#saying this as someone who HAS seen musicals both on broadway and on tour and as slime tutorials

[tomatosnoupy]

it’s easy to complain about everyone only getting into wicked now that it’s mainstream but like. isn’t that the point. broadway is highly inaccessible and even when people are familiar with cultural touchstones that come out of it (like defying gravity) it doesn’t necessarily mean the story itself is known. sure the movie is different certainly and i won’t argue if it’s better or worse but at least now everyone can enjoy it

[dk-wren]

My Thoughts on Mean Girls the Movie MUSICAL

(Taking a quick break from my usual postings to go back to talk a little bit about one of my other interests...musicals!)

I just wanna share some of my thoughts about the new Mean Girls movie, so I hesitate to really call this a review or a critique. First and foremost, gosh its marketing. Don't even get me started. I have so many questions, but that is not what I want to really focus on. I just needed to get it out of my system. Now, let's begin!

I consider myself a fan of the Broadway musical. Probably not to the extent where I would consider myself its #1 fan, but I did follow its journey to Broadway and any announcements that came during its initial run and tour. I have yet to have the pleasure of watching it live (only through a slime tutorial on YT). So, for someone like me who has listened to the cast recording and watched any live performances by the any of the Bway or touring casts countless time, I can at at least appreciate that this movie exists to deliver the musical aspect to a larger audience.

Jaquel, Auli'i, and Renee (maybe in that order?) are the standouts to me. I absolutely loved Jaquel and Auli'i as Damian and Janis. I honestly think I have nothing but good things to say about their performances and portrayals. And again, from hearing and seeing clips of Renee in the Broadway cast, I was so happy to hear she was cast as Regina George in this adaptation. If you haven't already listened to the movie's soundtrack, most of the songs from the musical were adapted to fit more of a pop vibe than the original Broadway style. While I am happy to have like an official version of Renee singing Regina's song, I felt like her voice was toned down a bit to fit this iteration of the music. Don't get me wrong, she still sounds amazing but I didn't feel like she was able to truly show off her musical theatre chops.

Also, on the subject of the soundtrack, I listened to it before seeing the movie. And can I say, watching it really makes a big difference. I had a lot of thoughts about "Fearless" and "Stop" being cut. But, it kinda makes sense since those are the Act 1 closing and Act 2 opening songs, which in a movie, is not going to have that break, or intermission. In this still being an adaptation of Mean Girls, you have the scene where Cady tells Regina she can no longer sit with the Plastics and is subsequently shunned from the rest of the cafeteria. It's there, there's just no song to accompany it. But, it did feel like the right call since I think that part of the movie would've started dragging if those songs were both kept in.

"Where Do You Belong" is another song that was cut that I have mixed feelings about. I am still a little sad that it was cut, and I don't think it would've slowed down the pacing that much if left in. After watching the movie, while I can't say it was the right move to cut this song, it definitely didn't feel like there was something missing in this part of the scene. Now, this song leads into "Meet the Plastics" in the musical, which was significantly trimmed down for the film. It's kinda funny to me that the title is still plural when it's only Regina's part. In having this be the third song in the movie, and really the first one after the opening, there is a bit of power that inherently(?) comes with it in having Regina's entrance announced through song.

As I've seen others point out, two of Damian's songs were cut. So, I am really happy that they turned "Apex Predator" into a duet between Janis and him (rather than Cady and Janis). This is a change or perhaps addition that I really enjoyed. In the movie, this scene/song still takes place at Northshore High (with any mall scene being completely removed). Going along with the lyrics, the choreography resembles the musical in more ways than others, with the students acting like different animals. And it works but also it doesn't. The choreography definitely fits the lyrics. But that comparison between students as animals and high school as a savannah that is set up in "It Roars" does not happen because "What ifs" replaced "It Roars." As a result it feels a little weird (I hesitate to throw out the word cringey, but maybe a little bit). I'm familiar enough with the musical that I could tell they were definitely pulling from that number as it appears in the musical, but if I was not, I don't really know how I would feel.

The last song I'm gonna talk about is "What Ifs" replacing "It Roars." For the slight story adjustments that were made as to why Cady and her mom return to the US, the new song definitely works. It sets up Cady wanting to explore "normal" high school or teen life the same way "It Roars" does, but it supports the detail of Cady talking with her mom at some point about what she feels she is missing out on because they are in Africa (from what I could gather, the decision to move back to the US is much more driven by character interest or desire, rather than cut funding and becoming the only option). The vibe or style of this song also works well amongst the rest of the soundtrack, especially since I can't imagine "It Roars" translating that well into this new style.

For some smaller details that I really enjoyed, I really liked how (if I'm remembering correctly) when Karen is first introduced, she's wearing a necklace that has her name on it, but she's wearing it backwards (leaning into that "she is the dumbest person you will ever meet"). It was shown in a trailer or an ad, but during "Revenge Party," there is the section where Janis, Damian, and Cady try to embarrass Regina by turning on a sprinkler that will hit her (and ruin her makeup). I like how we see Ashley Park's character, the French teacher, try to mimic the "wet look" since it almost feels like an homage to her playing Gretchen in the musical, who is always described as trying to please or be just like Regina.

Everyone has their own opinions, so I can't say with confidence oh this type of person will love it or this type of person will hate it. But, I can say as someone who loves the musical, I really enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun and was generally smiling throughout the whole thing since in a way, this is the closest I've come to (and may come to) seeing the Mean Girls musical adaptation. Even then, this movie felt like it was trying to do its own take on Mean Girls and Mean Girls the Musical, and I'll give the directors and creatives credit, some of it really worked (and some didn't). I wanted to see this movie, but I was unsure how to feel going into it since I couldn't tell if it was going to be bad or decently/surprisingly good. And after watching it, my initial reaction is to lean more towards the surprisingly good, which makes me happy.

Go see it for yourself though and be your own judge! These are just some of my thoughts. Feel free to comment or share yours! Or ask me about any of my other thoughts about the film.

-Dakota Wren

[notebookmusical]

Okay I will tell you what songs remind me of Outsiders but keep in mind it might only make sense to me lol. Also Ponyboy is a character I really relate to so all of my favorite songs are or could be about Ponyboy. Examples of this is definitely You're on your own kid and Evermore, but Evermore also says writing letters addressed to the fire, which stuck out, but to me it could be the whole song. There are two songs in the musical specifically, one that remind me of I Hate it Here and the other one reminds me of the Lakes so the mashup she did is perfect to me haha. Another obvious one is Wildest Dreams..say you'll remember me staring at the sunset. I can't believe I never noticed that, cuz that quote was my favorite part in the book and Cherry was always one of my favorite characters and I love how the musical does a little more with her character. I honestly wanted to ask what you thought of their relationship but didn't want to influence you I guess. So some of these make sense in that way and I definitely only see it in the musical compared to the movie. 2nd verse of Fresh out the Slammer..swirled you into all of my poems, and 2nd verse of the Black Dog and bridge of it, and bridge of Smallest Man. If I die screaming can be about the rumble. Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead, were you writing a book, you deserve prison but you won't get time..it can refer to her bf or Johnny who are both now dead. How Did it End is a great song about grief that fits really well to me..it's happening again. They sing a song called Hopeless War together that goes well with the Great War too. Also Ponyboy to me is very tortured poet in general haha so maybe that's where it came from. I hope it makes sense to you but it overlaps with my personal connection too and other similar stories I've read and connect to.

I love how the Wicked movie inspired the casting on Broadway..it's so great! I just read about Nessarose finally getting played by an actress in a wheelchair too and just wanted to mention that. I also heard there will be a performance of Wicked songs at the Oscars now. I think I will try to see Parade as well but I totally get how it could be hard for people who don't know or like those kind of musicals that aren't a spectacle cuz it's pretty dark. I don't even know what the most serious show I've seen on tour is, cuz everything at least has some lighter parts. Maybe the color purple for me but what about you? Also I just saw the videos of Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren singing the Last Five Years...idk. it seemed a bit off but I'm still interested in the production. I don't think it's as bad as everyone is saying yet, based only on one song but I'm mainly familiar with the movie only and I love Jeremy's Jamie so much. I think you didn't like it either, which is fine lol.

I have not had a chance to check out the show yet..I keep forgetting but I mentioned it to my sister so I will remember when we start a new show. For cooking, I'm still a beginner and honestly just know basics and am better at preparing foods, like pizza, soups and sandwiches. What do you think are some easy meals or recipes to start with? Any tips, tricks to improve my cooking skills will be helpful. What about you? What are some of your favorites? Also we are trying to eat healthier so that makes it hard too with knowing what to make. I did Spanish in high school too, but I think it's great that you're trying to learn ASL. Also the same instruments for me..but I mostly said it was a maybe haha cuz I still haven't done it in years for my resolution

How was your week? I watched the Grammys on Sunday and was pretty happy with all of the winners. I was hoping Taylor would win best music video though. I can't believe Beyonce won album of the year and it was well deserved and amazing. I also loved that Taylor presented her best country album win. My favorite performances were Sabrina, and Chappell. Then Tuesday was the Zayn concert! I thought it was going to be raining but it didn't, which was good. Unfortunately we got there right when the doors opened and couldn't get a close spot still. There were a lot of people there and the crowd felt kinda squished. Also we are short so didn't have a good view for some songs, but the vocals and performance was great. It just felt kinda chill compared to other shows I've been to, and was kind of a short show, but still worth it and fun. It was also supposed to be the first show of the tour, but since he rescheduled, it ended up being the last show of the whole tour which was pretty cool. But the energy couldn't match that either. It's hard to judge though, when he is only one person just standing and singing and focused on his voice, which was amazing! So I'm happy I got to go and we were able to have fun as always. It made me think about Soccer Mommy's show and if it would be a similar vibe with just her singing since she had a softer album too. Happy Friday and I hope you have a good weekend and are having a nice start to February!

i still have not had time to watch the outsiders (movie or musical) but i do want to do it soon! i think life will be a lot calmer next month, so hopefully i'll be able to do that then!

i could definitely see how some of those songs fit with the characters, but will have to watch both the movie & musical to get a better understanding of the characters! i will come back when i do that 🤍

i've been listening to a lot of maybe happy ending, musical theatre wise, and i'm very intrigued by boop! and i've been reading about smash ... and well. i wish they'd just adapted bombshell instead.

i really like what i've seen of the new wicked cast, although i haven't spent a lot of time doing a deep dive! i don't think i'll be able to make it to parade when it's here, which is okay. but i am glad i'll see waitress. and we will see what else i see this season or next! i don't really like the jonas brothers, and while i love adrienne warren, i'm not sure that the last five years should be transferred to broadway in general... so we will see what happens! i have not been very impressed by nick jonas (in les mis, in tlfy, etc) but maybe he will prove me wrong! but i do loveeee the last five years as it is. we just did it here in seattle and i couldn't go see it and i'm still a little bit bummed :(

i am not very good at cooking but i do love baking! i'm going to try to cook a little more this year but honestly just haven't had time to really do that. one of my new crafty projects is trying to illustrate + writing out some of my mom's recipes!

i have not been very diligent about ASL lessons — i think i'm firmly stopped at lesson 5/8? so a little more than halfway there. i have been doing decently at learning italian on duolingo though — i have not missed a day yet! i feel like it's quite similar to spanish in some ways, and so sometimes i find myself reaching for the spanish spelling or pronunciation and getting tripped up over that.

i loved the sabrina and chappell grammy performances! and am very happy with how everything played out. have you listened to the giver yet? i'm obsessed with it. and what are your thoughts on short n' sweet deluxe? i'm glad you had fun at the zayn show, despite not being able to see a lot of it (i definitely relate)!! if you could attend any three concerts, what concerts would it be?

[mychrysanthemumdiaries]

Follow The Yellow Brick Road

Recently I got to watch Wicked in theaters starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. I came in with high expectations and left emotionally attached to this film. 

There’s so much I can say that I loved about this film that contributed to how amazing it is. The cast alone sold me. From Michelle Yeoh to Ariana Grande, who I’ve grown up loving, every cast member brought something special to their character that made this so special. Of course the music in the film was another selling point. Songs like Popular and Defying Gravity were already acclaimed and recognized, but as someone who was not as familiar with the other songs in the original broadway musical I developed a love for all the performances I watched. 

This film has accumulated a lot of hype in the past few months. The press tour and marketing has been crazy and it almost seems inescapable. It also generated positive reviews through critics and the general public, so it should be no surprise that the film broke box office records. Getting within the top 5 box office records in different categories and was even the highest debut for a movie based on a musical. (Deadline) 

This is not something that can be said for the original 1939 Wizard of Oz. 

Following my excitement for Wicked, I decided to rewatch the Wizard of Oz. I actually haven’t seen the film since the one time when I was young, so it almost felt like a first watch. To no surprise however, I became even more obsessed with the whole world of Oz. 

This film is already recognized as one of the most iconic and groundbreaking films in all of cinema. Its innovation in technicolor has made this one of the most visually appealing films in Hollywood. It’s the perfect example of a classically magical film for families to watch. To top it all off, we got to see Judy Garland’s star making performance as Dorothy. She delivers such an innocent and sweet performance that truly captures the essence of the film.

It’s hard to look back and think that this classic did not have as close of success as Wicked is having now. When the film was first released it was actually a bust and the studio lost more than the millions it put into making the film. It took the film a long time to generate its iconic prestige and its success was more dominant in the years to come. (NBC)

Regardless of the initial receptions each film received, they both have garnered much acclaim and garnered much attention to the story of Oz. The leading women in these films have laid a foundation for cinema and I hope that even more classics and blockbusters can come from such efforts.

[tending-the-hearth]

Bestie, as someone who has never seen newsies and only knows about it through your posts * Waves hand* rant? ramble? elaborate? summarize? whatever you want to call it! Imagine i had never seen Cats and you were about to change my life by telling me about it. Just absolutely go ham telling me literally everything about it. Literally anything. Which version should i watch first? Headcanons? Favorite scenes? Favorite characters? Favorite songs? Whatever! All of the above or another sixth thing i haven't thought of. I am curious about Newsies and i want to know more! Please Share! :D

YES YES YES THANK YOU BESTIE I'M SO EXCITED TO TALK ABOUT NEWSIES

okay so Newsies first started as a movie done by Disney, directed by Kenny Ortega (yes, THAT Kenny Ortega) and with music by Alan Menken, and it was released in 1992, starring Christian Bale as Jack Kelly!

the musical is based off of the 1899 New York Newsies strike, and focuses on the Manhattan borough, led by Jack Kelly, who strike against Joseph Pulitzer. David Jacobs and his younger brother, Les, join the strike, and the newsies work to bring in other boroughs and draw support from other kids working in the city.

now, the frustrating thing is that the stage musical deviates from the movie in a few points:

in the 1992 movie, there's a reporter named Denton, who offers to write about the strike. Also in the 1992 movie is David's sister, Sarah, who is Jack's love interest. the musical basically combines Denton and Sarah into Katherine, who is a writer for the Sun (like Denton) and who is Jack's main love interest.

the 1992 movie makes it VERY easy to figure out which newsie is which, and focuses on the newsies as a whole, and their relationships with each other. the musical is MUCH more centered around just Jack, as well as just his relationship with Katherine. In the 1992 movie, Jack and Sarah's relationship is more background.

i'd personally go with watching the 1992 movie first. it's the entire reason i fell in love with the show, and it's the version i honestly prefer. Christian Bale's Jack is SO soft and wonderful, and i love his interactions with the rest of the newsies. I'm not saying the Broadway version is bad, but it's different, so i'd say do the OG version first!

i honestly think the reason it was easy for me to come into the Cats fandom and start identifying the different cats was because of Newsies lmao. There are so many different background boys, but like i said, the 1992 movie makes it EXTREMELY easy to identify all of them. it's the stage version that makes it ridiculously hard to figure out who is who, which is why i suggest doing the original movie first, and learning the characters from that!

note: the Broadway version (specifically the U.S. tour) added a song for Crutchie called "Letter from the Refuge", which isn't included in the original cast recording, but the pro-shoot they did a few years ago has it in there!

ok so some of my favorite scenes from both the movie and stage show!!!!! (probably most of these will be from the movie lmao)

1992: Kloppman (the owner of the lodging house that the newsies stay in) wakes Jack up, and they have a very adorable father/son-type back and forth with each other

1992: where Racetrack (one of my favorite newsies) is asking for a towel, and Skittery (my other favorite newsie) says "for a buck i might" and the scene is just so PURE and brotherly like???? they're siblings?????

