. Unfortunately, Canadian director Danishka Esterhazy (previously responsible for the excellent Black Field) just doesn’t have the resources to make this film look good. Right away, the badly-written story stretches plausibility to its breaking point. The Banana Splits are obviously actors in suits but actually, they’re highly-sophisticated robots covered in fake-looking fur to bring a children’s television series to life. Seems like a waste… but without the setup, there’d be no movie, so fine. Is it too much to ask for the film to get the basics right? When Austin walks away from his family to pursue the show's hostess, Paige (Naledi Majola), he disappears for the entire length of the shoot but his family hardly notices. Strange considering once the filming is done it’s pitch black outside and the studio lot is deserted. I guess Austin was gone for 8 hours then? As for the kills, there are a couple of neat ones but overall, they’re only ok. Mostly, they’re unconvincing, don’t fit the premise, or don't excite you. Needless to say, you’ll never come close to being scared.

The Banana Splits Movie comes off as a couple of random ideas stitched together, as if writers Jed Elinoff and Scott Thomas had a script for a Five Nights at Freddy’s movie that was repurposed with a property that kind of fit but not really. I’d love to hear what fans of the original ’68 television series think of this take on the material. Everything about the production screams “cheap”, down to the story. I’ll remind you it doesn’t cost much to give your text one extra pass to make the characters smart or interesting. Often, this film just doesn’t care about very much at all. Still, I did find myself laughing quite a bit, particularly during the beginning. Although severely flawed, the novelty of The Banana Splits does keep you invested enough to look past the numerous flaws and keep watching until the end. (On DVD, March 30, 2020)

[donospl]

Co w jazzie piszczy [sezon 2 odcinek 46]

premierowa emisja 18 grudnia 2024 – 18:00 Graliśmy: Richard Galliano “The Man I Love” z albumu “Around Gershwin” – Pentatone The Fury “Ender’s Game” z albumu “The Fury – Live From Brooklyn” -– Giant Step Arts Arturo Sandoval “Smile”  z albumu “My Foolish Heart” – MetaJAX Entertainment Linde Tillmanns “Ice” z albumu “Stillness, Chaos, Thoughts, Feelings” Aurore Voilque “Juste une…

[whileiamdying]

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” Transcends the Holiday-Movie Genre

Tyler Thomas Taormina’s comedy drama about a Long Island family boasts some of the year’s sharpest characterizations and a strikingly original narrative form. By Richard Brody November 8, 2024

It wasn’t on my list of likely occurrences that a nostalgic and sentimental holiday movie would provide some of the year’s sharpest characterizations on film and also boast a strikingly original narrative form. But this paradoxical blend turns out to make perfect sense in “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” a finely crafted and achingly romantic memory piece, directed by Tyler Thomas Taormina. It’s set sometime in the two-thousands in the fictional Long Island town of the title, where members of a large Italian American family, the Balsanos, come together to celebrate the holiday. Written by Taormina and Eric Berger, who both grew up on Long Island and have been friends since middle school, the movie checks the genre’s boxes—long-awaited reunions and poignant separations, hearty festivity and romantic intimacy—but it does so in a way that provokes bracingly complex emotions and frames them in the snow-globe-like quotation marks of reminiscence.

The clan’s matriarch, Antonia (Mary Reistetter), at whose house the Balsanos have gathered, is physically and mentally deteriorating, spending most of her time parked in an easy chair, offering wan greetings. The house teems with at least twenty family members—siblings, cousins, grandkids, other halves, and in-laws, ranging from toddlers to the elderly—plus some friends. Amid the revelry, fundamental relationships are drawn with a clarity that lays bare suppressed anguish, smothered disputes, and painful secrets. Antonia’s four grown children are gradually introduced. There is the poised and pensive Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), who’s there with her husband and two kids, one of whom, a teen named Emily (Matilda Fleming), biliously resents her. Kathleen’s sister, the energetic Elyse (Maria Carucci), is married to the flamboyantly domineering Ron (Steve Alleva), who cooks up the holiday feast while inveighing against the looming prospect of “chaos and insurrection.” Their brother Matt (John J. Trischetti, Jr.) is their mother’s caregiver, living in the house with his wife, Bev (Grege Morris). Matt instigates the film’s main conflict when he proposes selling the house and moving their mother into a nearby nursing home—a plan that surprises his sisters and enrages his brother, Ray (Tony Savino), a widowed blowhard with a hidden artistic streak.

