#musical theatre adaptation

[mafiaamongstus]

The people have spoken (it's me I'm the people). They want a musical adaptation of this storyline. What is everyone's vocal range classification and what are they singing about in their main song?

WOOO ALRIGHT SO!!!

Vocal Range Classifications:

Olo: Baritone

Rouvan: Bass

Rynn: Mezzo Soprano

Joris: Alto

Odil: Alto

Jitil: Tenor

Kyle: Tenor

Main Song Topic:

Olo: honor and duty, something like Seize the Day from Newsies but instead of whimsical newsboys its government agents

Rouvan: probably has the mentor song, smth like History has its Eyes on You (Hamilton) or Or he just has his own song about life in the medical wing dealing with idiots.

Rynn: the dreamer song maybe, about like, what she'd do if she didnt have to deal with the Wall gunning for her. Along the lines of like, Santa Fe (Prologue) from Newsies or something like that

Joris: The fact that she's secretly an imposter, and dealing with the fact that she's hiding from everyone but wanting to connect with them because being a solo Kinling is utterly BRUTAL. Maybe like Waving Through a Window from Dear, Evan Hansen or Dead Mom from Beetlejuice.

Odil and Jitil definitely have like a shared song, and its probably like, the motivational song of the musical. Them hyping everyone else up. Maybe along the lines of The World Will Know or Once and For All from Newsies.

Kyle absolutely has the introductory song where he tells you a little bit about everyone else. Think Alexander Hamilton (from hamilton) or like, Ex-Wives from Six

[benevolenterrancy]

~loathing, unadulterated loathing~

[fircyrk-na-kolkach]

guy who's seen 5 musicals: omg guys Wicked is so good

guy who's seen 55 musicals: the only people who've heard about my favorite musical are me and maybe actors who have played in it, and it hasn't been played anywhere for 40 years anyway

guy who's seen 150 musicals: omg guys Wicked is so good

[screenshotsonpinterest]

Thinking about how Starkid’s raised nearly half a million dollars for Cinderella’s Castle simply by being transparent about where their money goes, being nice to their fan base, hiring unproblematic, talented people, and creating good, original art

[real-odark]

here the spacerap king (/j) coukd you PRETTY PLEASE draw some spaceraps.. it can be platonic or romantic i don't really care!!! 🙏🏻🙏🏻💜💚

i love these two so much,,..,.. thye had such an interesting relatiosnhip i need more productions to explore. right now. here they are....,...,...,

[pastelcatnip-x3]

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ Glinda Stimboard ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹♡

༄ 🌸🎀💗 x👛👑🩰x🌸🎀💗 ༄

[writing-hurts]

The Wicked movie has an epic avengers endgame-level applause-worthy moment yall

Like I had to physically restrain myself from giving a standing ovation right there in the movie theatre

[shiningstarr15]

Been listening to the Wicked movie soundtrack for the past week now like I literally can’t get over how good the movie was! 💚🩷😫

[firthbetterorfirthworse]

Pride & Prejudice: A New Musical (2020)

god help me, I am on my knees

I adored this. It was a delight. Did they change things? Of course, once again proving that my heart is a fickle creature; changing things is terrible and insulting unless of course, I happen to like the change, in which case it is unique and commendable and wonderful.

Occasionally I come across a show that makes me wish I was rich enough to fund a vanity project solely so I can perform in it, and this was one of those.

In the US, this is currently on Tubi which is a free service and I am extremely grateful for it.

Mary and Jane are given lines that make us laugh for very different reasons, in character, which I adore. For instance, Mary is the one who announces where each scene is taking place, and gets more annoyed that it's her job as the show goes on.

There's an adorable duet with Bingley and Jane about the things they would say, if they weren't so shy. This Bingley is so shy he becomes tongue-tied, which is not the usual depiction of gregarious Bingley but I feel is still true to the heart of Bingley's character.

Caroline gives the best sign-offs to her letters, "yours ever, Caroline Bingleyyyyyyyy" in the flattest affect possible. It's passive aggressive and beautiful.

The banter between Darcy and Elizabeth is at Netherfield is so quick, which I really appreciate - makes it seem more like a quarrel, and leads to this beautiful perfect moment that is what introduced me to the show. If all you watch of it is this 20 seconds, it's worth it:

Darcy's songs are more of a pop vibe than I would have expected, but Justin Mortelliti rocks it so well I love it anyway.

There's a fantastic Collins song where all the Bennet ladies are lined up and he's singing about picking who will have the honor of his hand, and the Bennets are singing a counterpoint that is essentially oh please no don't pick me. And Elizabeth gets a fun, fairly comedic refusal song.

Lady Catherine gets a surprisingly almost jazzy song, with a chorus of servants talking about how grateful they are for her advice. At one point she makes a rebuttal and Darcy guffaws loudly until he abruptly slaps his hand over his mouth.