1992: "dear me, i fear the sewer may have backed up during the night" "or is it... the Delancey brothers!" they're little SHITS and i love them

1992: "baby born with three heads" "must be from brooklyn"

1992: gotta highlight @cutesiewooren's boy Blink here, his line "a saturday night with the mayer's daughter" gets me EVERY SINGLE TIME in "king of new york"

broadway: also speaking of "king of new york" it's impossible to talk about it without talking about the broadway line of "and when your famous... the woild... is yer erster!" "ya what?" "ya know, the fancy claim with the pearl inside?"

1992: "your honor, i object" "on what grounds" "on the grounds of Brooklyn" spot conlon my FUCKING beloved

broadway: any of the background dialogue during the "king of new york" tap scene, it's perfect

my favorite songs would probably have to be:

"Carrying the Banner"

"Seize the Day"

"Watch What Happens"

"High Times, Hard Times" (1992 movie)

"Something to Believe In"

"Once and For All"

now for favorite characters!! once again, because the 1992 movie does SUCH a better job at giving each newsie a unique personality and highlights them, it's mainly based off of those versions!

Mush... my love... my boy... my darling... my everything...

Racetrack... Racer... love...

(gotta include both max and ben's racers, they're iconic)

David!!! ofc!!!! my beloved!!!! he's just like me fr!!

spot conlon!!!!!

skittery!!!! i've done a whole appreciation post for him but he!!!!

literally i could name every single newsie bc i love all of them. jack is a given, but i specifically love 1992 Jack. I've been meaning to make a whole analysis post on it, but Christian Bale just really plays such a heartwarming and soft Jack. His interactions with the rest of the newsies, with Sarah, with the adults, you can just feel how much he cares about everyone around him.

a little fun fact about the 1992 movie:

while in production, the newsie boys basically shot a mini-horror movie called "Blood Drips Heavily on Newsies Square" that is the FUNNIEST fucking thing i've ever watched in my life

like it features all of the cast + a lot of the crew, and you can absolutely tell this was made by a bunch of teenage boys who had way too much time on their hands in between filming

you can probably find the whole thing on youtube, and i 100% recommend watching it

and a few cast crossover facts bc i can't resist:

Jess LeProtto (2016 revival Mungojerrie) was Jojo in the original Broadway cast!

Mukeni Nel (who was part of the 2019 international tour as Bill Bailey + Mistoffelees cover, as well as the 2020 Asia tour as Carbucketty) is currently playing Jojo in the UK Tour of Newsies!

Giuseppe Bausilio (2016 revival Carbucketty) was also in the original Broadway cast, and I believe later performed as Racetrack!

Mike Faist (who was a Delancey brother/ensemble member in the original Broadway cast) was the original Connor Murphy in Dear Evan Hansen

quite a few of the OBC newsie actors (Including Jess and Mike) were part of the 2021 West Side Story film!

Jeremy Jordan (OBC Jack Kelly) has done SO much but my favorite fact is that he voices Varian in the Tangled animated series!

also i saw Kara Lindsay (OBC Katherine) as Glinda in Wicked back in 2015 or 2016, and she was absolutely INCREDIBLE

and finally, a few hcs:

Jack is unofficially adopted by the Jacobs family as soon as they meet him, they see this scruffy jaded boy and immediately go "he's ours"

Katherine's newsie name is "Scribble", and ONLY Jack is allowed to call her "Ace"

Sarah's is "Mama Bear" because she can and will go absolutely feral if she sees any of her boys getting hurt

Spot can't swim (idk why, i just think it's funny if he lives near the docks and can't swim to save his life)

no one's actually sure if Specs needs glasses, or if they're fake. at this point, they're too afraid to ask, and Specs just thinks it's absolutely hilarious that they're trying to figure it out.

Patrick's mother (who's shown at the beginning of the movie during "Carrying the Banner") never finds her son, but she, like Mrs. Jacobs and Medda, becomes a type of surrogate mother for a lot of the newsies.

that's all i can think about right now lmao, but i love getting to rant and ramble about one of my absolute favorite musicals of ALL time!!! and you know i'm always down to answer asks about newsies any time, bestie!!

[to-know-how-it-ends]

Hadestown Thoughts

 - .Hello fellow humans (and intelligent cats) of tumblr! I saw Hadestown on Broadway exactly 12 days ago and I have some thoughts. It was my first Broadway musical in my entire life and it was absolutely the most amazing thing I’ve ever witnessed/heard since... December last year when I saw Wicked on tour. Let’s go song by song to show just how much of a masterpiece this is.

Road to Hell:

 - All of the actors just burst from the entrance door thingies and the wings! wowww. It felt so casual but so awesome

 - T. Oliver Reid was Hermes and he had such a remarkable stage presence, like gosh, that’s good.

 - I was a bit confused about the setup because it kind of looked to me like Hermes was a teacher and the chorus and Eurydice (Eva!!!!) were high school students. Maybe it’s just me. But then it all made sense.

 - Hermes stops at every member of the chorus, doing handshakes, fistbumps, etc., and then he stops at Eurydice and puts his hand on her shoulder, and lingers for a moment, as if he’s regretful for the story having to happen yet again

 - then he faces the audience, does that little lapel thing, unbuttons his suit (really shiny and i want it), puts his hands on his hips, and goes “alright!” to the chorus and then to the audience who repeats it back. Instantly drew us in, the fourth wall has officially been obliterated. I know Andre de Shields did an “aight” as opposed to “alright”, but it still had the same effect

 - T. Oliver Reid’s mustache.

 - the trombone player is a gift to this world

 - It’s a sad song -- in the jumpiest tune ever

  - this is really random but I really liked the yellow dress that the violin player was wearing

 - when Hermes calls Orpheus and he misses his cue because he’s so focused on that red shmata and then he gives that cute little wave

 - when Reeve and Eva pause in front of one another and Orpheus just has plain heart eyes

Any Way the Wind Blows

 - the fates! the harmonies! my god. They were fantastic! Soara-Joye Ross was Atropos, and she had such a beautiful low voice. Jessie Shelton played Laechesis (hope i’m not totally butchering the spelling) and she had such an interesting mixture of joy and haunting. She had this huge taunting smile, and she seemed to love it whenever she could manipulate people. Literally amazing. Kay Trinidad (nothing like the OBC) was Clotho, and I feel like she brought the group together. She was mystical and creepy. And also seemingly very cold. 

 - Eva Noblezada is a blessing unto this earth. I mean it. And her voice! Ahhhh! From the literal heavens. 

 - I don’t know why this part always sticks out to me and some people might not notice it, but there are 3 notes in the word “blows”, and when Eva sings it they all flow together seamlessly, like pouring water into a glass. She could be a disney princess and outshine all of them. She can do amazing belts and also go very low and high. She can do anything. In case you couldn’t tell, I’m just a little bit in love with her. 

 - also if you look really close, on the candle that Eurydice lights there are flower designs -- my inner English teacher says good symbolism and also foreshadowing

 - also, (wow i say that a lot) the acting in this (and the rest of the show) is incredible. I’ve seen a bunch of musicals in person before this (never on Broadway though), and while, granted, the acting is good, they act the relationships well, it’s very clearly acting. I don’t know what makes this so different but here it feels real, not fake. Maybe because Reeve and Eva are actually dating lol.

 - ooooooh.

Come Home With Me

 - Orpheus is a sweetheart. I’m also a little bit in love with him too. You know that a musical is good when you’re in love with both of the leads.

 - I didn’t think I’d like him originally, but (like Eurydice) I fell in love in spite of myself

 - Orpheus is adorable

 - You can sense Hermes’ admiration of him, even if Orpheus is always like this

 - when the chorus starts singing behind Orpheus. Someone said this in another review, and it’s very true: (i’m paraphrasing) It’s cool to see the balance of how awkward Orpheus is alongside how he commands attention with every note he sings

 - also another thing -- in ancient greek epics, it was common for a chorus to sing behind the hero so I liked that symbolism

 - That little scooch across the table Eva does when she’s like “oh, he’s craaazy”

  Wedding Song

   - I love the balance between Eurydice’s teasing and Orpheus’ earnestness and naivete 

 - Have I mentioned how adorable Orpheus is?

 - when Eurydice is like “you wanna take me home?” and pulls down her coat to show her shoulder. tee hee. and orpheus totally misses the innuendo and is like Yes!

 - He’s such a sweetie

- Reeve’s falsetto! I swear everyone in the cast has a voice straight from the heavens.

- La la la la la la la...

- When the chorus moves the tables for Orpheus to walk on in his ethereal state as Eurydice just looks on in awe

- I’ve watched a bunch of slime tutorials by now (only 12 days wow), and I know that the flower comes out of his hand, but I have to admit that when I was watching it I must have not been paying good enough attention because at first there was nothing in his hand, and then I blinked and there was

- that flower is beautiful by the way. I was recently visiting my grandparents and my Zaidy (grandfather) has a beautiful garden. I asked him if next year he could plant carnations but he wrinkled his nose and said that carnations were tacky flowers that don’t have a smell and that if you gave them to somebody it would be like an insult. But my mother likes them so I’ll get them for her. They will always be beautiful to me.

 - And then at the end Eurydice’s face when she looks at him like, “Maybe he is everything he’s all cracked up to be. And even if he’s not, it’s kinda cute.”

Epic I

 - I don’t have a lot of notes on this one except Reeve’s gift-from-god voice

 - and also the sweet Orpheus/Hermes father/son relationship

 - another difference i noticed from the soundtrack and seeing it live is that a lot of the words blend together when he’s singing in falsetto. Like when he says “And he fell in love with a beautiful lady” It sounds kind of like “beautifalady” but I actually prefer that because to me it sounds more raw, like it’s coming entirely out of him and not a songbook

Livin’ It Up On Top

 - Jewelle Blackman as Persephone is a force to be reckoned with. I’m not going to compare versions as to which one is better but I will say that the way Amber Gray and Jewelle play Persephone differ greatly

 - Jewelle used to play Atropos, so you know she has a MUCH deeper voice than Amber’s, but she does the same gritty things with her voice during certain lines like Amber. 

 - Eurydice’s reluctance to dance and then her getting right in the middle of it

  - Persephone instantly clinging to Eurydice and giving her some alcohol from her flask, and then Eurydice’s surprised gasp lol

 - The way Persephone lovingly touches Orpheus every time he passes her

 - The way Eurydice looked at Orpheus when he gave her and Persephone cups, like “Oh, he’s so thoughtful...”

All I’ve Ever Known

 - The mother of all love songs except perhaps As Long As You’re Mine. Actually no. This one is better

 - The way they hold one another! Ahhhh my heart

 - Like they simply can’t stay apart from one another, they live for the other

 - that violin solo and the love ballet

Way Down Hadestown

 - I knew this song was in the musical before I saw it because it’s in all the ads but I had no idea of the context

 - How Orpheus and Eurydice are lying on the ground and holding one another for half the song and then the other half just hugging and making out because they’re totally oblivious to the change

 - Basically singing that everything’s going wrong to the tune of sesame street

 - the umbrella

 - Jewelle’s forced smile when she says “you’re early”

 - When Hades says “I missed ya” in his crazily low voice. It’s even lower now, probably because Patrick Page has aged. hehehe that rhymed

 - When Eurydice says “Kinda makes you wonder how it feels” and then Hades lowers his shades and turns to her, and then Orpheus literally jumps in front of her

skipping a gathering storm because it’s like three seconds long and it’s usually always the same except Eurydice sounds more understanding and trusting in this than she does in the soundtrack and slime tutorials

Epic II

 - when I tell you how much this song broke my heart

 - And Orpheus’ empathy my gosh. How he’s able to empathize with Hades who is so different from him. It sounds like he’s the only one who truly understands how Hades is feeling

 - La la la la la la la

 - la la la la la la la

 - that’s it

Chant

 - by far the best song in the musical

 - highlights every single perspective:

  Persephone -- in shock of how much has changed in the underworld and how unnatural all this manufactured light and heat is so she’s trying to numb herself from it with wine, she cannot believe that this is what has become of the man she once fell in love with “I don’t know you anymore”

Hades -- the fact that he’s doing this all out of love for Persephone, to mimic the sunlight on earth so that she’ll want to stay, but he’s so blinded that he’s allowing himself to go down a very dark and dare I say evil (but somewhat i don’t want to say understandable but like you see why) path and he’s sort of jealous of her devotion to the people on earth

Orpheus -- trying desperately to finish the song, all he wants is to protect Eurydice with it, all he wants is for her to be safe and have everything he promised her because he feels she deserves it so much that he himself has also blinded into oblivion and can’t get the focus off the song. What he doesn’t realize is that they need food and shelter and fire now, but he’s just so swept up. Was that wrong? Yes, but he’s not to blame though he will blame himself. If I hear any hate for Orpheus I have an orange belt in Tai Shin Do -- that’s all I’m saying

Eurydice -- Orpheus showed her the way the world could be and she’s trying in spite of her gut to see that, to trust that Orpheus is going to “shelter us”, but she knows how the world is. She’s more cynical, but also more reasonable, and Orpheus isn’t helping to provide because he’s so stuck on his song which leaves her as the main provider until his song is done. She’s losing everything, and as the wind grows, her hope lessens and she becomes more desperate, and as everyone knows, desperate times call for desperate measures...

Hermes -- trying to get Orpheus out of his head, perhaps I can change the direction of the story, maybe it can go right this time, but I feel like by the time Orpheus has the a-ha moment and says “The gods have forgotten the song of their love”, and Hermes turns away, he knows that Orpheus has lost himself completely and there’s nothing he can do

The Fates -- acting as the doubt in Eurydice’s head and the wind, taking away everything she and Orpheus has, and you feel awful as they pull off Eurydice’s coat

The Workers -- Their chant is so ominous “Keep your head low” and that fact that the reason they are working is because of how much Hades has been changed because of his blindness and jealousy because of his love for Persephone

 - I just love that all the parts blend together. Visually, it’s a masterpiece, with all the turntables being used and the thingy that brings people up and down in the middle

 - eva’s pure desperation

 - the way it seems like orpheus is really trying to get the sound right, he’s repeating himself and scrunching up his face desperately

Hey, Little Songbird

 - Oh man, Patrick Page’s voice is like a massage on your brain

 - But it is so, so creepy

 - as is the song which is kinda the point

 - It makes it look like he’s trying to seduce Eurydice

 - You really get a sense of Eva’s range in this song. In four lines, she basically uses all of it, and I feel like that’s sort of the symbolism for Eurydice giving everything she has if you think about it but that could just be me.

 - Like the low part in “Wasn’t it gonna be the two of us?” and then the high “weren’t” in “Weren’t we birds of a feather”

 - I love all the bird analogies in it, like of course with the songbird thing, but then “I wanna fly down and feed at his hand, I want a nice soft place to land”

 - The pure grief and desperation (i use this word a lot) in her voice

 - “songbird vs. rattlesnake” kinda interesting when you think about it that the reason Eurydice went down to the Underworld in the original myth was because she was bitten by a snake on her wedding day and now she’s being lured down by a metaphorical “snake”, Hades

- “see how the vipers and vultures surround you” - this song is very reminiscent to me of Eicha (איכה) where it basically uses metaphors like this to describe the exile of the Jewish people

 - Hades is also doing this as a kind of petty way to get back at Persephone

 - God, Hades is so creepy

When The Chips Are Down

 - there is so much I love about this song

 - the vocals! Ahhhh! they were perfect! PERFECT and so spicy!