It’s a mark of Taormina’s audacious way with narrative architecture that the scene in which this conflict bursts forth—which includes the piquant detail of Ray yelling at Matt while on an exercise bike—is the movie’s only traditional scene of overt exposition and constructed argument. Mostly, Taormina proceeds in fragments and snippets, with exquisitely rapid touches of dialogue and behavior which bring to life a house that is full of stories and long-standing tensions. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is a drama of the individual and the group; it’s a coming-of-age tale about many ages but also a reckoning with the frustrations of adolescence, the many varieties of loneliness in adulthood, and the struggle to define oneself against the identity assigned by a tight-knit family.

Taormina’s idiosyncratic artistry, which was evident in his first feature, “Ham on Rye” (2019), has now, in his third, developed into uninhibited cinematic self-assertion. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” bolsters my belief that a great movie usually reveals itself quickly, in its first scenes and even in its first shots. The film’s distinctive combination of sharp, nuanced writing and enticingly original visual compositions grabs the viewer almost instantly. In moments seemingly caught on the fly, characters flit through the house and out of it, meeting and separating, sharing laughs and exchanging confidences, giving voice to dreams and troubles in casual remarks and offhand gestures. The cinematographer, Carson Lund, festively ornaments the screen with points and streaks of color and light, and his drifting camera conjures murmurs of the past, recalling shots in classic memory films by Max Ophüls and Alain Resnais.

Taormina punctuates the familial drama with several spectacular set pieces, such as a festive meal at which an elderly woman named Isabelle (JoJo Cincinnati) delivers a loving litany of the departed; a scene of teary-eyed melancholy in which the family turns off the lights and watches home movies; and a Christmas Eve tradition in which the family joins neighbors to watch the local fire department’s procession of fire engines festooned with Christmas decorations. Yet even such large-scale pageantry gives rise to brisk strokes of high drama, as when Emily unleashes adolescent hostility at the dinner table or when Kathleen becomes the bearer of a burdensome secret.

Meanwhile, at the edges of the action, the movie features micro-incidents of the sort that burrow deep in the mind, a whole box of madeleine moments in the making: a bunch of kids playing video games in the basement realize that the family iguana is missing, and one goes into a dark storage room to look for it; a waggish guest finds Isabelle asleep in a stair lift and presses a button to send her gliding downstairs unawares; Ray, on the patio, talks business into a landline with a very long cord; Ron declares that society is “survival of the fists,” a malapropism that he reinforces by putting up his dukes; Kathleen tries to cheer up an ailing boy with a little dance of uninhibited joy.

The overwhelming profusion of incidents and details, of sidelong glances in crowded frames and notable actions occurring in the background, is reminiscent of Wes Anderson’s films. Taormina’s ornamental sensibility is far less artificial—he adorns a largely realistic cinematic world with seemingly spontaneous touches and serendipitous observations—but, as with Anderson’s work, the movie should be viewed at least twice to be truly seen: the action moves fast, its connections are implicit, and the talk is brilliantly epigrammatic, leaving viewers to look back and catch up while risking missing out on new pleasures as they speed along.

Taormina, like Anderson, also encourages a distinctive mode of performance. Few of the actors in the Balsano clan have long résumés—Dizzia is the most prominent, and her attentive, eloquent performance deftly meshes with Fleming’s, as Emily—but Taormina’s perceptive direction grants everyone moments in the spotlight. The movie seems to create actors along with characters.

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” pivots on a twist of sorts that’s too good to mention but also too good not to. Emily and a cousin, Michelle (Francesca Scorsese), who’s a little bit older and a little bit bolder, sneak out of the house to meet their friends and take a car ride that Kathleen has forbidden. With this leap into the unknown, the movie instantly becomes a story of teen-age discovery, by turns passionate, tender, and goofy. It begins with a comedic wink at a young driver’s inexperience, and includes the motormouth intellectualism of a local boy, Craig (Leo Hervey). In an extended sequence of late-night snacks and seductions at a bagel shop, featuring a memorable cameo by Elsie Fisher, Craig’s smarty-pants riffs take on an earnest weight as Emily deems Christmas gifts “capitalist propaganda” and ponders what to do with hers. As the night progresses from jollity to intimacy, Taormina discovers wondrously discreet and delicate visual correlates for teen lust, including at its most fumbling. (The end credits give a sense of the comedy of the teens’ tussles, listing such characters as Bubble Gum Gal and Kiss-Marked Dope.)

