#anyway I love Andrea Macasaet | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

tonyglowheart · 2 years ago

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trying to decide if I like Andrea's Boleyn best because that was the first one I meaningfully saw so it's like, primacy effect, or if I rly do prefer her portrayal like the thing is. I really do like her take on it, I think she balanced the comedy of the role really well. her portrayal is like the one I feel like I can argue that the archetype they're playing for Anne in SIX is like the Marilyn Monroe dumb blonde "say, they told me you were stupid!"

like, she somehow infuses a like note of irony to her comedy that makes it like oooh she's PLAYING dumb, not actually dumb! Even the part when she's like, I don't get it. I guess sort of like the Paris Hilton persona/voice thing she does? But yeah I feel like the West End versions I've seen with the HAH for the (politics) not my thing is like... too much. like overcompensating ig? I dunno I just don't feel like it works for me.

also I think I just rly like the Cyndi Lauper Girls Just Wanna Have Fun vibe more than the Avril Lavigne Girlfriend vibe (sorry, I don't know the British reference so I can only use this) that it seems like the UK performances tend to have, just seems to fit a play on AB better. And also I think gives a more... mature Anne? Like I mean don't get me wrong, she still has youthful energy, and is still impetuous and all of that. But just, I think the West End version just reads TOO young for me. I see comments where ppl say "oh it makes her seem like the youngest of the bunch!" and just, I don't love that.

Anyways also, I think Andrea gives fantastic rocker chick at the climax, and her I'M NOT SORRY is amaazing showstopping breathtaking, changed the scene. I think starting in that more, like, "why mister, I couldn't POSSIBLY"/OOPS I did it again coyness with a note of irony to it, and then going to unapologetic rocking out really gave an arc to the song that like, had it go somewhere. Whereas the more rocker rebel vibe Anne's just come off a bit too one-note for my taste.

And also the way she poses at the very end for the spotlight lmao, very simple elegant straight on with a Mona Lisa smile. just beautiful, stunning. you really don't need to do a whole lot to make a ton of impact. The queens I've seen who do that sort of rocker pose at the end, I think it sort of skews the spotlight so it's not just singled on their face anymore, they're casting shadows on their face with their angle choices. But yeah I think Andrea's Anne, she takes us on a whole arc and story and by the end, you're like... ooh damn okay maybe she IS all that, maybe she IS fitter, she has the je ne sais quoi obviously she miscalculated but it's not ALL youthful arrogance

#six tag #anyway I love Andrea Macasaet #her Anne does everything for me #and her vocals are insane

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krokodile · 3 years ago

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My extremely patient partner has decided to follow me down the Six rabbit hole. Very patient and very bad at names, which means we’ve started referring to everyone with descriptors instead. And it’s made me think about how amazingly diverse these performers are. NONE is quite like another. Which is probably why I would have an impossible time picking a “favorite” in nearly any role. (Aside from Adrianna Hicks as Aragon. That role is HERS.)

Examples:

Bisaster!Boleyn: Millie O’Connell. She and her Boleyn are absolute chaos queers and I thank her for her service. Moniker swiped from AO3 because it suits her perfectly.

Killer Queen: Andrea Macasaet’s Boleyn. She’s so calculated and conniving. Also known around here as Brat!Boleyn but no one needs our theories about the queens’ sex lives in here. (You know I’m right though.)

Enby-leyn, Works better when said out loud than it does writing. Anyway. Maddison Bulleyment, my partner’s fave Boleyn.

The Actual Infant: Aimie Atkinson’s Howard. So fragile, so sweet, not terribly bright, a bit arrested. Think Cat from Victorious or Aimee from Sex Education. Princess Sparkle Bling Bling is also acceptable.

Harley Quinn Howard: Alicia Corrales-Connor’s Howard (they’re my partner’s fave Howard and she actually knows their name at this point, but the nickname stuck regardless). She has some crazy eyes and crazy energy, at the same time making you believe that she was in love with these men and believed they loved her and wow they’re lucky they stayed dead because she might actually kill them otherwise. (Also I’m using she/her pronouns for their Howard only, just to be clear; I know Alicia prefers they/them, but the characters are all generally considered female, so. I’m sticking with that.)

sweetest: Lauren Byrne, just in general. Small “s.” If you’ve seen her perform literally anything from this show I shouldn’t need to explain this.

She/theymour: Shannen Quan already calls themself this; we just stole it. Prior to this they were just “lil bb Seymour” because they literally look 12.