If you don't know the rules of musical theatre, when the emotion becomes too much for words, song breaks out, which means Elizabeth starts singing during her refusal of the proposal scene (love). This Darcy actually opens his mouth to defend himself, but Elizabeth refuses to listen. Leading to an amazing line in the next scene "I've written you a letter - since clearly I found 'speaking' far too challenging." (Also, the bitter Darcy song after her rejection? yes please. Fuckin' Broadway tenors and their ridiculous range, man, sure just pop those high notes and make my soul thrill that's fine I didn't need to have equilibrium today)

Jane has a beautiful song and reprise about how she's definitely not going to think about Bingley any more.

Cute scene where they run into each other at Pemberley. This Darcy spies Elizabeth and sneaks up on her, which is fun.

Did I become immediately obsessed with Darcy's song "The World She Lives In" where Darcy sings about how he's a better man because of Elizabeth, and listen to it on repeat? Yes, yes I did.

There's a fantastic song about being ruined that really captures the despair a lot of movies can't.

When Bingley and Darcy return to Longbourn at the end, Bingley is so shy he can't speak. He sings about what he would say, but in reality says nothing. It's comedic and wonderful.

And the writers love us - they really love us! - they gave us a scene of Darcy rehearsing what he's going to say to Elizabeth and despairing at his inability to speak in her presence: "Miss Bennet, how good it is to see you again...........and after that I'm blank. Maddening."

Of course it's all happily ever after and I may or may not have watched it twice before even posting this. And then someone showed me a list of other P&P musicals, which I will now be watching ALL OF because I love both of those things and them converging delight me beyond reason.

Anyway. Go watch it. Just watching this made up for watching all those hallmark movies. Joy.

[inbarfink]

Okay, so I accidentally thought about Stage Productions of Dr. Horrible Where There’s Not Enough Male Actors So Billy is Played By a Woman too hard again. And the thing is, well,  I say ‘Stage Productions of Dr. Horrible Where There’s Not Enough Male Actors So Billy is Played By a Woman’ and not, like, ‘Female!Billy Productions’ because in all of the ones I’ve seen the script is unchanged and so the character is still textually a man. Super-minor characters like the Mayor and the two Newscasters or even Bad Horse can sometimes get genderswapped, but usually the kind of people dedicated enough to DHSAB to want to create their own recreation of it don’t want to change the script too much. So Billy remains gendered the same way he is in the original.

But also… Dr. Horrible isn’t gendered that much in the text of the script. Like, he gets talked about in third-person way less often than the other two leads (so there’s less places where he would be called he/him/himself), he’s not referred to using gendered terms as often as the two other leads, ‘Billy’ can work as a gender-neutral name and ‘Dr. Horrible’ is 100% gender-neutral. As such, the only textual references to Dr. Horrible being a dude are:

Refers to himself as a guy in ‘My Freeze Ray’: ‘I’m the guy who makes it real/the feelings you don’t dare to feel’

Refers to himself as a man in the title line of ‘A Man’s Gotta Do’

Moist calls him a man in the line ‘look at me, Man, I’m Moist!’

Refers to himself as a guy in ‘Brand New Day’, ‘Go ahead and laugh/Yeah I’m a funny guy!’

The one time Dr. Horrible is called by a third person pronoun is during ‘So They Say’, when Moist notes that ‘he’s still not picking up’

During ‘Everything You Ever’, he sings ‘My victory’s complete/so hail to the king’. Implicitly calling himself a ‘king’.

So, like, what that means is that if a production did just want to genderswap Billy… it’ll be considerably easier than doing it with either of the other two leads. There’s basically just a few lines you have to change and basically nothing else.  

Like, ‘I’m the gal who makes it real’ is really a no-brainer. ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ is an Idiom and I could see a woman quoting it without it meaning anything. (And in a pinch you can replace it with the gender-neutral ‘one’s gotta do what one’s gotta do' or maybe 'I've gotta do what I've gotta do').

“He’s still not picking up” often gets cut from stage reworks of ‘So They Say’ anyways or swapped for something like ‘Doc’s still not picking up’ to make it clear who’s Moist talking to without the Magic the Kuleshov Effect Really. The only line that offers any meaningful challenge is in ‘Brand New Day’ and 'Everything You Ever' cause that use of ‘guy’ and 'king' is part of a rhyme, but I still feel like it’s not the toughest one to solve. 

… of course, I keep saying the three main characters because Moist isn’t actually gendered once in the entire script. So basically every time a production gets a girl to play Moist that Moist has a Gender Quantum Position. 

