#hes kept every playbill from every show he's seen since he was 15 he keeps them on a shelf in his room i want that collection when he dies

[vraska-theunseen]

stopppp i saw jacob geller's newest video show up the hour it came out but i put off watching it because i was like god i save everything i get so sad thinking about the media i love that i'll lose so many things i've used for research or hobbies are sources or websites saved only on the internet archive whole communities of artisans active in the 2000s and 2010s almost lost to time (i just keep thinking about decades old chainmail websites with some links active but countless other links to other sources leading to a 404 error message or a redirect. pages proudly declare other places to visit to learn more but the list consists only of graves!!!) only kept and allowed for me to see and learn from by the internet archive i won't be able to bear this. and just now i was like oh i'll watch it it won't be that big of a deal and i'm 30 minutes in and the whole time i've been like i'm imgoumg to throw up and im going to die

[belizedeservesbetter]

Pretty Woman the Musical Was So Bad That I Need to Apologize to Mean Girls the Musical

Oh Tina Fey, I’m so sorry I called your musical mediocre

Before I start, I would like to issue an official apology to Mean Girls the Musical. 

Mean Girls the Musical, you’re not so bad. When I said you were mediocre, I didn’t really mean it. When I called you amateur hour, perhaps I was being a little harsh. When I said you were one of the worst scores ever heard on Broadway, I was just disappointed, that’s all. I’m so sorry for calling you a bad musical, because after tonight’s performance of Pretty Woman, I know what a real bad musical is. 

Oh boy.

Where do we begin? 

One of my best friends (let’s call her M for privacy’s sake) and I like bad musicals. We like to have fun at trainwreck musicals. M and I both saw Escape to Margaritaville from the front row rush seats and had an absolute blast. That show is a mess and absolutely terrible, but did we have a good time? Yes. I have never seen M laugh harder than during this weird “snow” scene where the fake plastic snow flakes fell directly onto my head and only onto my head. We could barely breathe during that airplane scene because there was so much dry ice going over us but we were both howling with laughter at the dancing clouds. It was bad. But I knew it’d be bad. I expected it to be bad. Fins was one of the worst choreographed songs of all time but we still do the weird hand movement to each other whenever we hang out. 

But Pretty Woman? 

At least the seats were nice. For anyone wondering, while rush seats are front row, the lottery seats were the boxes. The boxes at the Nederlander Theater are super nice and completely full view so I had a lot of leg room and my seat was comfy and I wasn’t worried about someone tall sitting in front of me. 

The thing about this musical is that it is absolutely terrible in every way but not in a fun way like Margaritaville was. This was a musical that absolutely mediocre and amateur-ish in every way and I’m gonna tell you why. 

The score is in fact the worst score I’ve ever heard on Broadway. It’s bad. It’s childish. The songs have the most generic titles like “Welcome to Our World” “Freedom” “You and I” and “Rodeo Drive,” just to name a few. The lyrics are just as generic and out of place. At one point they rhyme thought with cop and it was just bad. It was like they put absolutely no thought into a single song, and it showed with the performances, but we’ll get to that in a minute. 

The book was, for the most part, just the screenplay of the movie. Garry Marshall is even credited for the book because so much of it is basically the screenplay. But the thing is, the movie is a movie, and for good reason. You can’t just take a movie and put it on stage and expect it to work the same way. Likewise, this musical had me questioning whether the original movie was good in the first place. Because really, if the dialogue was that bad, surely the movie was bad too, right?

But when thinking about it, yeah the dialogue never really was great. It was the star power of Julia Roberts and Richard Gere that made the movie, which brings me to the performances. 

To be honest, no one was good. 

I don’t know whether the bad reviews have gotten to Samantha Barks or she’s just doing the motions now, but she wasn’t good. Like at all. She just seemed like she was there. She didn’t command the stage or even really put much effort into it. Also what was her accent? It was incredibly distracting and screamed, “Look! I’m doing a Julia Roberts impression!” She didn’t really add to the character or elevate what was already there. She didn’t do anything differently than Julia Roberts did, and everything felt incredibly calculated and planned out, down to every laugh and hand gesture. 

Andy Karl isn’t gonna get out of this without a comment from me, because out of everyone I was most disappointed in him. I know he can do better. I have seen him do better. I feel like a disappointed parent because I know he’s a good actor but this just wasn’t it. He didn’t feel present. He was just going through the motions. You could tell he wasn’t feeling the show and didn’t really care for it. The only time you could see he was enjoying himself was at the end when he got to dance with Orfeh. Also, it was super awkward watching him and Samantha Barks kiss when she literally stood right next to them? Like I know it’s a musical and they’re in character but I wish Orfeh stood literally anywhere else other than where she was standing. 

Oh Orfeh. One day the right Broadway show for you will come. Same for you Tommy Bracco and Eric Anderson. You did your best but there was absolutely nothing you could do with the material. 

The choreography was weird because the bulk of the dancing was the cast standing in a line at the back of the stage and strutting forward to the beat of a song. Literally. With the exception of one or two other songs, that was literally every dance number. It didn’t work. It felt forced. 

Likewise, they blocked in a lot of time for applause during certain costume reveals, but no one clapped. It was awkward and we all knew they thought we would clap. Not even the drunk women in the mezzanine who wore blonde Vivian wigs clapped or cheered. 

Another thing, why was the Happy Man a character in this? He added nothing to the plot and the fact that he also played Mr. Thompson the hotel manager didn’t make any sense. Why did Kit all of a sudden want to become a cop? Why did they keep the Edward being afraid of heights thing when it clearly wouldn’t work on stage because we know that the outside of his hotel room is the back of the stage/is level with the ground? Why was Vivian/Kit’s apartment set so shaky and not built right? Edward had good reasons to be afraid of climbing up onto that set because I was afraid it was about to fall over, and I wasn’t the only person who thought this. 

However, the very worst offense of this musical is the fact that it was not about Vivian at all. It was about Edward. At intermission when M and I were talking about it, she put her hand over the Vivian half of my playbill and said that the problem with the musical is that it could be called Pretty Man. At the end of the day, Vivian was simply a pawn for Edward’s character growth. In this musical she was written as having less importance than Edward, which came through clearly in songs and staging. The signs all over the theater kept saying “Fierce Woman!” “Strong Woman!” amongst others, but I never really believed them. Having her hit the Bad Business Man at the end doesn’t make her a strong character, especially since that scene lasts for literally 15 seconds. They stripped away all of Vivian’s vulnerability on her own accord, only revealing it to benefit Edward’s change. 

About halfway through Act Two, I started to think about Angels in America and how amazing and moving that show was. I was wishing I was there instead of Pretty Woman. It was just so much better in every way. Does that make me a pretentious theatre elitist? Maybe it does but I’m not asking for every show to be Angels in America. I’m not, I swear. I don’t want every show to be Angels in America, even. We need fun shows and we need escapist shows but is it too much to ask for them to put a little effort into this? Please for the love of God just put some effort into your Broadway musical!