 - the taunting, ooh. You never know whether or not to love or hate the Fates in this, but it still stands that they have the best harmonies in the show

 - When they say “You got a knife in the back”, and then Eurydice acts like she’s literally been stabbed in the back. You can actually see the pain and tears on her face and feel it in your chest. Or, at least I could.

 - “you can have your principles when you’ve got a belly full” -- there was an interview with the cast where reeve was saying something like “The point of the show is not that people say, oh that’s what she would do, that’s what they would do in hadestown, but can you honestly say that you would?” Someone said this somewhere, can’t remember, but if the choice is between x and survival, it’s not really a choice. What they’re really saying in this song and actually throughout the entire show is they’re using the characters as a vessel to challenge you, would you really have been able to do it any differently, honestly? Can you say that you’d be better?

 Gone, I’m Gone

  - not many notes, just the single tear that fell onto the stage. Like gosh. That’s not acting, that’s real

 - Hermes wears glasses

Wait For Me

 - I knew this song from the ads but, like Way Down Hadestown, I didn’t know the context. 

 - Visually a work of art

 - the swinging lanterns! Oh my gosh. 

 - Hermes gets very stern in this. It’s almost like he’s mocking Orpheus a little bit, idrk what to think. Because like after he does that, he’s immediately helping him. 

- i wonder what it tastes like to have your mouth stuffed with cotton

  - orpheus’ desperate “noooo” when hermes is like, “But I guess you weren’t listening”

 - The flower and how lovingly and desperately (there I go again with desperate but it seems like the main word of the musical) orpheus holds it out, like that’s his piece of Eurydice and he needs to be back together with her, he can’t bear to be without her

 - The fates starting to also be a part of Orpheus’ story, acting as his doubt “who are you? where do you think you’re going? who are you to think that you can walk a road that no one’s ever walked before” and he’s like screw you, anything for my love

 - the lights start swelling as Orpheus sings la la la la la la la

 - when the stage opens up... the whole audience collectively gasped

 - the last verse and everything about it -- “I’m coming!”

 - I was a bit confused why this wasn’t the end of act 1 because it was a showstopper, and I still am a little bit confused, but I think the next song is worth it for the last song of act 1 and i will tell you why.

Why We Build The Wall

 - what I think is so funny is that this song was written in 2006

 - and it’s a kind of political musical. How did anais kind of prophesize Trump?

 - that low voice, holy cow

 - the fact that Hades refers to his workers as his children

 - and the fact that the thing they are building to keep out poverty is the same thing they think that poverty wants

 - But. I want to repeat something that Reeve Carney once said in an interview (he says the most meaningful things): “Oftentimes, physical walls are merely manifestations of emotional walls within oneself” 

Carney: “Walls that we build against intimacy, togetherness, unity, all those things. I mean, there's so many walls you can build that prevent you from feeling something. That's where I think it starts. And our show deals those themes. I mean ... love, fear, hope, trust, doubt." and then Patrick Page: "And the world now is so complex and moving so fast and so scary, that it's not surprising to me that people would want to think, 'Oh, well there's a solution. We will simply build this barrier and will keep all of the good people inside and we'll put all of the bad people on the outside and we'll be safe.' That's what Hades is appealing to.”

I don’t think I can add any more, what they said is so perfectly true. 

Wait one more Patrick quote:

"Any time you have someone who's trying to hold onto power, which is what my character is doing, he's trying at that moment to build up his own sense of himself, his own sense of power, because his relationship is threatened. Political things come from personal things, so he's feeling threatened in his personal life. He goes out and holds a rally in which he gets everyone to chant about building a wall."

 - oh and this is why it’s a good ending - we set the scene for act 2 and Persephone gets to say “Anybody want a drink?” before intermission

end act 1

Our Lady of the Underground

 - Jewelle and the vocals! wowww!!!!

 - there’s a CRACK IN THE WAaaALLLllLlL!

 - I wonder if Hades knew anything about this. Like there’s no way he’d allow his wife to run a speakeasy for his workers

Way Down Hadestown (Reprise)

  - we see Eurydice in her worker’s uniform, but she doesn’t have the head-cover-goggly-thing that the other workers do. 

 - Eurydice doesn’t understand why they’re working -- she introduces herself to the workers and is like what are you doing, we’re free?

 - then the Fates reveal what Hadestown really is -- freedom to spend eternity as basically a slave

 - “your eyes will look like that someday” -- and Eurydice is like i have to go back and then the Fates mock her for already losing her memories of the past

 - the fact that they sang this already but they sing it slower and then Eurydice understands -- no hate to Eurydice of course, but it’s kind of like when you say something slower so a younger person can understand. it’s sort of meant to be played as taunting and condescending

Flowers

 - gut-wrenching

 - my god

 - so so so sad

 - and the one thing she remembers is flowers and the fact that she has a lover. the symbolism!!!!!

Come Home With Me (Reprise)

 - Literally two seconds after Eurydice sings her grief ballad and says come and find me, Orpheus runs through the audience and goes up to the stage and comes and finds her. I was in the mezzanine, so I didn’t see him run through but that must have been a treat for the people in orchestra seats

 - I love the repetition, and of course the “It’s you,” “It’s me,” “Orpheus,” “Eurydice!” and then they rush into an embrace, they have longed to hold each other for so long and now they can’t let go.

 - “You heard me?” 

“...no.”

 - Orpheus thinks he can get her out and is so confused why they can’t just leave

Papers

 - The look of complete betrayal and fear and grief when he says it isn’t true and then Eurydice confirms that she belongs to Hades

 - Orpheus still presses on, and immediately asks to take her home

 - Hades’ laugh. An evil laugh if I ever heard one. But I started laughing too. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t know why.

 - Persephone’s trying to defend him but to no avail

 - Everybody beats up poor Orpheus! noooo. Also, during the beatup scene, were they like smearing red makeup on his face that we couldn’t see? Because I am pretty certain he has more cuts and bruises after the fight and he doesn’t leave the stage once during that whole encounter

Nothing Changes

 - the fates and their vocals can never be topped

 - they are always taunting everyone. They’re like the murphy’s law voice in your head -- anything that can go wrong will go wrong, why try to fight it

If It’s True

 - I’m pretty sure this is what you call the 11 ‘o clock number. Like No Good Deed in Wicked. Even if it’s not, it has the same effect. 

 - so incredibly inspiring.

 - sweet little orpheus has seen how the world is but still he clings to the hope that things can change and unintentionally starts a strike

 - a song of hope, resistance, and resilience

 - reeve’s voice, ahhh like powerful magic

How Long

 - This is the song I repeat the most because it’s pretty much the only female song I feel comfortable singing with the voice that I have

 - with jewelle how long is very very very low and it sounds amazing

 - It’s so beautiful

 - The metaphors! 

All of his sorrow won’t fit in his chest - figurative

It just burns like a fire in the pit of his chest - simile

And his heart is a bird on a spit in his chest - metaphor

How long, how long, how long

 - I also love the repetition of chest chest chest, bed bed bed, and sky sky sky

 - and how they duet at the end

 - “The sun must go on rising” and the riff on rising is another brain massage

 - shows how they both feel about their relationship and also as a parallel to orpheus and eurydice’s

Chant (Reprise)

 - is almost as good as the first chant and is still amazing

 - I wish they still kept Persephone’s part in it though so she could add to Eurydice’s parallel

 - the worker’s singing

 - you can’t really detect that much of a tune from Hades’ voice live, probably because Patrick Page aged, but still it sounds awesome

 - “I CONDUCT THE ELECTRIC CITY!!!!”

 - Hades is very scary 

Epic III

 - the best of the epics in my opinion

 - you get the whole finished la la la song with all the parts come together, and with reeve’s voice and the entire company singing backup it is vocal gold.

 - talk about killing them with kindness. 

 - like how a poor, young, beaten up boy in love manages to break down the shell of a mighty king simply by empathizing with him. he really did have a gift to give. 

 - and the parallel “It was like you were holding the world when you held her” to “suddenly I’m holding the world in my arms” and just the two love stories coming together

 - when Hermes says, “and brother, you know what they did” the way t. oliver reid says it, it sounds like an innuendo. the audience cracked up.

 - the cello and violin during Hades and Persephone’s dance and Orpheus accompanying them

 - when the flower appears for Hades

Promises

  - orpheus - “now what do i do?”

 - re-affirming their love for one another

 - Orpheus immediately doubting that Eurydice would want to stay with him after he wasn’t able to keep the promises he made in the Wedding Song and All I’ve Ever Known, asking are you sure you want to come back, I wasn’t able to provide for you -- “take me home”

 - Eurydice immediately reassuring him

 - the fact that it’s to the same tune as “say that you’ll hold me forever” in all I’ve ever known

 - Hades and Persephone hugging and dancing the entire time 

Word To the Wise

 - Hades faces a dilemma here -- if I don’t let them go, i’ll be seen as a heartless man and my workers will view him as a martyr for their cause and will continue to fight, and if i do let them go, I’ll never get my workers in line again and will be considered spineless

 - also, orpheus’ song touched him so much that it rebuilt his relationship with Persephone, so of course he feels pity for him and wants to let them go, but how can he do so without letting a revolution happen?

 - fates vocals are of course top notch

 - It’s kind of funny that word to the wise only has that line in it once and that doesn’t really have anything to do with the song

His Kiss, the Riot

  - Hades makes his decision -- he will let them go but make it a journey that he doesn’t believe a even a god could ever face -- it’s a very difficult challenge, but it can still be beat with the right amount of trust

  - interesting tidbit - the tune to “Who lays all the best laid plans” is the same tune that acts as sort of a theme whenever Hades comes in instrumentally.

Wait For Me (Reprise)

 - I really love the line that Hermes says “the dog you really gotta dread, is the one that howls inside your head, it’s him who’s howling drives men mad, and a mind to its undoing”. He is, of course, referring to doubt, and how one can get stuck inside their head. This is fOrEsHaDoWiNggg....

 - Orpheus and Eurydice holding each other for as long as they can until they have to let go.

 - All the workers following Orpheus

 - Persephone and Hades -- “Wait for me?” “I will.” We see their story end on a hopeful note, which I really like.

 - and then everyone sings WAIT FOR ME and my god the emotion

 -  eva’s belt!

Doubt Comes In

 - originally, when the fates start making him question himself, that’s just how it is but now when orpheus sings them out loud it shows he’s giving voice to these thoughts

 - like what if this is a trick. I can’t see or hear or feel the presence of eurydice and the workers? What if Hades took them all back without me knowing, why would he, the king of the underworld, willingly let them go for a poor boys song. we know from greek mythology that the gods are not above tricking mere mortals, they’ve done it plenty of times for this to be a valid doubt. It could also be, why would eurydice even want to follow me? I wasn’t able to provide for her, why would she want me anymore, he blames himself for her going down to hadestown in the first place

 - eurydice’s calls to him sound so beautiful, clear, and reassuring, and really highlight eva’s voice in all the best ways, but can orpheus actually hear her? i don’t know if that’s actually ever specified. 

 - when orpheus says “is this a trap that’s being played on me,” the vocals are so so good, another brain massage

 - and when he says “I used to see the way the world could be, but now the way it is is all i see” he’s lost all hope, his experience has broken him, he can’t be naive or hopeful anymore, he feels so compelled that he must...

 - he looks back and the audible gasp from the audience as the ground beneath eurydice starts sinking once more, and their final words to each other “it’s you” “it’s me. orpheus!” “eurydice...”

 - gut punch. I’m dead, I’m crying, they’re crying, Eurydice is gone and Orpheus is knelt to the ground where she sank.

Road to Hell (Reprise)

  - It’s a sad song. 

 - It’s a sad tale.

 - It’s a tragedy.

 - But we sing it anyway. (gaaaahhh the tears)

 - Cause here’s the thing.

To know how it ends

And still begin to sing it again

As if it might turn out this time

I learned that from a friend of mine

 - I liked how they started it again - Eurydice comes back in and asks for a match. It feels very full circle - which is the point.

 - He could make you see how the world could be

In spite of the way that it is

Can you see it? (the trombone here, beginning, swelling, signifying hope and new beginnings)

Can you hear it? (more trombone -- everybody bless the trombone guy)

Can you feel it! (the way T. Oliver Reid says this -- kind of like Andre, but also with a lot more vigor)

Like a train... Is it coming?

Is it coming this way?

 - and then we see that orpheus has indeed brought spring back -- just as he promised, and the chorus are back on stage in their normal clothes -- not as workers, as people starting once more

 - and persephone comes back. 

 - It’s a love song

 - orpheus and eurydice have the repeat of their bump into one another at the beginning

 - and everything begins once more

  - and we’re gonna sing it

We’re gonna sing it again.

And that’s just the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I can’t get it out of my system and I don’t want to. If you’ve stuck long enough to read this entire thing, bravo. I worked two days on this, so I appreciate it.

[unpopularwiththepopulace]

Don’t I Get a Dream for Myself ? – Bernadette Peters and the 'Gypsy' Saga

Gypsy. It’s perhaps the most daunting of all of the projects related to Bernadette Peters to try to grapple with and discuss. It’s also perhaps the most significant.

For someone notoriously guarded of her privacy and personal life, careful with her words, and selective of the questions she answers, the narrative around this show provides some of the most meaningful insights it is possible to derive in relation to Bernadette herself. The show’s ability to do this is unique, through the way it eerily parallels her own life and spans a large range in time from both Bernadette Peters the Broadway Legend, right back to where it all began with Bernadette Lazzara, the young Italian girl put into showbusiness by her mother.

The most logical place to start is at the very beginning – it is a very good place to start, after all.

(Though no one tell Gypsy this, if the fierce two-way battle with The Sound of Music at the 1960 Tony Awards is anything to be remembered. Anyway, I digress…)

Gypsy: A Musical Fable with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and book by Arthur Laurents, burst into the world and onto the New York stage in May of 1959. After closing on Broadway in March 1961, Ethel Merman as the world’s original Mama Rose herself led the first national tour off almost immediately around the country. Just a few months later, a second national touring company was formed, starring Mitzi Green and then Mary McCarty as Rose, to cover more cities than the original. It is here that Bernadette comes in.

A 13-year-old Bernadette Peters found herself part of this show in her “first professional” on-the-road production, travelling across the country with her older sister, “Donna (who was also in the show), and their mother (who wasn’t)”.

The tour played through cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, New Haven, Baltimore and Las Vegas before closing in Ohio in 1962. Somewhat uncannily, its September 1961 opening night in Detroit’s Schubert Theatre even returns matters full circle to the 2003 revival and New York’s own Schubert Theatre.

Indeed this bus-and-truck tour was somewhat of a turning point for Bernadette. She’d later remember, “I mostly thought of performing as a hobby until I went on the road with Gypsy”.

But while this production seminally marked a notable moment for the young actress as well as the point where her long and consequential involvement with Gypsy begins, it’s important to recognise she was very much not yet the star of the show and then only a small part of a larger whole.

Bernadette was with the troupe as a member of the ensemble. She took on different positions in the company through the period of nearly a year that the show ran for, including billing as ‘Thelma’ (one of the Hollywood Blondes), ‘Hawaiian Girl’, and additional understudy credits for Agnes and Dainty June.

The above photo shows Bernadette (left) with another member of the ensemble (Sharon McCartin) backstage at the Chicago Opera House as one of the stops along the tour. Her comment on the stage of the Chicago theatre – “I’d never seen anything so big in my life!” – undeniably conveys how her experiences were new and appreciably daunting.

Along the tour, she assumed centre-stage once or twice as the understudy for Dainty June, but playing the young star was not her main role. Unlike what more dominant memory of the story seems to purport.

Main credits of June went instead to Susie Martin – a name and a tale of truth-bending that’s now well-known from Bernadette’s concert anecdotes. While performing her solo shows as an adult and singing from Gypsy, Bernadette has often been known to take a moment to penitently atone for historical indiscretions of identity theft or erasure where her mother long ago conveniently left out the “understudy” descriptive when putting down Dainty June on her resumé, in an effort to add weight to the teenager’s list of credits.