But, with all due respect to Moist and their Quantum Gender, that’s just not a change I find as interesting as the possibility of a Female Billy. Like, hey! We’ve got a second female character who is not primarily defined through her romantic relationships and survives through the end of the narrative and has a kind of a Gross Power you don’t really see for a female super-character, that’s… kinda neat. But I don’t really think there’s anything in here that really shakes the basic thematic undercurrents of the movie the way Female Billy does. Female Billy has a really the highest rate of Implied Changes to the Meaning of the Text Caused by the Change Vs. Actual Changes Required to the Text

Because, okay, look… Would making Dr. Horrible a woman fix every single thematic problem people have with the DHSAB Narrative forever and ever and make it the Politically Perfect-est Musical Ever? Nah. Does it arguably create its own set of problems with the whole Tragic Toxic Lesbian Trope? Yeah… 

But that’s why I’m advocating for it not as some sort of Remake that’s gonna be the New Definitive Version That Fixes Everything, but as a stage production. A new version that exists in the Kaleidoscopic Multiverse of takes that the stage inherently creates. Not Ultimate, not Definitive, not ‘The’ version. Just A Version I think should exist. Because even if it’s not a change that’ll Fix Everything, it’s still gonna change things in a way I, personally, find very Compelling.

And I was thinking, as part of this train of thought, that if I were to do Lesbian Billy, that for Penny’s role, I would try and cast a girl with a very butch and/or nonconformist haircut. Cause, like, at the start, the one line Billy wants to tell Penny is

And that way you can connect it with how nonconformist hairstyles are used as a way to communicate queerness to other queer people with some plausible deniability from Mainstream Society. So it’s not just that it helps explain ‘oh, that’s why Billy even assumes her attraction could be mutual’, wanting to tell Penny that she loves her hair is a whole thing of

Or rather, because it’s Billy, more like

So that’s another layer of Added Thematic Meaning just via casting choices, without changing anything about the exact text of the script!

And, you know, charity, compassion and kindness are not Exclusively Feminine Traits. Penny could be kinda gender-nonconformist while also being innocent and maybe a bit naive. And, y’know, she’s a damsel in distress when compared to the characters who have super-strength and super-science at their disposal.

And then I thought, well, maybe we can also show Penny dressing more feminine during her time dating Captain Hammer, so there’s kind of an unspoken implication to the audience that maybe CH is pressuring her into being more gender-conformiming. Which isn’t just a New Way in Which Captain Hammer is terrible,  it also connects with how he, as a superhero, functions as an upholder of the status que that Billy is trying to upends (and again, it makes ‘love your hair!’ an actually Really Important Line! It’s Billy showing that, even if her attraction right now is kinda shallow. She is appreciating something about Penny that is her choice and CH is probably trying to take away from her.)

And, like, even in readings of the DHSAB narrative that try and make it as critical of Billy as possible, you always kind hit a snug that there is also an unspoken but present assumption, that while Billy does kinda suck, he could’ve been a good romantic partner to Penny if he just Got Over His Shit and is still always better than Captain Hammer despite… not really doing a good job establishing why. 

So this thread does give at least one clear reason for why Captain Hammer is absolutely worse for Penny than Billy is, without necessarily letting Billy off the hook for all the way she does still kinda Suck.

You know, since we’re talking about changing as little of the actual dialogue as possible, the audience might not be able to tell if Penny is an out-and-proud Bi woman and Captain Hammer is pressuring her to be less Obviously Queer or if she still hasn’t fully processed that her affinity towards gender-nonconformity is also somewhat connected to her sexuality and the whole debacle is her shoving herself deeper into the closet… but I think that if the audience notice Penny suddenly changing into girlier clothing after she starts getting close to Captain Hammer that’ll be enough to create a visceral “Oh, this guy is BAD” reaction of sort.

Plus, like, the way the narrative kinda treats Penny slowly sobering up to Captain Hammer’s bullshit and realizing she’s not actually in love with him

is treated as interchangeable with the process of her gradually falling in love with Billy

that would hit as less Weird, at least thematically, if we have that thread of Captain Hammer representing, like, Heteronormativity and the Patriarchy Billy and Penny both being girls....

And that’s when I came to realization

of what I was actually doing.

[snekjoy]

The good (matilda 2022) the bad (dear evan hansen 2021) and the ugly (cats 2019)

[himblebo]

What’s wrong babe? You’re thinking about Glinda’s face before she is handed the torch to light the funeral effigy of her friend? Her best friend who was fundamental to the woman she has become? The woman that she abandoned at the most pivotal moment of their lives in an act of cowardice that she has spent the rest of her life running from? Her best friend that, through her own lack of action when it counted most, is widely believed to have deserved her murder?

[purple-mushroom-cap]

something something musical adaptations of popular media pieces give allowance for the nuances not explicitly mentioned in the original source materials because of how character-centric musicals inherently are

[talesofsorrowandofruin]

PERIOD DRAMA APPRECIATION WEEK 2024

Day 3: Favourite Costumes: Dimitri (Takarazuka Revue, 2022-23)

Bonus: close-up screenshots under the cut:

[asexual-juliet]

outsiders book purists you are allowed to have strong opinions about and fundamentally disagree with the musical changing the way dally’s suicide plays out but don’t act like they did it for no reason like it is abundantly clear why that choice was made

[perhapspluto]

we as a society should have made an example out of tom hooper while we still had a chance. now every movie musical has the "ooo we recorded live singing" gimmick and no one has LEARNED