At this point, the story brings Emily and the other teens into contact with two other groups—three postadolescent slackers who hang out at a graveyard, sullenly smoking (the most voluble of whom is played by Sawyer Spielberg), and two police officers with the misfortune of working on Christmas Eve (played by Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington). They provide a sense of a wider world that may look absurd to the teens—they mock yet fear the slackers and hardly notice the sad-eyed officers—but which for Taormina, older and wiser, is full of pathos. (This is perhaps laid on a bit thick, these older characters’ identities subordinated to the meaning that Taormina assigns them.)

Those streaks of exaggerated melancholy in the grubby ordinariness of suburban life don’t detract from the exalted tone of Taormina’s suburban reveries. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is a drama of gimlet-eyed nostalgia. An image of Emily taking refuge in the woods at night connects her teen life with the grandeur of classic-era melodrama, and few movies ever tap the kind of intense emotion that Taormina stirs with a bag of dumpster-dived bagels. Without losing sight of what’s banal and petty in suburban life, he imbues it with a sense of grace that emerges both from personal relationships and from the aesthetic of daily life—transcendence despite itself. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline “Yule Rules.”

[genevieveetguy]

Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, Tyler Taormina (2024)

[thinkingimages]

Car Crash Studies, Interior no 8 - Selected works from Nicolai Howalt / Courtesy: Martin Asbæk Gallery, Denmark. Brucesilverstein Gallery, US. Galerie Maria Lund, France.

[laclefdescoeurs]

A gondola on the Grand Canal in Venice with a view towards the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, 1870, F. C. Lund

[iidanen]

Käärijä in a Finnish magazine called Seura before esc 2023.

Topics on magazine cover:

• Eurovision hero Käärijä open: Was close to lost his life and end his career "Nothing is written in the stars"

• Seura investigated: Pension isn't enough for living - 65-years-old Heli and Maija are still working in the nursing field

• Daughter's and mother's touching story: 3-years-old Iiris's brain cancer has been treated already twice

• New Finnish research: exercise helps treating cancer

• Sixten Korkman: "Age discrimination is still a problem but situation is changing" *Korkman is a Finnish economist

• 10 questions: Walkers can suffer shin splints

• Maria Lund hides sugar cubes in her bra *Lund is a Finnish actress and singer

• Travel: Riga is full of stories

"We will never know when we have to face departure from here. We have to enjoy every moment and do things that we truly love.

"My mother is very silly and brisk. She is very loving and helps always. I love her very much." 🥰

"I have never liked if other people tells me what I have to do.

"170 cm is short height for a man but I can survive with that. I can still go to amusement rides."

"My goal is to be the best live performer in Finland."

[queensilvy]

The Drottning Diaries

On January 16th, 2024, Her Majesty Queen Silvia of Sweden awarded scholarships to researchers. The scholarships were for research about children and disabilities. The ceremony where the researchers received the awards was held at the Royal Palace. The scholarships were awarded from Queen Silvia's Jubilee Trust.

The researchers that received scholarships from Queen Silvia's Jubilee Trust:

Anita Birovecz, PhD student at Karolinska Institutet Katja Sjöblom, PhD student at Karolinska Institutet Karin Persson, PhD student at Lund University Livia van Leuven, PhD student at Karolinska Institutet Jonas Mellgren, PhD student at the University of Gothenburg Anna Hallin Provenzano, PhD student at Karolinska Institutet Elizabeth Jennions, PhD student at the University of Gothenburg Emma Hedlund, PhD student at Lund University Maria Dellenmark-Blom, PhD student at Sahlgrenska Academy

pc: kungahuset

[cosmicanger]

Car Crash Studies, Interior no 8 - Selected works from Nicolai Howalt / Courtesy:

Martin Asbæk Gallery, Denmark.