Whatever happened to Susie Martin? – many have wondered. Well, she soon left the theatre. But not before appearing in two more regional productions of Gypsy and a 1963 Off-Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward with Liza Minnelli and Christopher Walken.

Bernadette too went on to other regional productions of Gypsy. She spent the summer of 1962 in various summer stock stagings with The Kenley Players, like in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and this time she did indeed get to play June.

Above shows photos from different programmes for these productions. While some may have featured odd forms of photo editing, they at least also bring to attention Rose here being played by none other than Betty Hutton.

The two women couldn’t have been in more different positions when they coalesced in these rough-around-the-edges, small-scale productions. A young Bernadette was broaching summer stock in starting to take on bigger roles in the ascendency to her bright and long career. Meanwhile, Betty found herself there while navigating the descent that followed her sharp but fickle rise to Hollywood fame in the ‘40s and early ‘50s. Top billing Monday, Tuesday you really are touring in stock after all.

While details aren’t plentiful for these productions, it was recounted Betty apparently struggled in performing the role. And understandably so. Following the recent traumatic death of her mother in a house fire, and the birth of her third child shortly before the shows began, it’s not hard to see why her mind might have been elsewhere. Still, she was apparently impressed enough by the younger actress who turned in one of the show’s “creditable performances” to make comment that she would’ve liked Bernadette to play her if a movie were made about her life.

Bernadette might not have done this exactly, but she did go on to revitalise Betty’s best-known movie role, when stepping into Annie Oakley’s shoes in the 1999 Annie Get Your Gun revival. With Bernadette’s first Ethel Merman show under her belt, the ball was soon rolling on her second.

The 2003 production of Gypsy was imminently beckoning as her next successive Broadway musical and it was Arthur Laurents who lit the match to spark Bernadette’s involvement. Laurents, as the show’s original librettist, drove the revival by saying he “didn’t want to see the same Rose” he’d seen before. Going back to June Havoc’s description of her mother as “small” and a “mankiller”, and Arthur’s take that Bernadette sung the part “with more nuance for the lyrics and the character than the others”, the choice of Bernadette was justified. Moreover, “Laurents – whose idea it was to hire her – [said] going against type is exactly the point,” and Sam Mendes, as director, qualified “the tradition of battle axes in that role has been explored”.

So Bernadette also had her own baseline of innate physical similarity to the original Rose Hovick, in addition to her own first-hand memories of the women she’d acted alongside as Rose in her youth to bring into her characterisation of the infamous stage mother.

But there was a third factor beyond those as well to be considered in the personal material she had access to draw from for her characterisation. Namely, her own real life stage mother.

Marguerite Lazzara did share traits with the character of Rose. She too helped herself to silverware from restaurants, and put her daughters in showbusiness for the vicarious thrill. Marguerite had “always wanted to become an actress herself”, but had long been denied her desire by her own mother, who likened actresses to being as “close to a whore as you could be without, you know, getting on your back”.

In that case, to “escape a housewife’s dreary fate in Ozone Park”, Marguerite channelled her latent dream through her pair of young daughters instead, shepherding them out along the road. Thus was produced a trio of the two children ushered around the theatre circuit by the driven mother, forming an undeniable parallelism and a mirror image of both Bernadette’s reality and Gypsy’s core itself. Bernadette didn’t see some of these familial parallels at the time when she was a child, considering “maybe I didn’t want to see” – “didn’t want to see a mother doing that to her daughter”.

It was coming back to the show as an adult that helped Bernadette resolve who her mother was and some of the motivations that had propelled her when Bernadette was still a child. She realised, “I think she thought she was going to die very young”, as her own father died young. So “she was rushing around to get as much of her life as she could in there”.

When she herself returned to the production in playing Rose, Bernadette conceded to sometimes bringing elements of her mother and her driven energy into her portrayal, and admitted too she looked “like her a lot in the role”. You can assess any familial resemblances for yourself, from the images below that show a young Marguerite next to Bernadette in costume as Rose, and then with the pair backstage in 1961 in a dressing room on the tour.

Marguerite was ambitious. From her own personal position and with the restrictions imposed upon her, it was ambition that materialised through her children. Irrevocably, she altered them. She placed Bernadette on TV as a very young child (“I was four when my mother put me in the business”); changed her daughter’s surname (“She told me my real name was too long for the marquees,” or really – “too Italian”); doctored her resumé (“Somehow the word ‘understudy’ vanished. ‘No one will know,’ said Marguerite”); and lightened her hair (“She’d say, ‘Oh, I’m just putting a little conditioner on it.’ But slowly my hair got blonder and blonder!”). All in the hope of giving her child a more favourable chance at the life she’d always wanted for herself.

On paper, a classic stage mother. “When I was a kid, she fulfilled herself through me,” Bernadette would say. “She put me into show business so she could get a taste of the life herself.”

But it’s important to consider Bernadette often qualifies that her mother wasn’t as brutal as Rose, nor was she herself as traumatised as June.

Bernadette didn’t begrudge her mother for her choices – at least by the time she was an adult, she’d rationalised them, explaining “naturally it was more exciting [for her] to go on the road with me than staying home and keeping house”.

As a child, Bernadette hadn’t necessarily wanted to be on stage, but there was a sense of ambivalence – not resentful belligerence – as she “didn’t care one way or the other” when she found herself there.

Like June, Bernadette may have been entered into and coaxed around a path she hadn’t voluntarily chosen. But unlike June, Bernadette had a deal with her mother that “she had only to say the word”, and she could leave.

Most crucially, she never did.

But that’s not to say Bernadette was enamoured with acting from the beginning.

She seemed to feel ‘outside’ of that world and those in it. And others saw it too.

It was in 1961 in Gypsy that Bernadette first met Marvin Laird – her long-time accompanist, conductor and arranger. The way he put it, he “noticed this one young girl, very close with her mother” who, during breaks, “didn’t mix much with the other girls”.

Beneath the effervescent stage persona, there’s a quieter and more reserved reality, and a sense of separation and solitary division.

When asked by Jesse Green in 2003 for the extensive profile in The New York Times if she thought her experiences on the road in Gypsy were good for her at that age, she gives a curious, somewhat abstract, predominantly dark, potentially macabre, response. He wrote:

She doesn’t answer at first but seems to scan an image bank just behind her eyes for something to lock onto. Eventually she comes out with a seeming non sequitur. “I didn’t know how to swim. I remember, in Las Vegas, I fell in, once, and they thought I was flailing, but I felt like: ‘It’s pretty down here!’ I might have been dying and I was thinking: ‘Look at the pretty color!’ And suddenly my fear of water was gone, and I could have stayed in forever.” After a while, I realize she’s answered my question. Then she dismisses the image: “But I had to get my hair dry for the show that day, so up I came.”

I’m still not entirely sure I know what she’s trying to convey here. My interpretation of this anecdote changes as I have re-visited and re-examined it on multiple occasions at different time points. It’s arguably multiply polysemic.

Was she simply swept up in a moment of childlike distraction, lost in the temporary respite alone away from the usual noise and clamour? Was she indicating comprehension that her feelings and perspectives came secondary to any practical necessities and inevitable responsibilities? Was she using the water to depict a muffling and fishbowl-like detachment from others her age who got to live more ‘ordinary’ lives in the ‘normal’ world above that she felt separate from? Was she referencing the pretty colours she saw as a metaphor for show business and how she became bewitched by them even despite potential dangers? Was she trying to legitimately drown herself, or at least exhibiting an ambivalence again as to whether she lived or died, because of what the highly pressurised demands on her felt like?

The underlying sentiment through her response in answer to Green’s primary question was that, in essence – no. Being a child actor was not “over all, a good experience for a youngster”.

Acting might have been something she fell in love with over time, but not all at once, not right from the beginning, and not without noting its perils.

It was a matter of accidental circumstance that landed Bernadette in the show business world to begin with at such a young age in the first place – “I just found myself here,” she would offer.

Her mother, who was “always crazy about the stage”, “insisted” that her sister, Donna take lessons in singing, dancing and acting.

A further point of interest to note is that, although it was Bernadette with her new surname who would grow up to be the famous actress, look to the cast lists from the 1961 touring production of Gypsy that featured both sisters in the company (see photo below) and you’ll find no ‘Lazzara’ in sight. Donna too, appearing under the novel moniker of “Donna Forbes”, had also already become stagified (nay, ethnically neutralised?) by her mother. As such it is clearly demonstrated that Marguerite’s intention at that point was to make stars of both her daughters. Correspondingly so, when her sister returned from her performance lessons some years before, “Donna would come home and teach me what she had learned,” Bernadette remembered. She may have gotten her “training second hand”, but the key element was that she got it.

For Bernadette, it was a short jump from emulating magpied tricks from her sister as well as routines from Golden Age Busby Berkeley musicals on the ‘Million Dollar Movie’ in front of the TV screen, to her mother getting her on the other side of the screen and actually performing on TV itself – belting out Sophie Tucker impressions aged five for all the nation to see.

The photos below show Bernadette in performative situations at a young age (look for criss-crossed laces in the second for identification).

“At first, as a toddler, Bernadette enjoyed performing; it came naturally, a form of play that people inexplicably liked to watch.” It was “just a hobby” and she “wanted to do it”.

But while she may not have detested it, she didn’t entirely comprehend what was going on either. “I didn’t even know I was on TV,” she said. “I didn’t know that those big gadgets pointed at me were cameras and that they had anything to do with what people saw on the television set.”

When she started gaining more of an awareness of how “such play [was being] co-opted for commercial purposes”, she grew less enthralled. “She didn’t care for the bizarre children, accompanied by desperate mothers, she began to see at auditions: ‘They spent their whole time smiling for no reason, you know?’”

Being a child who had become sentient of being a child performer began to grow wearisome and grating to the young girl who had her equity card, a professional (and strange, new) stage name, and an increasingly long list of expectations by the time she was nine. There’s a keen sense she did not enjoy being in such a position: “I wouldn’t want to be a child again. When you’re a child, you have thoughts, but nobody listens to you. Nobody has any respect for you”.

Gypsy did indeed mark a turning point for Bernadette as mentioned above – but not just in the way that seems obvious. Looking back at it now, it does appear the monumental turning point at which she started appearing in significant and reputable productions, beginning what would be the foundation to her ‘professional’ career. However it was also the turning point after which she nearly quit the business altogether.

When she returned from performing in Gypsy, Bernadette felt like she’d had enough. One way of putting it was that she “then retired from the business to attend high school”, wanting to have some semblance of a normal scholastic experience “without the interruptions”. But whatever dissatisfaction she was feeling as an early adolescent on stage, she didn’t resolve at school – going as far as saying that while at Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, “she was in pain”.

“When you’re a teenager you’re too aware of yourself,” she recalled. Being a teen and trying to come to terms with of the expectation of the ‘60s that “you are supposed to look like Twiggy, and you don’t, you feel everything is wrong about you”. Everything “was all about tall, skinny, no chest…[and] hair straight”. Little Bernadette with her “mass of [curly] hair and distracting bosom”, as Alex Witchel put it, was never going to fit that mould. “That was not me,” she stated. “At all.”

Her self-consciousness grew to the point that it became overwhelming and asphyxiating. “I was trying desperately to blend in and be normal, but that doesn’t allow creativity to come out,” Bernadette said. “I knew I was acting terrible. The words were sticking in my mouth and all I could think about was how I looked”. It was hard enough just to look at herself (“I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror”), let alone to have other people gawk at her on stage. So she stopped trying. She “didn’t work much from age 13 to 17” in the slightest. Bernadette would later reflect in 1981 in an atypically open and vulnerable interview, “I was very insecure. Insecurity is poison. It’s like wearing chains”.

It was a combination of factors that helped her overcome these feelings of such toxic and weighty burden to draw her back into the public world of performing and the stage. “The two people who helped her most, she says, were David LeGrant, her first acting teacher, and her vocal coach, Jim Gregory.” Jim helped with “[opening] a whole creative world for [her] with singing”; and it was David who’d give her the now infamous and often (mis)quoted line about individuality and being yourself.

Having these kinds of lessons, she reasoned, was “really a wonderful emotional outlet for a kid of 17”. The process of it all was beneficial for her therapeutically – “you have a lot of emotions at that time in your life, and it was great to go to an acting class and use them up”. And Bernadette felt freer on stage than she did out on her own in the ‘real world’, saying “[up there] I don’t have to worry about what I’m doing or saying because I���m doing and saying what I’m supposed to be doing and saying”.

Finally then and with considerable bolstering and support, she grew comfortable with the notion of being visible on stage and in public, and realised she was never going to blend in as part of the chorus so it was simply better to let go of such a futile pursuit.

David LeGrant’s guiding advice to Bernadette (“You’ve got to be original, because if you’re like everyone else, what do they need you for?”) wasn’t just a trite aphorism. For her, it was a life raft. It was the key mental framing device that allowed her to comprehend for the first time that she might actually have intrinsic value as herself. And that it was imperative she let herself use it.

She had always stuck out, yes, but she had to learn how to want to be seen – talking of it as a conscious “choice” she had to make when realising she did “have something to offer”.

Thus soon after Bernadette graduated, she stepped back into productions like in summer stock and then Off-Broadway as she made her debut at that next theatrical level at 18. It wasn’t long before she was discovered in what’s seen as her big break in the unexpected smash hit, Dames at Sea. And so Bernadette Peters, the actress, was back. And she was back with impact and force.

Besides, as she’s also said, she couldn’t do anything else – “if I ever had to do something else to earn a living, I’d be at a total loss”. An aptitude test as a teenager told her so apparently, when she “got minus zero in everything except Theater Arts”. So that was that. Her answer for what she would’ve done if she’d never found acting is both paradoxically exultant and macabre – “I don’t know, probably shot myself!”

Flippant? Maybe. Trivial? No.

Acting is thus undoubtedly related highly to Bernadette’s sense of purpose and self-worth. This is what makes it even more apparent that a show with such personal and historical connections for her, as in Gypsy, was going to be so consequential and impactful to be a part of again as an adult and perform on a public stage.

She’s called inhabiting the role of Rose in the 2003 revival many things: “deeply personal”, “life changing”, “like going through therapy” – to name a few.

In interviews regarding Gypsy and playing the main character, when asked what she had learnt, Bernadette would frequently say something like, “It taught me a lot”. Pressed further about specifics, her answers often hem close to vague platitudes as she maintains her normal tendency of endeavouring to keep her privacy close to her chest.

On one occasion, she actually elaborated somewhat on what she’d learnt, giving a fuller answer than the question is normally afforded anyhow. Beyond all it revealed to her about her mother, she extended to admitting “my capacity for love and my capacity for anger” as aspects in her that the show had permanently altered. Moreover, Rose to her was undoubtedly the “most rewarding and fulfilling acting experience” she had ever had.

But while such deep, personal and emotional depths and memories were being stirred up beneath the surface in private, she was getting vilified in public singularly and repeatedly by New York Post columnist, Michael Riedel.

Even before she’d set foot on stage, Riedel set forth in motion early in the 2003 season a campaign of vocal and opinionated defamation against Bernadette as Rose that she was miscast, insufficiently talented, and would be incapable of executing the role.

Too small, too delicate, too weak, too many curves (and too much knowledge of how to use them). Not bold enough, not loud enough – not Merman enough. Chatter and speculative dissent begun to grow in and around the Broadway theatres.

For such a prestigious and historic musical theatre role, it was always going to be hard to erase the large shadow of an original Merman mould. Ethel was woven into the very fabric of the show, with the rights to Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoirs being obtained at her behest in the first place, and the idiosyncrasies of her voice having been written into the songs themselves by their very authors.

To step out from such a domineering legacy would be a marked challenge at the best of times. Let alone when battling a respiratory infection.

Matters of public perception were certainly not helped when Bernadette then got ill as the show started its preview period and she started missing early performances.