Beauty Queen Seymour: Kiersten Hodges. Both because she’s STUPIDLY pretty and because her Seymour gives me “former beauty pageant queen” vibes. She knows exactly what she’s doing on that stage and how to work an audience, and her Seymour is in it to win it. Love it so much.

Addict!Howard: Vicki Manser’s Howard has a very specific vibe that I can only describe as “former child star who turned to drugs to cope with the endless abuse inherent in the industry at a very young age and is now barely holding it together.” (I should also add...both of us have been very close to addicts and this is no way meant as either an insult or a mockery; I actually think it’s a brilliant take on Howard even though I don’t think it’s specifically what she was going for.) Probably could be a better name for this one, but...

Wine Aunt Howard: Jodie Steele’s performance at Aimie’s concert. You know the one. The Ginger Queen: Mallory Maedke. Not all of these are complicated, guys.

There are also just the ones that came from nowhere and have stuck, or are based on a single characteristic. There’s “resting bitch face,” there’s “bafflingly heterosexual,” there’s “I wanna Sey-mour” (look, I’m not proud of this one, but I’ve watched the Dance Attic performance like 20 times and I still don’t think I’ve processed a single note Natalie Paris has sung because my brain short-circuits every time I see her in yoga pants and a tank top. It’s not even sexual, her body is just so actually perfect it’s distracting), there’s a dozen or more I can’t think of in the moment. I got so used to thinking of Alexia Macintosh as “Grace Jones Cleves” before I found out her actual name that I still think of her as that. I’ve never gone too deep into the fandom but I can only assume I’m not the only one who sees that resemblance.

And every single Parr is now simply known as “the blue one.” (I mentioned to my mother - she’s nearly 80 and is strongly onboard the Six fandom train, it’s amazing - that Anna Uzele was leaving and she asked which one she was. “Parr.” *blank look* “...the blue one?” “OH.” Anyway this struck the wife as hilarious and now they’re all just “the blue one.”) Yes, even the UK alts.

Possibly the most tragic one, though...see, I was trying to express “she has the absolute sweetest eyes I’ve ever seen and her entire vibe to me is ‘would miss work trying to coax a stray cat out from under a car.’” What I actually said was “you know, sometimes Abby Mueller kinda looks like a cow, but in a good way?” Look, I’m just saying, if you want to see the gentlest, kindest and most beautiful eyes you’ll ever see, go look at a Jersey cow. Whoever decided “cow” was an insult has never actually seen a cow. But...yeah, everyone’s favorite wine aunt Seymour is, in this household, known as “oh, you know, cow eyes.”

#broadway nerd #six #personal

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belizedeservesbetter · 3 years ago

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Six is Super Fun But Also Kinda Bad

sorry not sorry ‘bout what i said...

In a way, I’m not entirely convinced Six is actually a musical. It feels more like a concert than anything, with a paper thin plot and dialogue that had me constantly cringing. However, much like a concert, I was there for the music and the music was of course fantastic.

To begin, I want to say that I won the $30 lottery seats for this, which put me in the front row. To be very honest, I would not have paid any more than that to see this show. It is only about 70 minutes long and is again very much a concert and not a musical so I really couldn’t justify paying even a TKTS price for it. Unfortunately, the cheaper seats are usually in the back of the theater and this is very much a show where you want to be as close as possible.

I really expected to be blown away by this show, but honestly? I was more disappointed than anything. The plot is genuinely bad and the dialogue is genuinely awful (filled to the brim with “lol” and social media references) and I’ll definitely be going into spoiler territory here but honestly it doesn’t even matter because there isn’t enough plot to hold the weight of a spoiler in the first place.

So basically the premise is these six queens are performing this show for you (how? why? don’t think too hard on it) since they have decided to form a girl group but will now hold a contest to see who had it worst with Henry VIII to see who will become the leader of the girl group - even though girl groups don’t really have leaders but again don’t think too hard on this. The six queens then each sing a song about their life and somehow skip all the actual interesting details about themselves before Catherine Parr (wife #6) is like guys WAIT we shouldn’t be pitting ourselves against each other! We should be feminist and be a TEAM and then they all turn to the audience and are like ACTUALLY we were a team all along and this was all a trick to get us the audience to see how bad comparing women is. Why was it a trick? Didn’t we already know comparing women is bad? Anyways, this “plot twist” occurs like ten minutes before the show ends and is just... kinda there? It’s very much a “oh okay” moment where you really can’t do anything but accept it for what it is because we know they’re gonna do the big MegaSix number at the end and that’s the best part anyway.

But like I said before, the music is super fun and super catchy and in the moment is an absolute BLAST. So I had a fantastic time watching it because it’s a fun time, but once you give the show one single shred of thought it kind of falls apart completely.