Brucesilverstein Gallery, US.

Galerie Maria Lund, France.

[notanotherinfjblog]

MBTI fiction writers

Unfortunately, though for obvious reasons, I’m constrained by my own reading habits, so if you have any suggestions for underrepresented types here, please let me know and thanks for the ones that I’ve already received!

INTJ

Margaret Atwood

Joyce Carol Oates

Tom Rachman

ENTJ

Markus Zusak

Hank Green

Gillian Flynn 

Bernardine Evaristo 

Lois Lowry

Ruth Ozeki

INTP

Kai Meyer (interview is in German)

Neil Gaiman

J. R. R. Tolkien

ENTP

David Mitchell

Philip Pullman

John Green

Terry Pratchett

Douglas Adams

Jonathan Safran Foer

Lauren Oliver

Brandon Sanderson

Patrick Rothfuss 

Michael Ende (interview is in German)

Mariana Leky (interview is in German)

Frank Herbert

Aldous Huxley

Matt Haig

Ta-Nehisi Coates

INFJ

Rohinton Mistry

Audrey Magee

Jenny Erpenbeck (interview is in German)

ENFJ

Eleanor Catton

Alissa York

INFP

Wolfgang Koeppen (interview is in German)

Helen Oyeyemi

ENFP

Gavriel Savit

Maggie Stiefvater

Jan Philipp Zymny (interview is in German)

Stephen Chbosky

Daniel Handler

Rick Riordan

Christopher Paolini

George R. R. Martin

V. E. Schwab

Jenny-Mai Nuyen (interview is in German)

ISTJ

Astrid Lindgren

Ken Follet

Elizabeth Nunez

ESTJ

Kerstin Gier (interview is in German)

Cornelia Funke 

John Boyne

Maja Lunde

Sebastian Fitzek (interview is in German)

ISFJ

Anna Burns 

Lucinda Riley 

Jack Livings

ESFJ

Tomi Adeyemi

Victoria Aveyard

Suzanne Collins 

Raquel J. Palacio

Jojo Moyes 

Ursula K. Le Guin

Rosamunde Pilcher 

Rebecca Gablé (interview is in German)

Kirsten Boie (interview is in German)

ISTP

Jhumpa Lahiri

John Irving

Erich Kästner (interview is in German)

James Dashner 

Fredrik Backman 

ESTP

Leigh Bardugo

Sabaa Tahir

Paulo Coelho

Stephen King

Jonas Jonasson

Jussi Adler-Olsen

Erich Maria Remarque (interview is in German)

ISFP

Fatima Farheen Mirza 

Tash Aw

Andreas Izquierdo (interview is in German)

Antoine Laurain 

ESFP

Adam Silvera

Nicholas Sparks 

Cecelia Ahern

[anarchist-caravan]

Vica Pacheco/Maria Bertel/Ying-Hsueh Chen - 29/04/2023 - at Intonal

The Mexican-born artist and musician enlists the Danish trombonist and Taiwanese percussionist/multi-instrumentalist for a live soundtrack for the world premiere of her original animation.

Commisioned SHAPE+ work.

Pacheco studied art in Mexico City and France, and while her work is rooted in experimental music and composition, she also has a plastic practice ranging from ceramics to 3D animation. Chen was educated at the Juilliard School and the Royal Danish Academy of Music, has won several awards in USA and Denmark, and her concerts have been broadcast on national and international radio and TV in Denmark, USA, Taiwan, and South Korea. The “Ancestral Modernism” concert series, in which primordial sonic experiences are delivered by bringing out the universality of avant-garde and ancestral heritage, is a milestone among her projects. Bertel is a co-founder of the Copenhagen-based art collective eget værelse and apart from her work as a solo artist, she performs and composes in groups like GESH (with drummer Jaleh Negari), Selvhenter (the notorious noise rock band), an improvised noise duo with Nina Garcia, the G.E.K duo with saxophone player Johannes Lund, and more.

Ita means flower in Mixteco, the indigenous Mesoamerican culture in the Mexican region of Oaxaca – where Pacheco was born. Deeply inspired by Oskar Fischinger’s animations for music, Ernst Haeckel’s artistic-scientific drawings, and observations of nature, ITA evokes organic, living elements that create a network in constant movement.