Nor did it help with critical perception that the Tony voting period coincided so synchronously with Gypsy’s first opening months – giving Bernadette no time to recover, find her feet, and settle more healthily into the show for the rest of the run before the all important decisions were made by that omnipotent committee.

The tale of her illness is actually undercut by a more innocent and unsuspecting origin than you’d expect from all the drama and trouble it engendered. Bernadette decided nearing the show’s opening to treat herself to a manicure. In the salon, she was next to a woman very close to her with a frightful sounding cough. Who could’ve known then that this anonymous and inconspicuous lady through a fateful cause-and-event chain would go on to play such a part in what is among the biggest and most enduring Tony Awards “She was robbed!” discourses? Or even more broadly – in also arguably playing a hand in the closure and financial failure of an $8.5 million Broadway show after its disappointing performance at the Tony Awards that ominously “[spelled] trouble at the box office” and led to its premature demise?

Bernadette did not win the Best Actress in a Musical Tony that night on June 6th 2004. The award went instead (not un-controversially) to newcomer Marissa Jaret Winokur for Hairspray.

She did however give one of the most indelibly resonant and frequently re-referenced solo performances at the awards show just before she lost – defying detractors to comprehend how she could be unworthy of the accolade with a rendition of ‘Rose’s Turn’ that has apocryphally earned one of the longest standing ovations seen after such a performance even to date.

Even further and even more apocryphally, she reportedly did so while still under the weather as legend as circulated by musical theatre fans goes – performing “against doctor’s orders” with stories that have her being “afflicted with anything from a 103-degree fever, to pneumonia, to a collapsed lung”.

Seeing then as unfortunately there is no Tony Award speech to draw on here, matter shall be retrieved fittingly from that which she gave just a few years earlier in 1999 for her first win and previous Ethel Merman role in Annie Get Your Gun to wrap all of this together.

As has been illustrated, there are many arguably scary or alarming aspects in Bernadette’s Gypsy narrative. There’s undeniably much darkness and an ardent clamouring for meaning and self-realisation along the road that tracks her journey parallel to the show. But unlike Rose’s hopeless decries of “Why did I do it?” and “What did it get me?”, there was a point for Bernadette.

As her emotional tribute in 1999 went: “I want to thank my mother, who 48 years ago put me in showbusiness. And I want to finally, officially, say to her – thank you. For giving me this wonderful experience and this journey.”

Whatever all of this was, maybe it was worth it after all.

[uomo-accattivante]

I recently came across a bunch of press articles and photos about Oscar Isaac that are so old, they appear to be out-of-print and pre-date social media. Considering they were probably never digitally transcribed for internet access, I’m guessing that the majority of current fans have never seen this stuff.

Even though a lot of these digital scans are challenging to read because they are the original fuzzy news print, I think there some gems worth sharing with you guys. Over the next several weeks, I will transcribe and share those gems on this page. Hope you enjoy them!

Let’s start with this fantastic 2001 profile piece done before Oscar was accepted into Juilliard:

South Florida’s rising star isn’t just acting the part

By Christine Dolen - cdolen@herald.com

February 4, 2001

As fifth-graders at Westminster Christian School in Miami, Oscar Isaac and his classmates were asked to write a story as if they were animals on Noah’s Ark. Oscar turned in a seven-page play – with original music – from the perspective of a platypus. Then he starred in the production his teacher directed.

He hasn’t stopped expressing himself creatively since. Today, Isaac is one of South Florida’s busiest young theater actors, and certainly its hottest. And not just because he’s a slender five-feet nine-inches tall with an expressively handsome face and glistening brown eyes.

Since making his professional debut as a Cuban hustler in Sleepwalkers at Area Stage in July 1999, he has played an explosive Vietnam vet in Private Wars for Horizons Repertory, a pot-smoking slacker in This Is Our Youth at GableStage, another Cuban on the make in Praying With the Enemy at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, the entrancing narrator of Side Man at GableStage, a Havana-based writer in Arrivals and Departures for the new Oye Rep and, most recently, a young Fidel Castro in When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater.

Beginning Wednesday, he’ll be juggling five roles in City Theatre’s annual Winter Shorts festival, first at the Colony Theatre in Miami Beach, then at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. But that is not all: During the two weeks he is doing Winter Shorts, he’ll also be playing dates with the punk-ska band The Blinking Underdogs (www.blinkingunderdogs.com), which features him as lead singer, guitarist and songwriter.

Oh, and he just got back from auditioning for New York’s prestigious Juilliard School of Drama.

All this for a guy a month shy of his 22nd birthday.

Sure, you could hate a guy who’s that talented, that charismatic, that transparently ambitious. But the people who have worked with Oscar Isaac don’t. On the contrary, they’re all sure he has it – that magical, can’t-be-taught thing that transforms an actor into a star.

Playwright Eduardo Machado, who put in a good word for Isaac at Juilliard, says “he does have that star quality that makes your eyes go to him. It’s great that someone with that talent still wants to train.”

“He has a star quality that’s rare in a young actor,” adds Joseph Adler, who directed him in Side Man and This Is Our Youth. “Without a doubt I expect to be hearing great things from him.”

‘I JUST LOVE CREATING’

Isaac, who also makes short films, can’t say exactly why he was attracted to acting. He just knows it makes him happier than anything, that it’s what he was meant to do. And he’s been doing it since he was a 4-year-old putting on plays in his family’s backyard with his sister Nicole.

“I just love creating, whether it’s music or films or a character on a stage. I love taking people for a ride,” he says. “In Side Man, every night I would love being that close to the audience. I felt like I was talking to 80 of my closest friends.

“I could feel what the audience was feeling.”

His powerful, mournful-yet-loving monologue near the end of the play, he said, “worked every night. I knew it would get them. I’d hear sniffles.

“But it had less to do with me than with the atmosphere [created by the playwright and director].”

You could understand if Isaac, surrounded as he is by praise and possibility, had an ego as burgeoning as his career. Instead, he channels the positive reinforcement into confidence about his work.

“He has such a charm and an ease onstage, but he’s very modest,” says New York-based actress Judith Delgado, who shared the stage with Isaac in Side Man. “He’s hungry. He’s got moxie. I was blown away by him.

“He saved me a couple of times. I went up [forgot a line] and that baby boy of mine came through. He’s a joy.”

FORGING HIS OWN PATH

The son of a Cuban-American father and a Guatemalan mother, Isaac was never a stellar student. But he found ways of turning routine assignments – like the Noah’s Ark story – into creative challenges.

His science reports were inevitably video documentaries underscored with punk music. He acted through middle and high school, though he had a falling out with his drama teacher at Santaluces Community High in Lantana over his misgivings about a character. When she refused to cast him in anything else, he got his English teacher to let him play the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors his senior year.

His skepticism about authority and love of playing the devil’s advocate have long made him resist doing things the usual way. His post-high school “training” consisted of one semester at Miami-Dade Community College’s South Campus (where he met his girlfriend, Maria Miranda), touring schools playing an abusive character in the Coconut Grove Playhouse’s Breaking the Cycle, and working as a transporter of bodies at Baptist Hospital, where he absorbed the drama of people in emotionally intense situations.

“It was the most magnificent dramatic institute I could’ve attended,” Isaac said. “I was able to observe the entire spectrum of human emotion, people under the most extreme duress. I was mesmerized watching the way people interacted with each other in such heightened situations.

“I learned everything about the human condition, and it was real and harsh and brutally honest.”

Yet even given his propensity for forging his own path, something nudged him another direction while he was in New York making his Off-Broadway debut in December. Walking by Juilliard one day, he impulsively went in to ask for an application. Though the application deadline had passed, Isaac persuaded Juilliard to accept his, noting in his application essay that most of the exceptional actors he admires had acquired “a brutally efficient technique” to enhance their talent by studying at places like Juilliard.

Though he won’t know whether he has been accepted until the end of this month, his audition last weekend went well, he says. He did monologues from Henry IV, Part I and Dancing at Lughnasa, adjusting his Shakespearean Hotspur to a more fiery temperature at the suggestion of Michael Kahn, head of Juilliard’s acting program – though not without arguing that Hotspur wouldn’t be speaking to the king that way.

Isaac, not surprisingly, loves a good debate.

Adler, GableStage’s artistic director and a man who is as liberal as Isaac once was conservative, savored the verbal jousting they did during rehearsals for Side Man.

“He knows exactly how to pull my chain,” Adler says with a laugh. “Intelligence is the cornerstone of all great actors, and he’s bright as hell.

“He has relentless ambition but with so much charm. He’s very hard to say no to. He has incredible raw talent and magnetism that is very rare in a young actor along with relentless energy, perseverance and ambition. I see his growth both onstage and off. He’s mature in both places.”

Part of his growth, of course, will necessarily involve dealing with the rejections that are part of any actor’s life. His career is still too new, his string of successes solid, so it’s anyone’s guess how failure will shape him. But director Michael John Garcés, who picked him for When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba after Isaac flew to New York at his own expense to compete with a pool of seasoned Manhattan actors for the role, believes his character will see him through.

“Oscar is realistic, but he’s so willing to go the whole nine yards,” Garcés says. “He didn’t go out when he was in the show here. His focus earned the respect of the other actors, some of whom have been working in New York for 30 years.

“He hasn’t had a lot of blows yet, when the career knocks the wind out of you. But he has talent, determination and focus, and if he has perseverance – my intuition is that he does have it – he could achieve a lot.”

FAMILY TIES

His father and namesake, Baptist Hospital intensive-care physician Oscar Isaac Hernandez, couldn’t be more proud. (Isaac doesn’t use the family surname in order to avoid, in his words, being “put in that Hispanic actor box.”)

“I’m ecstatic that he’s probably going to be going to the most prestigious drama school in the United States,” he says. “School will help him focus his energies and give him discipline. He’s got the raw material and the drive.”

Isaac’s mother, Maria, divorced from his father since 1992, is a kidney-transplant recipient who acknowledges that she’ll miss her son if he moves to New York. But, she adds, she wants him “to live out his dreams. He amazes me every day. He calls me every day. I’m very proud of him.”

Even the other guys in The Blinking Underdogs are fans of Isaac’s acting, though it could take him away from South Florida just as the band appears to be, Isaac says, on the brink of signing a recording deal (it has already put out its own CD, The Last Word, with songs, lead vocals and even cover photography by Isaac.

“Oscar’s the leader of the band, a great musician who amazes me and motivates us,” says sax player Keith Cooper. “I’ve been to see every one of his plays. He’s a phenomenal actor.

“I completely buy into his role in every play. As close as I am to him, I forget it’s Oscar.”

His South Florida theater colleagues credit that to Isaac’s insatiable desire to learn and grow.

Gail Garrisan, who is directing him in Donnie and One of the Great Ones for Winter Shorts, observes, “It’s not often that you find a young actor who is willing to listen and who doesn’t think he knows everything. He loves the work.

“He really brought the young man in Side Man to life. When I saw it in New York, it seemed to be the father’s play. When I saw it here, I felt it was his [Isaac’s] play.”

Oye Rep’s John Rodaz, whom Isaac calls “the best director I’ve ever worked with,” gave the actor his first important job in Sleepwalkers at Area Stage. They met when Isaac came to see Area’s production of Oleanna and the actor, knowing Rodaz ran the theater, introduced himself.

“He has so much energy and such a sparkling personality,” Rodaz says. “He knows how to move in the world. He seems to take advantage of every situation in a good way; he’s not a cold, calculating person who’ll stab you in the back.

“[But] he wants it so badly. Everything he does, he’s the leader. When I was 21, I was taking naps.”

Rodaz coached Isaac on his Juilliard monologues and found the experience energizing.

“I got chills just watching him. That happens so rarely. I was so exhilarated when I came home that I just had to go out and run. You just know he’s got all the tools.”

Christine Dolen is The Herald’s theater critic.

###

[rosaliefms]

new york’s very own 𝒓𝒐𝒔𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒆 𝒎𝒐𝒐𝒏 was spotted on broadway street , with a striking semblance to 𝒋𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒊𝒆 𝒌𝒊𝒎 ! you may know them as @𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐈𝐄𝐌𝐎𝐎𝐍 or hitting the front page of tmz as 𝗺𝗼𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗮𝗽𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘂𝗻𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗵𝗹𝘆 𝗯𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗮𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗲𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝘄𝗮𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝗮 𝗴𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗽𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿 . according to tmz , you just had your 𝒕𝒘𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒚 𝒔𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒅 birthday bash . while living in nyc , you’ve been labeled as being obstinate , but also intrepid . things that would paint a better picture of you would be 𝗸𝗻𝗲𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵 𝗯𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗯𝗼𝗼𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗱𝗼𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝗸𝗶𝗿𝘁𝘀 , 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗵𝗹𝘆 𝗯𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗺 & 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗰𝗵𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 . ( cis female + she / her  ) ( career / voice claim : jennie kim )

hey  all  ,  i’m  shay  ,  sadly  in  the  gmt  timezone  and  i  go  by  she  /  her  pronouns  .  i’m  super  excited  to  be  here  again  and  i’m  glad  this  group  made  a  comeback  .  this  is  a  very  new  muse  and  i’m  still  fleshing  her  out  so  if  you’d  like  to  read  a  little  more  about  her  ,  you  can  find  it  under  the  cut  and  i  can’t  wait  to  plot  with  you  all  !!

° ⁎ ⋆ 𝒃𝒂𝒔𝒊𝒄𝒔

full name:  rosalie  moon .

face claim: jennie  kim .

nicknames:  rosie  mainly  ,  rosa  and  rose  (  but  you  have  to  be  real  special  for  her  to  let  you  call  her  this  one  )  .

age:  twenty  two .

sexuality:   bisexual .

date of birth:    14th  december 1998 .

place of birth:   manhattan  ,  new  york .

° ⁎ ⋆ 𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒆 𝒃𝒂𝒔𝒊𝒄 𝒊𝒏𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏

education:  graduated  highschool  and  went  to  culinary  school  .

occupation:  singer  /  business  owner .

drinks, smokes & drugs:  only  drinks  sometimes .

° ⁎ ⋆ 𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚

zodiac:  saggitarius .

MBTI:   ESFJ .

likes:   bouquets  of  flowers  in  every  room , baking  at  least  twice  a   week , glazed  donuts , butterscotch  milkshakes , dogs , summer   picnics  in  the  park , sunglasses  for  each  outfit , an   updated   instagram , neatly  organised  closets  &  grilled  cheese   sandwiches .

dislikes:  rude  people .

bad habits:  none .

hobbies:  reading , cooking , baking  &  painting .

fears:  none .

positive traits:  affable , allocentric , altruistic , benevolent , cordial , diligent , humble , jovial , optimistic , punctual , reverent , staunch  &  virtuous .

negative traits:  boisterous , enigmatic , fanciful , indulgent , mealymouthed  & reticent .

inspired by:  amy santiago  ( brooklyn  nine  nine ) , josie  saltzman  ( legacies ) , pam  beesly  (  the  office )  &  phoebe  buffay  ( friends ) .

