#anyway i hate rudolf affaire mayerling

[fitzrove]

Musical questions! 28, 29, 30?

[To celebrate 400 followers I'm finally answering all these from my drafts :D]

28. What's a musical that you saw ages ago that you're still not over? What about it made you love it so much?

If watching a video counts as "seeing": Tanz der Vampire. I saw posters and ads on the street for the Helsinki 2016 production... but that was after it was already over, in April/May!!!!! I was so curious about it but forgot after the initial wondering. Then that summer I went to a two-week language camp/course in the UK (my first time abroad without parents!) where we were singing Total Eclipse in the music room and an older "camp counsellor" girl from Germany told us it's actually from a musical, and that night I took it as my sign to look it up and ended up watching sooo many clips on YouTube over and over for the rest of my time at that course, and eventually the whole 2005 proshot with English subs.

Something about it spoke to me in a way no other musical had before - I mean, I had liked POTO for years, that summer I also started listening to Hamilton, but neither of those rattled in my head to the same obsessive degree as TdV did <3

It came into my life at a special time, has come and gone since, and whenever I get back to it, it still hits the hardest out of any show I've ever watched. Whether it be the epic orchestral rock score (I'm not like an über Steinman fan but I like his stuff), the level of emotion (some would say melodrama <3) and the way the show itself has come to symbolise a lot of things to me over the years (freedom to leave an environment you're not happy in and remaking your life elsewhere; freedom to be yourself and go after what you want even if it goes against what's conventional or societally acceptable; the world belonging "to the shameless and the wicked" and the rest of us just having to roll with it). So yeah >:)

I've now seen TdV live three times: once in Stuttgart in autumn 2021, and twice in Hamburg this summer (2024). It wasn't perfect but it meant a lot :') I've also met Aris Sas and he liked my headcanons and hot takes, and wished me the best in my life and my studies 😭��

29. What's a musical that you used to really like but don't anymore? What made you fall out of love with it?

I think I'm falling out of love with Wicked!! It was one of the first shows I saw live (back in Finland) and that production left a lasting impression on me, but after seeing it in London twice (heheh) I think I'm satiated :') I will still want to see the movie though! I probably just won't have the energy to engage that much with the hot takes it will probably spawn kslsls. Plus I hate the discourse that the movie is stirring up about how the book is better and that should've been a movie instead dkkdldls. I think the book is kind of terrible and takes itself too seriously. Plus the sex scenes are bad bad bad bad....

Anyway - still like the musical, I think I have just overlistened to it and I don't usually find too much to "chew on" in the fandom space :D Especially since I don't know/care about Wizard of Oz lore 😭

30. What's a musical that's grown on you since you first saw it or listened to it? What made you appreciate it more?

Rudolf: Affaire Mayerling.......... I still think it's terrible but I keep making friends with people who know that it's inaccurate (and don't really care about defending its honor skkskd) and still love it for being camp 😭 I used to have a very negative view of it but now I can just listen to Du bleibst bei mir on repeat, enjoy wholeheartedly and pretend it's the whole show 😌 obligatory mention that I met and took a pic with Wietske at the Les Mis München stagedoor this year 😭😭😭😭🙏🙏

[lunatic-fandom-space]

Idk if i ever really talked about rudolf: affaire mayerling after i finished watching it, but ive been thinkinh about it again so I guess Im doing that now

Honestly I didnt like it very much, I feel like the worst parts of any frank wildhorn musical are whenever theres a a really slow boring lovesong and in those took up like half the score here, which is a shame because I do remember liking a lot of the non-lovesong songs, although I cant really remember a lot of them. Like, pretty mich the only songs from this musical that I can remember are Du bleibst bei mir, Fäden in der Hand and Mein süßer Held because surprise surprise, the sick freak whose favorite musical is the one where they romanticise suicide likes the song from a different musical where they compare suicide to sex

But anyway, thats not the reason I was thinking about this musical again, the reason I was thinkkng about it again was that other than me not liking the songs, I also found it hard to enjoy because I could not for the life of me tell the characters apart, and for the longest time I couldnt figure out why because i usually dont struggle with face blindness at all, but I think i figured it out

Its because I didnt wanna look at the screen whenever rudolf was onstage because he just made me cringe that much. Did anyone else experience something like that? Like, i dont think its just because the actor didnt have charisma or chemistry the other actors because I feel like it was so severe that Im like "theres no way someone can naturally be that rizzless and cringe, they had to have intended for him to come across like that and done something to make him as pitiful as possible" but the thing that throws me off is the fact that i cant figure out what exactly makes him so cringeworthy to me, like Im pretty sure he just acted like a normal guy, i dont remember him actually doing anything that would make me hate looking at him, he was just so naturally unbearable idk what it is