[burnedspaghettidrama]

🎶✨ When you get this, you have to write down 5 songs you actually listen to and post them. Then send this (ask or tag) to 10 of your favourite followers✨🎶 I was tagged by @loosiap. Thank you for that ﾟ+.(´ｴ｀)ﾟ+.ﾟ He asked to hear songs in languages he can't understand from my country, so here have some finnish music:

Kwan - Tainted Love (lol song is in english. Band is finnish though)

Leevi and the Leavings - Poika Nimeltä Päivi

Maria Lund - Uinuva aurinko

Haloo Helsinki! - Vihaan kyllästynyt

Fröbelin Palikat - Peikon punnitus

Honestly I don't listen that much finnish music (TヮT) Only songs here and there. And usually old classics. I also have horrible music listening habits. I like to listen one song over and over again for hours, even days. Also I don't have bands that I like to listen all the time. I just like to listen music that vibes with me at the moment (｡_｡；) I'm tagging @everyone. Feel free to do this if you want haha I wish everyone I wonderful weekend! (-ㅂ-)/ ♥ ♥ ♥

[fenrirswood-hq]

THURSDAY...

... after a month of careful speculation and painstaking investigation, the police has come out with the full list of the ten people who were murdered on the night of the 24th of June. A lot of backlash and call-outs have followed the departments slow response to the situation, with many people leaving Fenrir's Wood for the summer to avoid whatever was still bound to happen.

National news speaks of a blood thirsty serial murder plaguing this small city, that truly - according to the news - has no right to call itself that. With the investigation underfunded and no new leads, the public eye turns to what they do know: this has been going on for far too long.

Families with small children have been seeking work and lodging elsewhere, trading the old town for cities like Oxford and London. More and more people have taken to drinking, and several businesses have closed for the summer with no promise that they'll be back come September.

The international supernatural community has been sending help and questions to the Council of Fenrir's Wood, voicing their concern and giving advice. The most prominent question is: why hasn't Evanora Ray been charged yet?

The list:

Samuel Berg (Cillian Murphy fc), second in command of Saga's Coven and one of Fenrir's Wood's highest standing business men. He was doing research into the Norse Mythology to figure out who could've been behind the murders.

Carl Lund (Eamon Farren fc), brother of Leah Lund - former coven leader of Hel Coven who was murdered in the winter - had been trying to help Hel Coven make sense of the legacy left behind by his sister and support his brother-in-law with taking care of the children.

Patrick Anderson (Jason Clarke fc), uncle of Arthur Anderson who was murdered during the winter. He was the former police chef and high standing local. Also for the longest time an unaffiliated Witch.

Leonard Dahl (Martin Short fc), uncle of Esmee & Finnley Dahl, two of the earliest murders, had been away on a boating trip, having said to have wanted to miss the festivities because he felt it was unbecoming of the memory of his niece and nephew.

Laura Nyland (Freya Allan fc), best friend of Sarah Lund and a Witch of Hel Coven, she'd been eager to get out of Fenrir's Wood and had been trying to convince her parents to move to London.

Maria Pihl (Evangeline Lilly fc), dean of the Fenrir University, Maria was known to teach her Supernatural students a bit of history on the side in after hours, not wanting the rich history of her people to be forgotten.

Maiken Trygg (Michelle Pfeiffer fc), was on a boat with Leonard Dahl because she wanted to be away from people for a while. She was a fairly unknown witch and regarded as the crazy old hag who lived just outside of the city bounds.

Otto Anderson (Joe Locke fc), grandson of Patrick Anderson, he had been begging his grandfather to join Saga's Coven, because he believed fully that the witches rituals could stop further murders from happening.

Sarah Lund (Kizzy Edgell fc), daughter of Leah Lund - former coven leader of Hel Coven who was murdered in the winter - was nineteen years old and planning to go study abroad in Vancouver after the summer. She was a part of Hel Coven like her mother.

Agner Thorsun (Stellan Skarsgård fc), father of Lukas Thorsun who was murdered a year earlier. He was a powerful witch who wanted nothing but to see his grandchildren pull through after Lukas' death.