° ⁎ ⋆ 𝒃𝒊𝒐𝒈𝒓��𝒑𝒉𝒚

born  in  the  heart  of  the  city  ,  rosalie  was  born  to  sung-ho  and  sera  moon  one  cold  decembers  morning  .  her  father  is  currently  a  plastic  surgeon  with  his  own  practice  while  her  mother  is  a  socialite  essentially  and  former  tennis  player  .  their  careers  couldn’t  have  been  more  different  but  they  made  it  work  ,  eventually  marrying  and  giving  birth  to  rosalie  . 

with  her  father’s  practice  just  starting  up  at  the  time  of  her  birth  ,  they  were  somewhat  average  at  the  time  ,  living  a  fairly  normal  life  and  so  rosalie  was  never  spoilt  and  didn’t   grow  up  surrounded  by  everything   she  could  possibly  dream  off  .  instead  ,  it  took  years  before  the  practice  actually  made  any  profits  .  all  it  took  was  one  celebrity  to  be  spotted  leaving  the  place  and  business  sky  rocketed  from  there  .  the  practice  was  full  for  months  at  a  time  with  limited  appointments  and  celebs  willing  to  pay  ridiculous  prices  to  just  be  seen  and  so  it  was  no  surprise  that  as  popularity  increased  so  did  the  moon’s  wealth  . 

the  family  were  quick  to  relocate  into  a  newer  and  much  deserved  bigger  home  ,  boasting  more  bedrooms  than  they  ever  needed  but  that  didn’t  matter  because  they’d  earned  their  place  among  the  rich  and  wealthy  in  new  york  .  rosalie’s  mother  began  to  spend  most  of  her  time  socialising  and  meeting   with  the  high  ranking  neighbours  and  her  father  was  continously  working  hard  to  maintain  the  life  they  were  still  adjusting  to  .  as  a  result  ,  rosalie  was  left  to   her  own  devices  ,  free  to  do  as  she   pleased  and  take  up  whatever  she  liked  to  the  pass  the  time  .

art  was  one  of  her  first  discoveries  ,  realising  that  she  enjoyed  painting  ,  liked  the  serenity  of  making  something  come  to  life  and  she  often  filled  the  bedrooms  with  her  framed  artwork  .  this  quickly  stopped  once  she  hit  her  teen  years  and  instead   she  turned  to  music  ,  quickly  discovering  she  had  a  voice  that  might  actually  do  well  .  her  mother  had  close  contacts  with  producers  and  agents  and  rosalie  was  quickly  signed  up  and  went  on  to  produce  her  own  music  for  a  while  .  she  even  went  on  tours  ,  met  fans  and  more  and  though  she  enjoyed  this  ,  she   wasn’t  sure  if  it  was  what  she  really   wanted  to  do  .

it  was  one  afternoon  alone  when  she  had  to  cook  for  herself  that  she  realised  that  was  what  she  wanted  to  do  .  food  made  most  people  content  and  she  wanted  to  do  exactly  that  ,  to  please  people  with  her  food  and  so  after  some convincing  ,  her  mother  set  her  up  with  some  critics  who  gave  her  advice  she’d  never  forget  .  do  whatever  it  takes  to  get  your  name  and  food  out  there  .  and  so  that’s  exactly  what  she  did  .  she’d  spent  hours  in  the  kitchen  ,  pouring  her  heart  and  soul  into  her  food  to  then  give  it  to  fans  and  paps  outside  and  it  gave  her  the  push  she  needed  . 

diving  into  her  own  savings  ,  rosalie  sought  out  her  first  restaurant  ,  finding  an  ideal  location  in  the  heart  of  the  city  to  open  up  rosalie’s  .  she  took   full  responsibility  for  the  development  ,  design  and  promotion  of  the  restaurant  and   even  cooked  behind  the  scenes  on  opening  night  .  and  as  interest  grew  in  the  place  ,  her  time  suddenly  became  more  and  more  limited  .  she  was  offered  a  book  contract   and  has  recently  signed  a  tv  contract  for  her  own  slot  on  day  time  tv  to  showcase  what  she  can  really  do  .

currently  ,  she  still  adores  singing  (  she’s  still  a  part  of  blackpink  ) and  does  it  to  please  fans  and  she’s  also  juggling   the  running  of  her  restaurant  and  starring  on  her  own  tv  show  .  when  she’s  not   doing  that  ,  she’s  painting  or  just  chilling  at  home  .

° ⁎ ⋆ 𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚 & 𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒅𝒄𝒂𝒏𝒐𝒏𝒔

is  very  soft  ,  basically  a  sweetheart  and  will  definitely  let  things  slide  unless  said  things  concern  her  friends  or  family  ,  then  she’ll  have  a  stern  word  or  two  to  say  about  it  .

big  believer  in  second  chances  ...  within  reason  .  she’s  the  kinda  person  to  see  the  best  in  everyone  until   they  give  her  a  reason  not  to  .

loves  people  and  socialising  and   conversations  about  something  and  nothing 

is  probably  the  kinda  friend  to  turn  up  with  muffins  or  whatever  concoction  she  decided  to  bake

has  two  pomeranian  puppies  called  chewie  and  han 

° ⁎ ⋆ 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔

pr  relationship  -  maybe  they’re  friends  ,  maybe  they   can’t   stand   one  another  but  pretending  to  be  romantically   involved  benefits  them   both  .  idk  this  could  be  fun

roommates  -   idk  this  could  be  fun  ,  just  a  couple  people  living  together  ,  having  movie  nights  every  week  and  hosting  pool  parties  .  bonus  she’ll  cook  for  all  her  roommates  too  . 

best  friend  -  self  explanatory  .  probably  a  ny  native  ,  someone  she’s  grown  up  with  her  and  is  probably  her  oldest  friend  .  they’ve  stuck  by  one  another  through   thick  and  thin  and  they’re  still  going  on  strong  . 

ex - friends  -  they  were  friends  once  upon  a  time  but  something  drove  them  apart  ,  whether  it  was  their  new  careers  ,  opposing  opinions  or  the  fact  they  grew  up  ,  something  pushed  them  apart  and  they’ve  not   made   up   since  . 

girl  squad  -  who  doesn’t  love  a  cute  lil  girl  squad  .  just  them  having  manicures  together  and  spa  days  .   they’ve  been  on  plenty  of  vacations  together  and  they  always  have  the  best  nights  out  together  too  .

crush  -   could   be  mutual  or  not  ,  rosalies  probably  too  oblivious  to  ever  realise 

exes  -  good  or  bad  ,  i  imagine  rosalies  had  a  couple  relationships  in  the  past  .  we  can  figure  out  the  finer  details  together 

other  ideas  -  childhood  friends  ,  neighbours  ,  highschool  sweethearts  ,  one  night  stand  ,  enemies  ,  sibling  like  friendship  ,  partner  in  crime  /  ride  or  die  ,  pr  relationship  /  friendship 

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #475

(from two days ago, oops)

What is your favorite background noise? (Ex. Water dripping, people talking.) I really like a steady rain tapping on the windows. Do you like taking selfies? Why or why not? No, because I'm ugly. It's annoying because I've been wanting to take pics with Girt considering even as just friends literally none exist of us, but yeah. I fucking hate taking pictures of myself and it takes a billion and two tries to get a picture I deem "acceptable" anyway. Were you named after anyone? No. What was the last comic book you read? I don't and never have read comic books. What is your heritage? German, Irish, and Polish. Describe the worst friend you have ever befriended. All things considered, somehow my former best friend was the worst. She was homophobic, racist, extremely self-centered, drama-driven, excessively bossy, ungrateful... I will never be able to explain how our friendship ever worked. If you found the recipe for immortality, would you sell it or would you burn it? Burn it. With certainty. We just aren't meant to live forever. What is the most embarrassing, cringe-worthy thing you have ever done? 99% of my life has been Cringe. What is the worst thing someone could do on a date? Be distracted/not pay attention to the other, like by constantly using their phone. It's so rude. That would immediately make me lose interest in you. If you could turn one legal thing illegal, what would it be? I dunno. What is something you swore you would never do when you grew up, but you did anyway? I was absolutely going to college as a kid. Fast-forward to the future, I've dropped out three times and am going nowhere. Little me saw me as so, so much more successful. Do you actually iron your clothes? No. Unless it's a formal occasion. Do you rent or own your current home? We rent. Have you ever used cursive after school, aside from your signature? My handwriting is naturally mostly cursive. Do you have your groceries delivered or do you buy them yourself? We order our groceries for pick-up, so we have to go to the store, but not in. Do you have a gym membership? Sigh. I do, but Mom and I have really been neglecting going since my time with my personal trainer ran out... What’s your favorite computer game genre? Horror, of course. Do you have any exes your parents never liked? No. Have you ever been severely mentally ill? I am. What was the last thing you purchased from a small local business? I don't know. Have you ever used chewing tobacco? EW no, that shit grosses me out so much. If someone’s laughing, do you instantly think they’re laughing at you? Suuuure do. How would you react if your parents told you they were having another baby? Well, they're divorced, Mom cannot stand my dad, and she also had a complete hysterectomy when she had ovarian cancer, so like... Have you ever had a garage or yard sale before? How much did you make? Over the course of my life, we've had a few yard sales. I don't remember how much we made at any. Have you ever had to evacuate your home for any reason? No. Which mythological creature is your favorite? DRAGONS. I love dragons. Have you ever been to a butterfly garden before? No, but that sounds amazing. What's the biggest bird you've ever seen up close? Oh my god y'all, when I volunteered once at a wildlife rehab center, I was FEET away from some sort of falcon. Guys, you would not believe JUST how big birds of prey are. I was shocked and in total awe. Have you ever seen a double rainbow before? More than once. Were you ever afraid of the dark as a child? I don't THINK I was? What is the strangest thing you’ve been asked? Something inappropriate that really pissed me off. What was your favorite game as a child? I was obsessed with the original Spryo trilogy and would play all three obsessively. What is the darkest thing you have seen on the internet? I don't know, dark shit. Do you crack your knuckles, neck or toes constantly? No, but ugh Girt does that with his neck and it drives me insane alsdkjfaljdlfkwe. Are you constantly catching colds or other sicknesses? No, my immune system is a legend. Are you afraid of mice? No, they're precious. What type of souvenir do you usually purchase when on vacation? I go on vacations so irregularly that I can't really answer this. I've been on a vacation maybe twice in my entire life. Do you own more than one copy or edition of a book? No. If you could see any musical on Broadway right now, what would it be? I don't like musicals. Will you willingly sing in front of other people besides your family? God no. Do you eat soup when you’re sick? No. I don't like soup. Who can never fail to make you laugh? Absolutely my boyfriend. He's the funniest person I know. Have you ever been on a tour bus? No. Do you prefer listening to things through headphones or speakers? Earplugs. Are you listening to music right now? No; I'm watching Gab play The Evil Within. Have you ever unbuttoned your ex’s pants? Just one of them, but we were together at the time. What are you planning on eating for dinner tonight if you haven’t already? Mom made pizza. What was the worst news you’ve heard this entire week? Girt's mother has Covid. He's vaccinated, but nevertheless, he's still getting a test done just to be safe, and also because if he's contracted it, I might have it. And that means my mother could get it, which just cannot happen, even if she's vaccinated, too. The poor guy is really freaking out about it, but ASTONISHINGLY, I'm not panicking yet. Girt's health has seemed fine, I'm fine, so... We'll just have to wait to see what his test says. Do you have a lot of trees around your house? What about buildings? No; yes. I hate living in the suburbs, it sucks here. Would you say either one of your parents are 'pack-rats?' No. Have you ever disowned anyone in your family? For what reasons? No. Has anyone ever called you a sociopath before? No. Do you have freckles? Do you like/dislike them? Not on my face, no. I have a few randomly on my body though. Would you ever consider getting dreadlocks? No. Have you downloaded extra fonts for your computer? Oh, plenty. Who is the latest great YouTuber you’ve discovered? The latest, uhhhh. I'd probably say John Wolfe as a truly "great" one considering I watch him regularly now. Do you read the Bible regularly? Yeah, no. All the Bible does is piss me off, frankly. Name three patriotic songs you like. I don't know about three, but I do shockingly like this one country song with a name I can't remember. All I know is it has "red, white, and blue" in the title. ... I think. Oh! There's "Deutschland" by Rammstein, even though it's not about my own country. Has it ever snowed on your birthday? Maybe at some point as a kid? Idr. Do you like the way your name is spelled? No, actually. I wish it was "Brittney." It's more true to the pronunciation. Do you believe in astrology? Not in the slightest, and while I really shouldn't care, like believe what you want, it's a genuine pet peeve of mine when others base their fucking lives around what positions some goddamn stars are in in an infinite universe. They make decisions based on bullshit being spat at them that might not be suitable. I know, it's stupid to care, but I can never seem to NOT roll my eyes when I see/hear people blaming their flaws and shit on this stuff. Are you one of those people who has like a hundred apps on their phone? No; I have very few. What’s the band that you love even though you know they’re awful? I can't help but love some Blood on the Dance Floor songs. :x Do you coo over other people’s babies? No, not really. Like I can acknowledge a cute picture and be like "awww," but it's nothing I lose my mind over at all. What is something that makes you very squeamish? VOMIT. If you’re out of high school, have you stayed in touch with your high school friends? If you’re still in school, do you think you will? The only high school friend of mine I'm still actively friends with/is still in my life is Girt, obviously. Like I have HS friends on Facebook that I still very much love and will react to what they post and sometimes comment, but we don't really talk-talk. Do you dye your hair regularly? No. :/ That's not something I can afford to do. Do you have an alter ego? Describe them: No. Do you know both of your biological parents? Which one do you prefer? I do, and I love them both. Do you store a lot of pictures you’ve taken that no one else has seen? I'm a wanna-be photographer, of course I do. If you had to name your kid after an American state, which would you choose? Probably "Dakota" for either gender. What do you use to dry your clothes? (Tumble dryer, radiator, etc) We have your normal dryer. Do you ever play the built-in games on your computer? Which ones? Nah. Do/did you doodle on your books at school? My notebooks and binders, ohhhh yes. Actual school textbooks, absolutely not. Who’d you last see in a tux? The groom and groomsmen of the last wedding I shot. Who’s the bravest person you know? Sara. Have you ever dated someone who was real sportsy? No.

[photolover82]

The Masked Singer Season 4 Episode 1: Group A Baby, Premiere Time! Guesses & Commentary

Hello my fellow Masked Singer peeps!! It’s that time, I’ve been waiting for this for so long and I can’t wait for this season, it’s looking super promising I’m so excited! So I am going to try to do these every Friday (since I watch The Masked Singer on Hulu the day after it comes out, which is Thursdays)... so stay tuned. This season, there have been 2 huge changes, the lack of audience (they were digitally edited in which I am not a big fan of) and the Golden Ear Trophy (where the judges put their first impression guesses and the judge(s) who got them correct get a point so we’re going to be talking about that too... I’m gonna call the segment Golden Ear Time every time someone gets eliminated)... alright so here we have Group A:

First and foremost we have the first eliminated contestant of the season who was: 

*DRUMROLL PLEASE*

The Dragon

Ok, so I kinda saw this coming (both who it was & that he was going to get eliminated), I’m kind of bummed out about it being so soon but everybody was so great that it was super hard to say that I wanted one to be gone.

Ok let’s first talk about his performance like always (if you haven’t seen my recaps before, 1st welcome! I’m Ana, nice to meet you... 2nd my format starts with the eliminated contestant and first I commentate on their performance, reveal them, and do clues how they match/the judges’ guesses now with the Golden Ear thing and then I do the same for the remaining contestants, the clues & commentary): I am not gonna lie, I enjoyed the dragon even though he was one of my least favorite performances (I am not the biggest rap fan, it’s not my least favorite genre by any means, but it’s just not my cup of tea even though this performance was fun af, like you could tell this was a real rapper... we’ll get to that later tho). He was awesome, it is a shame he went home so soon ngl. 

Anyways, let’s look at who the Dragon was revealed to be, shall we? Ahh it’s good to be back typing that: 😄

*DRUMROLL PLEASE*

Busta Rhymes!!!! 

So, I’m kind of shook and proud of myself because I legit heard a sneak peak of like 20 seconds of him rapping and I got it instantly even though I only know Busta Rhymes in passing by songs he’s featured in with other artists. Ok, let’s look at the clues, shall we? 

Clues:

“Dressing up in outrageous costumes isn’t new to me”= known for crazy costumes

A lot of gold= gold records  

Weights= has a love of weightlifting

Now it’s time for *fanfare* Golden Ear Trophy Time (and also a little bit of making fun of the judges... aka only Ken this time because this is kind of ridiculous)

Nichole & Robin each got 1 point with their guess of Busta Rhymes... yay!! They got it! 🥳

Ken: this wasn’t his 1st impression guess but his final guess legit makes me want to roast the crap out of him... Michael Phelps (like look at that performance and don’t tell me that you think that guess is actually a good one... like not even close 🤨)

Alright, now that that’s out of the way, let’s now talk about the remaining 4 contestants: 

1. The Sun

Performance: She was amazing, like one of my favorites from this episode. Her rendition of Because I Love You by Lizzo was gorgeous, she has a beautiful voice and she’s such a star man, I really do believe that she will go very far. 