Also, the costumes are super gorgeous and I loved getting a front row seat to see all the details. I visited the Showstoppers NYC! exhibit in August and got to speak with one of the guys who hand makes Katherine Howard’s costume so it was very cool getting to see them all live and in person.

Since the cast is only six people, I’ll go through them all (and their songs) one by one. Uniformly they were great, but I will admit that almost none of them stayed in character unless it was their turn to have their number. I blame this on the weird and clunky choreography, which is so excessive and so many moves that make them all look like robots.

First up is Catherine of Aragon, played by Adrianna Hicks. She sings “No Way” which is a fantastic first song of the Queen Competition. She really commanded the stage and was super interactive with the audience.

Next up is Anne Boleyn, played by Andrea Macasaet. Her song is “Don’t Lose Ur Head” and it’s the best song in the show. It will in fact be stuck in my head forever and I loved how bubbly and fun Macasaet was! She is so tiny but her energy filled the entire theater! Her costume is also my favorite of the queens.

However, as much as I loved her performance, I do take issue with how Anne Boleyn is portrayed. In actuality, Anne Boleyn was wicked smart and very religious and was not the ditzy having fun all day long person that she’s portrayed as. Her sister was Henry’s mistress and Anne really didn’t want to get involved with him. She was more interested in religion than anything else.

(and a side note, something I found odd was Catherine of Aragon’s brief mention of Mary but Anne Boleyn not bringing up Elizabeth at all. She even jokes about writing lyrics for Shakespeare in a better version of her life but Elizabeth was not only one of the most influential queens England had but also saw Shakespeare’s plays)

Which brings us to Jane Seymour, played by the lovely Abby Mueller, who looks and sounds strikingly like her sister. Unfortunately, Mueller is given the very worst song in the show in “Heart of Stone.” Oh man. This is a bad one. It’s the lowest energy song and has the worst lyrics and since you know the song is literally about Henry VIII you absolutely cannot get behind it. It’s a shame, because Mueller is giving the best performance in the show, and also the most consistent one!!

This brings me to my wider Jane Seymour Problem. Jane’s whole character is basically “wait but actually I loved him” and the show kinda brushes aside the whole fact of Henry being completely awful whenever it comes to Seymour. Anne Boleyn does chime in a couple times with a “but he literally beheaded me” but Seymour is consistently trying to spin it around. The show doesn’t know how to navigate the fact that Henry probably only loved her because she gave him a son and that very little is actually known about this woman. In Jane’s little “better version of her life” in the last song, she actually pairs herself with Henry as a long term relationship/family thing, even though the whole point of the song before is that they don’t need Henry? Make it make sense, Six! Make it make sense!

I’m gonna skip right over “Haus of Holbein” because that song was stupid and that whole sequence was stupid.

Luckily the next song was way better, with Brittney Mack’s Anna of Cleves bringing down the house with “Get Down.” On the cast album, “Get Down” is the one I always skip but I don’t think I will anymore because Mack was incredible. She made that song one of the absolute highlights of the show. She was absolutely fantastic.

Usually Katherine Howard is played by Samantha Pauly, but she was out and tonight the character was played by Courtney Mack, who was really wonderful. She can Sing with a capital S! “All You Wanna Do” is a really great song and it actually dives into interesting emotional territory and I wish more of the songs had that! I wish the show had more of that!! K Howard is usually the one no one talks about so I was glad she had a really good song that really laid out her life in a fairly raw way.

Coming in at song number six is “I Don’t Need Your Love,” sung by Anna Uzele’s Catherine Parr. Uzele has a lovely voice but her song is kinda boring and the fact that it’s tied so tightly with the “plot twist” is kind of a let down.

Then the six queens all sing a song (called “Six”) about what they would have liked their lives to be, and most of them are kind of absurd and have to do with becoming pop stars even though that wasn’t a thing back in Tudor England.

Ultimatey, the show is ridiculously fun but has absolutely nothing to say, even though the show really thinks it’s saying something about feminism and history. It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. The closest it gets is “All You Wanna Do” and even then that’s barely breaking the surface. The show is also very high energy and high fun, so they expect you the audience to also gloss over all the inaccuracies and weird Jane Seymour stuff.

This show is being built up as this pinnacle of feminist theatre but honestly it’s mostly mediocre writing that’s saved by catchy songs and powerhouse performers.

Looking back at this review, it does look pretty negative but I swear I had a really good time! I swear it’s very fun! It just isn’t anything more than that.

#six #six the musical #broadway #review #queendom

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