[glassprism]

What If Scenario. The Pandemic never happened, but the renovations at Her Majesty’s eventually did. During that time, they put together a concert-like production of Phantom like they did with Les Mis in 2019. Who would you have cast in each part? Feel free to include Ensemble & Understudies

I think I answered something very similar before where I said that I'd love to have had an international celebration, with recent, fan-favorite, or long-running members from productions all over the world given an opportunity to perform and do, like, one song each, along with the then-current cast at the time. So I guess it might be something like:

Phantom: Josh Piterman (London), Ben Crawford (Broadway), Derrick Davis (national tour), Osamu Takai (Japan), Alexander Goebel (Vienna), Colm Wilkinson (Toronto), Peter Karrie (Canadian tour), Peter Joback (Stockholm), Ian Jon Bourg (Germany), Anthony Warlow (Australia), Henk Poort (Scheveningen), Juan Navarro (Mexico City), Hans Peter Janssens (Antwerp), Tomas Ambt Kofod (Copenhagen), Hong Kwang Ho (Seoul), Juan Carlos Barona (Madrid), Sandor Sasvari (Budapest), Saulo Vasconcelos (Sao Paulo), Damian Aleksander (Poland), Carlos Vittori (Buenos Aires), Marian Vojtko (Prague), Stephen Brandt Hansen (Estonia), Ivan Ozhogin (Moscow), Ilkka Hamalainen (Helsinki), Adrian Nour (Bucharest), Nikola Bulatovic (Belgrade), Vladimir Grudkov (Sofia), Jonathan Roxmouth (World Tour), Espen Grjotheim (Oslo), Ben Forster (Greece), Killian Donnelly (UK Tour)

Christine: Kelly Mathieson (London), Meghan Picerno (Broadway), Emma Grimsley (national tour), Sae Yamamoto (Japan), Luzia Nistler (Vienna), Rebecca Caine (Toronto), Teresa DeZarn (Canadian tour), Emmi Christensson (Stockholm), Valerie Link (Germany), Ana Marina (Australia), Joke de Kruijf (Scheveningen), Irasema Terrazas (Mexico City), Inneke van Klinken (Antwerp), Sibylle Glosted (Copenhagen), Kim So Hyun (Seoul), Julia Moller (Madrid), Barbara Fonyo (Budapest), Lina Mendes (Sao Paulo), Edyta Krzemien (Poland), Claudia Cota (Buenos Aires), Monika Sommerova (Prague), Maria Listra (Estonia), Tamara Kotova (Moscow), Sofie Asplund (Helsinki), Irina Baiant (Bucharest), Mirjana Matic (Belgrade), Vesela Delcheva (Sofia), Claire Lyon (World Tour), Astrid Giske (Oslo), Amy Manford (Greece), Holly-Anne Hull (UK Tour)

Raoul: Danny Whitehead (London), John Riddle (Broadway), Michael Maliakel (national tour), Kanji Ishimaru (Japan), Thorsten Tinney (Vienna), Laird Mackintosh (Toronto), Kip Wilborne (Canadian tour), Anton Zetterholm (Stockholm), Nicky Wuchinger (Germany), Alexander Lewis (Australia), Peter de Smet (Scheveningen), someone who's not Jose Joel (Mexico City), Michael Shawn Lewis (Antwerp), Christian Lund (Copenhagen), Son Jun Ho (Seoul), Armando Pita (Madrid), Zoltan Miller (Budapest), Nando Prado (Sao Paulo), Marcin Mrozinski (Poland), Nicholas Martinelli (Buenos Aires), Tomas Vanek (Prague), Koit Toome (Estonia), Evgeny Zaycev (Moscow), John Martin Bengtsson (Helsinki), Florin Ristei (Bucharest), Slaven Doslo (Belgrade), Denko Prodanov (Sofia), Matt Leisy (World Tour), Carl Lindquist (Oslo), Nadim Naaman (Greece), Rhys Whitfield (UK Tour)

Is that way too many cast members? Probably! Are there even enough scenes for each of them to perform together? Unlikely! Did I give up doing supporting, ensemble, and understudies because it was too exhausting? Definitely! Do I even know who some of these people are or if they want to come back at all? Not really!

But you have to admit - it's a huge and very international cast!