As for my guess, I really do have believe it is singer songwriter...

LEANN RIMES 

I think this because of the following clues: 

Mickey Mouse shape= Disney= LeAnn Rimes sang multiple times for Disney, especially the song that appears during the fireworks show at Disneyland and had a Disney Channel special back in the day.

Fell into a deep depression= was sought into treatment in 2012 and is very open about her mental health going down after being a child star

Judges’ Guesses 

Jenny: Demi Lovato (not a bad guess, a lot of people agreed with this... I just don’t feel like the tone matches up) 

Ken: Madonna (say what now? That doesn’t even sound close to Madonna, but whatever Ken is Ken... what else is to expect?) 

2. Popcorn

Performance: She was great, I can tell she is a legendary singer. I had high expectations because this is like my favorite costume of the whole season, and I was a little bit let down not gonna lie. She sang “What about us” by Pink and I didn’t really love the song choice if I’m honest. Hopefully, she’ll do better, since I really want her to advance really far. 

As for my guess, I am not 100% sure, but my closest guess is legendary singer...

TINA TURNER 

I think this because of the following clues:

Mickey Mouse shape= Disney= LeAnn Rimes sang multiple times for Disney, especially the song that appears during the fireworks show at Disneyland and had a Disney Channel special back in the day.

Built a career around love= idk about this 

Proud Merry Go Round= ik too obvious but I really can’t think of anyone else especially due to the voice 

Judges’ Guesses

Jenny: Tina Turner (my guess exactly... I am still not 100% sure)

Nicole: Mary J. Blige (that’s pretty good but I’m not sure) 

Ken: Carole Baskin (wtf Ken? Please Masked Singer never have her on this show, I’ve had enough with her on DWTS)

3. Giraffe 

Performance: He was great and it was fun to watch, but I feel like he could do better. If it's who I think it is, I know he could do better than that first performance of Let’s Get it Started by The Black Eyed Peas. 

As for my guess, I have a feeling it could be Broadway legend, Hamilton superstar...

DAVEED DIGGS?

I honestly don’t know about it based on the clues:

He says music is in his blood

Was the butt of jokes but now he’s like super successful = this one sounds kind of probable but the clues are too general 

Judges’ Guesses

Robin: Vanilla Ice (I also heard this a lot online... maybe but the clues make no sense with Vanilla Ice) 

Jenny: Travis Barker (maybe... not a bad guess) 

4. Snow Owls 

Performance: Oh my god the first pair ever, how fun! I hope they keep doing this more in future seasons! They were literally my favorite of the night! Their rendition of “Say Something” was so stunning, I was shocked. 

As for my guess, I really do have believe it is sibling duo...

JULIANNE & DEREK HOUGH

I think this because of the following clues:

Family reunion, haven’t done anything together in a while= they used to work together a lot and now they have been pretty separate with her doing her singing stuff and him on World of Dance and Dancing With The Stars (if he’s on this too, damn he’s on all the channels haha) 

Christmas clues= they just did a Christmas show together in 2019 and came out with christmas music

He’s a prankster= Derek really is one, just look at his TikTok haha 

Also they sang this exact song together in one of their tours back in 2017 and it sounds really similar, here’s the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhC9dkmliTM

Judges’ Guesses

Jenny & Nicole: Donny & Marie Osmond (I mean Donny was already the peacock on season 1, I doubt that he’ll be back)

Ken: Eugene Levy and Catherine O Hara (they’re not really related so idk how it makes sense but not a bad guess.. I genuinely think it has to be a brother and sister duo)

Anyways, that’s all for today woohoo! See you guys next week, omg it’s great to be back! I am so excited for what’s to come, time for a rollercoaster of a season. Bye everybody! 👋🏼

[yourbrother-crutchie]

Copy and Pasting from my own rant elsewhere 

From an article (linked): "What kind of message does it send to the industry and the future musical-theater writers of the world that the one (1) original musical-theater score to have opened this "season" wasn't recognized? What kind of message does it say to the show's astonishingly large and young fanbase, the kind of people who could be turned on to a love of theater from this show, that the gatekeepers didn't care? It's just sad."

My Rant: 

The Lightning Thief Musical ran for almost TWO FUCKING YEARS after its original Off-Broadway run, and fought itself tooth and nail to reach Broadway. It reached Broadway because it was such an amazing show that the ticket sales kept it afloat- in a time when most heavily backed Broadway shows close a month after opening. All the while it kept tickets AFFORDABLE!! They specifically kept tickets at a price that their audience could actually afford!!! And as someone who has seen the show twice- both Off Broadway and On Tour let me tell you. my PJO love aside this show was ASTONISHING. It kept the tone Adventerous and Exhilerating, while also leaving room for camp and HEARTBREAK. The acting (especially Chris Mcarrell's) connected with the audience and had so much depth. The tech was simple but utilized EVERYTHING to be goregously atmospheric. The Lightning Thief being told to fuck off is honestly such a solid sum up of the way that Broadway hates innovation and creativity- and only supports reboots of old racist shows because old racists spend a lot of money. Broadway is no longer about art and creativity and sharing messages- and it hasnt been for a long time. and TLT sums that up perfectly.  You deserved better TLT. This is why I'm becoming a damned lawyer instead of theatre. Also- a good quote from an article I read to sum this up: 

[keepingupwithlinmanuel]

Best of the Decade: Lin-Manuel Miranda on making history with Hamilton

No 18th-century U.S. statesman had more sway on stage, more measure on music, or better brought the decade’s zeitgeist to its zenith than Treasury treasure Alexander Hamilton, the immigrant hero about whom Lin-Manuel Miranda spun a Pulitzer-winning, genre-defying, generation-defining Broadway musical that demanded, among other things, a renewed spotlight be shone on the theater as a cornerstone of American culture.

Since Hamilton’s February 2015 debut at the Public Theater and subsequent transfer to Broadway that summer, Miranda has had five years, three tours, half a dozen productions, hundreds of pre-show concerts, and a star-stacked mixtape to say just about everything he could about creating one of the biggest Broadway musicals of all time. And he’s heard everything you can hear about it, too.

“The thing that always trips people up is the incongruity of a hip-hop musical from this historical tone, which I always find surprising,” says Miranda, 39, whose previous Broadway successes included 2005’s Tony-winning In the Heights, 2012’s Bring It On the Musical, and the 2009 revival of West Side Story. “Because I live in musical-theater land, I know a disproportionate amount about Argentine politics because of Evita,” he continues. “I know about a failed revolution in France because of f—in’ Les Miz. I know what I know about the Constitution from 1776. To me it was not [out of place] to have a musical address historical subjects, and the musical forms I was applying to it were just musical forms I had been working hard to master. When I started reading [Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Hamilton] I thought, ‘Well, this will be my Jesus Christ Superstar. I’ll do a cool concept album and hopefully someone will figure out how to stage it.’ That’s not how it ended up panning out, but all I was looking to was tradition. I’ve been consistently surprised by how groundbreaking it has been perceived as because I feel like I’m just one in a long tradition of people who have used musical theater on unconventional subjects.”

...

With its 46-track album quick to become ubiquitous in every high school theater department across the country, a show about the might of the people swiftly belonged to the people. “Anecdotally, I heard from countless families who say Hamilton’s the only thing my family can agree on in the car — it’s not the teen’s music, it’s not the grown-up’s music, it’s sort of everyone’s music, and that has been thrilling,” Miranda beams. He’s heard tales of children with learning disabilities surprising their families by memorizing the words of the show, of kids with behavioral issues who found focus, relaxation, or solace in engaging with the libretto. “I think the tonnage of it is actually something that has its own legacy,” Miranda points out. “The fact that it’s literally so much show and so much music, it becomes this challenge for kids to wrap their minds around, the way my friends and I would memorize the Rent soundtrack and assign each other parts in high school a generation before. It’s done that for a new generation of kids, so that’s been really thrilling to see. More often than not, if someone is asking me for a signature or a selfie, it’s on behalf of their children. A lot of, ‘My kid would kill me if I didn’t ask for this photo.’”

And yet, it’s still tough to crack Miranda’s humility (and through the years, EW has tried). Miranda would sooner list 50 line-item debts he owes to Jay-Z and Les Miz and N.W.A. and ALW and Menken and Moreno and Method Man than praise his own impact or boast of the creative genius others have described him as having. Perhaps that’s why Hamilton’s crossover into the mainstream brought him along with it, into a stimulating new leg of a career that taps into his acting (His Dark Materials), songwriting (Moana), dynamic displays of dramaturgy (Fosse/Verdon), and even downright old-school showmanship (Mary Poppins Returns). But Miranda also uses his star power to redirect his spotlight elsewhere: on hurricanes, on history, on anxiety and artistry and the difficult intersection of both.

Only anecdotes (and EW) force Miranda to acknowledge how Hamilton did in fact change the game, especially in its electrified dialogue around the multiplicity of perspectives and representation in entertainment. He offers one such tale he particularly treasures: “I had seen Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time in theaters opening weekend, and they actually quoted my words and the show — I will never forget that as long as I live — and I had the chance to meet her and she told me that when she first met with Disney about the movie, she said, ‘I hope you know I’m doing a Hamilton on this,’” Miranda recalls. “The fact that she used that as shorthand for ‘I’m casting this with actors of color and it’s all hands on deck’ — that was very, very moving to me. The fact that this show is cast the way it is and has been as successful as it has, I think broke down some kind of door. I hope we’ve ended the conversation about nontraditional casting in a very real way. There’s no going backwards now.”

Only going forward, into whatever creative heir to Hamilton lies in our 2020s and his future 40s. “I spent my 20s writing Heights and I spent my 30s writing Hamilton,” says Miranda, whose milestone ages are tied to the turn of the decades themselves (he’ll be 40 on Jan. 16, 2020). “I was actually pretty down at the top of this decade,” he recalls. “I remember the hangover after my 30th birthday party… it was a great party, but I just remember feeling like this was adulthood for real, and [not knowing] what’s going to happen. But it has also been the most fulfilling and joyous decade I’ve had so far. It’s been unreal.” And he’ll enter his 40s in similarly surrealistic fashion: In addition to a movie of Heights arriving in June, he’ll make his directorial debut helming a Netflix film adaptation of Tick, Tick… BOOM!, the 1990 musical by the late Jonathan Larson about a composer’s midlife anxiety over his artistic accomplishments. Miranda doesn’t need to point out the parallels. “We’re shooting ‘30/90’ the day I turn 40, so you wanna talk about decades? Jonathan Larson is almost exactly 20 years older than me, and to begin the decade telling his story, telling the story of the person who allowed me to believe I had a life in the theater? That feels like a really nice way to start.”

[youtubeameliah]

Becoming Official - Niall & Amelia

Who: @youtubeameliah​ and Niall ( @charswamelia​ )

When: 30/01/21 (forget that covid is a thing).

Notes: Amelia and Niall have had a few dates and now Niall wants to take the next step. 

Trigger Warnings: None.

niall

Niall had been going on dates with Amelia for the past month and she still had two months left in London before she was planning to go back to New York but he didn't want to wait two months to ask her to be his girlfriend, so he just knew he had to do it then. They knew so much about each other and had spent countless days with each other and although his life was crazy and he was always either in the studio or busy wiht interviews, he was always making time to make plans with her. He really enjoyed her company, and she was just amazing and she had already sung him a broadway song and her voice was incredible. He was just amazed by her and he was hoping she would want to be his girlfriend. His cousin was out for the day and whilst he was out, he had planned for them to have a movie day at his and just really a chill relaxing day because she had said she was feeling a bit down and didn't want to do too much and he appreciated that and made it as chill as he could.

amelia 

Amelia had enjoyed spending time with Niall, he was a busy man but had always made time for her since they met and it meant a lot to her because he had become someone she really cared for over the past month and she was falling for him slowly but surely. She was having a weird day wasn't feeling herself or anything but they had arranged ot meet and she didn't want to cancel so she asked for a relaxing day with him. She arrived at his place and was let in by the concierge and knocked on the door waiting for him to respond.

niall

Niall was happy that things were going well with Amelia, the last person he dated was Hailee and that was hard to get over, clearly he wrote a whole album about it. But he was falling for the girl, but he was known to fall fast and he expected it with her. As he heard the door, he smiled putting his guitar down and walked to the door to open it. Seeing her face there, he smiled as he pulled her in for a hug and smiled, "Hello beautiful. Glad you made it. You okay, want a cup of tea?" He smiled looking over at  her, over the past month he had learned that she liked tea when she was feeling down.

amelia

Amelia stood there as she felt his arms around her and smiled hugging him back, it was definitely something she needed. She smiled walking into his place and smiled nodding, "Of course I did, did you think I would cancel on you? I couldn't do that, not to you." She laughed a little pecking his cheek for a moment before nodding, "A tea would be great thank you." She smiled looking over at him before picking his guitar up, she had no clue how to play but since it was sitting there she sat on the sofa and started trying to play it for a moment, knowing it would catch his attention.

niall 

Niall laughed a little, "No I don't think I thought you were going to cancel. Well aren't you sweet beautiful." He smiled stroking her hair for a moment, he was definitely comfortable around her but he just enjoyed being around her. He nodded, "One Tea coming up." He laughed, he walked over to the kitchen whilst she stayed in his living room and as he had made the tea, he came out of the kitchen and walked into the living room to see her play his guitar and he couldn't help but laugh, he could tell she didn't know how to play. He smiled walking towards her and putting the tea on the table next to where she was sitting before taking a seat next to her, "Do you even know how to play? Because it soundsss. well it sounds like loudso f random notes all over the place." He laughed, "I can teach you if you like?"

amelia 

Amelia looked over at him and laughed a little looking over at the guy for a moment, "Only to certain people." She smiled as she waited for the tea she continued to play the guitar and looked at him as he walked back in and laughed a little shaking her head, "No I don't know how to play. Just thought I would pick it up thought it would come naturally to me." She laughed, she knew it wasn't like that, "Okay I am kidding there, I have always wanted to learn but never had the patience. Don't trust me, my best friend Sam tried to teach me for like 3 months but I got so annoyed that it didn't work out. I don't have patience to learn an instrument and I am okay with that. I can though play the piano." She laughed a little looking at him, "So what did you have planned for today?"

niall

Niall glanced at her for a moment and laughed a little looking at him before hearing her speak and laughed a little, "I was about to say I hope you're joking. It took me a long time to get the hang of it but I love playing so I am glad I do. Well if you are really sure you don't want to then I won't teach you. Oh you play the piano? One day you'll have to show me." He smiled before sitting there as he looked at her as he stroked the lose hair that was in her face away before looking at her, "Well we can do anything, we can have a movie day or games day, I mean I only really have board games at the moment but we can do that." He smiled looking over at him.

amelia

Amelia glanced over at him and smiled for am oment and nodded, "Well I will leave you to be the one to play the guitar, you sound great playing it. I do. One day, not now but one day." She smiled, "It was something I picked up when Finn died, it was something to calm me down and my anxiety down. Made me happy for the first time in a long time." She smiled at the memory before looking at him and laughed, "Both sounds good, movie can be back ground noise and we can play monopoly. I really want to see how competitive you are." She laughed before she took his hand and looked at him, "Hey before we do anything, i need to thank you, the past month, you made me believe in a lot of things I gave up on believing in, like love for example, I had never wanted to open up to anyone in a long time till I met you. This last month has probably been one of the best I have had in a while and when I came to visit my cousin I never expected this, I came because I needed a break from the city and everything. I was lost in life I guess. I am not saying a guy fixes that but you did make me feel better." She looked over at him and leaned in and kissed his cheek for a moment.

niall 

Niall looked over at her for a brief moment, and nodded, "Well I am very glad that you like to hear me play the guitar, might do it more often just for you now. Okay I look forward to it." He smiled, hearign her mention Finn made him smile, he knw it was a painful memory for her and he knew that if she openly talked about him, she trusted him and it helped her move on, she had told him that before and he was never going to tell her to stop if it was what she needed. "Music can be a great healer when it is needed, but glad you got into something." He smiled, everyone who he had seen in the past month could tell he was falling for this girl, he went for drinks with Lewis the other week and he straight out said it. He looked at her, "Okay perfect, oh I can get really competitive especially with Monopoly." he laughed a little looking at her again, he heard her words as she took his hand and he just held onto it for a moment as he took his other to stroke her cheek, she was beautiful and amazing and making his heart skip a beat for a moment, "Amelia, you don't need ot thank me, I am glad that I have been able to put a smile on your face and I am glad that you have been able to open up with me. Amelia, you have made the last month enjoyable for me, I got back from tour expecting the next few months to be a bit slow and not much going on but just a chance to have a mini break but then you came a long and I haven't been as excited for something as I have to spend time with you and get to know you and see where this goes. Amelia, look I know it's only been a month but I need to do this now because I just know how I feel, I know I fall fast and I have accepted that, but I really like you Amelia and I just know I want to spend more time with you, and see where this goes. Amelia, will you be my girlfriend?" He realised he had said her name too many times there but he needed to.

amelia

Amelia glanced over at him for a moment and laughed a little looking over at him for a brief moment and nodded, "It definitely is a good healer in time." She smiled looking over at him and laughed a little raising her eyebrows for a moment and shook her head for a moment, "Oh really? Well I look forward to seeing it." She smiled for a brief moment. She listened to him and his Irish accent made everything sound better, but his words hit her, he was really sweet and she really liked him and hearing his words, she smiled as she heard his question, she smiled, "I would love to be your girlfriend. Honestly you have become someone so important to me in such  a short amount of time." She smiled and leaned in and kissed him passionately for a moment.

niall 

Niall looked over at her and smiled for a moment and nodded, "Oh trust me, you ill regret that." He laughed a little. Looking over at her he smiled holding onto her tightly, he was smitten with the girl and would do anything to be with her no matter what. "You have become such an important person to me as well Amelia. I am very happy to hear this though." He smiled as he kissed her passionately for a moment

amelia 

She smiled and laughed a little looking at him, "Sure I will." She shook her head for a moment and smiled as she held onto him for a moment, her mind just went crazy for a moment, "You're the first person to make me feel special at all times since Finn and I am just in so much shock... I need to tell you something, I know its only been a month but I love you Niall. I know things are going to be different once I go back to New York in a couple of months but I know we can make it work." She smiled for a moment as she kissed him softly.

niall

He looked over at her and laughed a little loooking at her as she was talking he was so shocked to hear the words but it was everything he had been feeling, he knew he fell fast which is why he hadn't told her because he didn't want to scare her off. He smiled and held on to her and smiled kissing her deeply for a moment, "I love you too Amelia. I am glad you feel special around me because are special to me. I know you haven't vlogged around me since beign here and I know it's your job and I am very greatful that you chose to keep this private for now. We will make it work babe, I promise you this will work no matter." He smiled holding on to her for a moment kissing the top of her forehead, "How about we just watch a film?"

amelia

She looked over at him and smiled for a moment as she bit her lip, hearing him say the words made her smile and feel so much better. As he kissed her deeply, she kissed back as she held onto him, "Of course I do. And I wanted to keep it private too, I vlog when I can or have to but other then that I keep it private. It's not that big of a deal." She smiled looking over at him and nodded, "I am glad you are as sure as I am." She smiled as she held onto him and nodded, "I like the sound of that, what film though?"

niall

Niall kept his smile on his face, he never expected to come off tour and find himself a girlfriend but he did and he was very much happy about it. He smiled looking at her, "You're amazing did you know that? One day you can put me in your vlog if you want." He smiled kissing her cheek for a moment and nodded, "Of course I am. Plus gives me more of a reason to visit New York." He smiled kissing her forehead for a moment and laughed, "Good question, hmm what kind of film did you wanna watch? Maybe Moulin Rouge? Or I might even let you put Hamilton on."

amelia 

She looked over at him for a moment, this guy had done something to her, he made her believe in love again and she was very greatful for that because it took a while. "Well some people have said that in the past. One day I will maybe when I am at a concert of yours but for now I don't want to do that." She smiled as she played with his hair for a moment and nodded, "You can visit the greatest city in the world. I am sure my friends would love to meet you. I will warn you now, Kurt might give you a speech and blah blah blah but hes amazing and my best friend but they are all great." She smiled, the thought of them made her miss them more. She smiled for a moment, "Oh you want to watch a musical? Well how about Moulin Rouge? I love Hamilton but seen it to many times now I need a break."

niall 

He smiled looking over at her and laughed a little, she was always making him laugh and he loved that and nodded, "I understand that." He smiled as he felt her hands in his hair and he loved it when she played with her hair, smiling he looked over at her and nodded, "Well I look forward ot meeting them all especially Kurt. How about I come down a month after you have left? I am heading to LA for a few weeks at some point so can come either before or after." He smiled looking over at her for a brief moment and nodded, "Okay well that sounds perfect." He smiled kissing the side of her head as he put the tv on and looked over at her for a moment as he wrapped his arm around her, "I am excited for our future together!"

amelia

She smiled as she glanced over at him for a moment and nodded as she ran a hand through her hair for a moment and laughed a little before hearing his words and smiled, "Oh my gosh that would be amazing, I would love it if you came out that would be great." She smiled as she hugged him tightly and she nodded and smiled as she rested her head on his shoulder, "I am excited for our future together too." She smiled as she stroked his leg for a moment.

niall

He smiled looking over at her and nodded, "Well then I will come. We will make this work, I know we will. I look forward to the day you get your broadway show and I get to watch you perform." He smiled looking over at her for a moment as he wrapped his arm around tightly and stroked her hair for a moment.

amelia 

She smiled glancing over at him for a brief moment, "We will for sure." She smiled for a moment, "I can't wait for that." She smiled for a brief moment efore laying her head on his shoulder and watched the film. As the film came to an end, she ran a hand through her hair for a moment before looking up at him, "Well that was a good film." She smiled as she gave him a soft kiss for a moment.Message #becoming-official

[mirkwoodshewolf]

That would be enough; Old!Roger Taylor x reader

*Author’s note*

Alright in honor of yet another Queen member’s bday this month one week after his friend and brother Brian, HAPPY 70TH BIRTHDAY ROGER MEDDOWS TAYLOR!! From all of us to you we hope you have a great birthday and always keep rocking and being your awesome self. Now this is my first time ever writing a current Roger Taylor fanfic so I hope I get it right and I hope you all enjoy this. So not really any warnings except swearing and a tad bit of angst but it’s all FLUFFY FEELS in the end. Enjoy my lovelies :)

Queen Taglist:

@psychosupernatural

@plethora-of-things

@ixchel-9275

@geek-and-proud

@queendeakyy

@waddles03

@coolcxt

_________________________________________________________

It all began in the winter 2016 when we were asked to perform live at the Grammy’s.  By we; I mean Adam Lambert, myself and Brian.  We were on the stage to wait the arrival of another artist we would be performing along with for the award show.  Apparently she’s a big name in America specifically on the Broadway spectrum. I would know because my daughters can’t stop listening to her recent musical she was in, “Hamilton.”

“Brian, Roger, Adam.” The producer called out to us. There walking beside him was a beautiful young woman around her early 30’s with (h/l) (h/c).  But what struck out to me was her eyes, she had the same blue eyes as I did, in fact she almost resembled me to a degree.  Hell looking back on all the times I dressed in drag, it was like looking at an exact copy. “I’d like the three of you to meet the performer you’ll be singing (y/n) (l/n).”

“Hello, I know you lot get told this a lot but—you guys were such an inspiration to me growing up. And Adam, you’ve got a range that I’ve never heard on any performer.”

“And what of you? Mrs. Eliza?” Adam vocalized which made her giggle.

“Hamilton fan I assume?”

“Girl are you kidding me? The second I heard about the album from a friend of mine I couldn’t stop listening to it. Your tickets are nearly impossible to get now.”

“I know. I never expected it to boom as it did. But as soon as Lin called me about the script and wanted me to be a part of it, I knew I had to get involved. It’s unlike any musical I’ve been in before.”

“I’ll admit my youngest daughter loves the show and couldn’t stop talking about it when we were in New York.” Brian spoke up.

“Oh wow I’m honored Mr. May.”

“Oh love, Mr. May was my father, please call me Brian.” The two shook hands with each other and she then turned to me. God she looked so familiar not just with my looks but she also had the looks of someone I once knew a long time ago.

“And the famous Roger Taylor. I must say it’s because of you I sought out the drums in my middle and high school band.” I snapped out of my daze and we shook hands with each other and said.

“I bet you were probably the best drummer there ever was.”

“Indeed, got my band to win Districts every year.” She said. “Would’ve gotten state champion my junior year of high school but unfortunately a few of the kids in the strings had to screw up the notes.”

“Been there before, mostly with this guy’s strings breaking.” I gestured toward Brian.

“Oh well forgive me but at least I wasn’t the one who forgot the lyrics to my own song.”

“I thought I told you to never mention that again!” I hissed leaving Adam and (y/n) to laugh.

“So shall we run some sound checks for a bit? I was told we’ll be performing after Pink.” (y/n) stated and we were all in agreement.

Throughout the day I couldn’t stop thinking about (y/n). Just the way she presented herself on stage just reminded me of someone but I just couldn’t figure it out.  After rehearsal one before the Grammys would begin in just 4 days, I sat in my dressing room when Brian came in and asked me.

“What is it mate? You’ve been out of sorts all day, what’s going on?”

“Brian, did…..did (y/n) look familiar to you?”

“You mean besides the fact she’s a Broadway star?”

“Brian I’m serious there was just something about her that just…..seemed familiar. Like I’ve seen her before.”

“You’re probably just overthinking this Rog, come and have a drink with Adam, (y/n) and I tonight. Adam’s buying this time after all.” I nodded and followed Brian to meet (y/n) and Adam outside.

We managed to find a nice restaurant pub nearby and as we ate a well earned late supper, Brian asked (y/n).

“So (y/n). How did you get involved with Broadway?”

“Well….it’s because of my mom. She was in Broadway, hell it’s been a tradition in my mom’s family. She was just a dancer but she was one of the best dancers according to critics.” At hearing that I choked on my water.

“Roger!” Adam exclaimed.

“Roger you okay?” asked (y/n).

“Yeah, yeah I’m fine just….went down the wrong pipe. Excuse me for a minute.” I raced out of the pub and into the fresh air as suddenly it occurred to me.

“Roger, what’s going on with you?” I heard Brian say.

“It all makes sense now. I should’ve remembered the last name, how could I be such an idiot?” I muttered to myself.

“Roger what are you talking about?”

“Do you remember when we did our last American tour at the start of the 80’s. And we performed at Madison Square Garden.”

“Yeah, where are you going with this?”

“Do you remember that Broadway show we saw? Umm West Side story I think it was? And I actually managed to hook up with one of the dancers.”

“Yeah (m/n). I remember you were crazy about her before you met Dominque.”

“I—I think the reason why she broke up with me was—because she was pregnant.”

“Hold on Rog. This is a serious allegation. You don’t think that (y/n) is…..”

“At first I didn’t get it but the more I look at her the more I see it. Brian she has my eyes, she’s almost like a reflection of me but with her mum’s hair. Brian I—I really think she’s my daughter.”

“So what are you going to do? You know you can’t just spring this up on (y/n) like this so suddenly.”

“I know, I know. I’ll….I’ll try to get alone with her and somehow slowly ease her into a conversation about her mum. Maybe I could even try to get reconnected with (m/n). To at least tell me why she never told me she was pregnant.”

“Now just be sure if you do get her contact information you don’t go off yelling at her. I’m sure she had her reasons…..”

“Reasons my arse Brian she kept my daughter away from me! I never even knew my first child would be a girl and I’ve missed so much….”

“Umm guys?” We turned to see (y/n) standing there. “Is everything okay?”

“No, I mean yes. Everything is fine love.” I assured her.  Her eyes gave off that same look her mum always made when she was concerned for my wellbeing.  God she really was my daughter.

“Okay, it’s just that you both were gone for a while and I got a little worried.”

“Don’t worry love, we’ll be just another minute.” She nodded before heading back inside.

“Just think about it carefully Rog. She seems to not know herself, so just proceed with caution.” Brian warned me one last time.

A couple days went by and it was just one more day till the Grammys.  I was now standing before (y/n)’s dressing room finally seeing a chance to talk to her in private.  I slowly reached my hand for the door and softly knocked on it and her voice rang out.

‘If it’s Debbie from the article fuck off I’m not giving you any dirt on Lin!’ God she really is my daughter.

“No love it’s Roger.” The door opened and she peeked out and said.

“Oh god I am so sorry about that Rog. I didn’t mean to do that I—”

“I get it, if you thought the press were bad today you should’ve seen them back in my day. God they literally camped outside your houses at the time.”

“Jesus, oh where are my manners please come in.” she said as she fully opened the door and allowed me inside.  I walked in and she closed her door and she said. “Can I get you anything? I’ve got water, champagne, some wine, beer.”

“I wouldn’t mind a beer.” I answered.

“Coming right up.” She went over to the minifridge and pulled out two bottles of beer and handed one over to me.  “So did you need anything?”

“Oh I just—see I feel like we haven’t really gotten the chance to really connect like you and Adam have, hell you even managed to spend some time with Brian and not get bored with him.” We both chuckled and I continued, “Only if you wish to. I don’t want to make you comfortable.”

“No, no it’s fine. I mean truthfully the reason why I never got to talk with you much is because…..well I’ve always been starstruck with you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah I know. All my friends had told me that out of every Queen member they’d be starstruck to meet it’d be Freddie. God rest his soul. I really am sorry about his death. I was just 11 years old when I heard the news. God I was depressed for weeks on end, couldn’t even listen to his voice without crying.”

“Yeah it—it was hard on all of us. I was actually on my way to see him. And I was just 300 yards away when I got the call….” I stopped as I felt tears fill my eyes.  Jesus retelling that day always makes me emotional.

“But he’d be proud of what you guys have done for the band. As well as everything else you all have accomplished. Even Deacy.” She said as she reached out and took my hand.  I smiled and placed my hand on top of hers.  It was then a picture caught my eye that stood on her makeup stand.

She turned around and smiled softly and said.

“That’s a picture of my mom and I at my first Broadway leading role. It was in Les Misérables when I got Fantine.” She reached over and grabbed it and handed it to me.  I took the picture in my hand and everything I had thought was officially confirmed.

There standing next to (y/n) was indeed (m/n) (l/n), the Broadway dancer I once fell in love with during our tour of America. She looked older than I last saw her, her hair was now a pixie cut short but she was still as beautiful as I remembered her being.

“Do you—still see her? I know life of a performer is tough and time constricting.” I asked her.

“I—visit her whenever I can. Bring her, her favorite flowers.”

“White lilies with baby’s breath.” We both said at the same time.  Oh bugger. “How did you know that?” she asked.

“She—she uhh….” C’mon Roger say something clever you old bastard! “She just looks like the type of woman who would love those flowers.” Oh please buy it please buy it please buy it.

“Okay.” She said a bit wearily.  “Well anyways I try to see her whenever I can. But it just gets harder and harder to visit her each time.” Huh? What did she mean by that? Is she sick? Was she abusive to her? Oh please tell me it wasn’t the latter.

“Whys that? If you don’t mind me asking?” I asked her.  She took back the picture from me and said.

“Well I’d like to clarify where she’s staying isn’t exactly a sunshiny place. It’s always hard to visit a cemetery.” What? Oh no.

“I’m so sorry dear. You don’t have to tell me the reason why…”

“No I feel like I should. After all you’re taking the time to getting to know me, might as well learn the whole package. Well this past year hasn’t been easy on me and my family. My mom was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. We—thought we’d have more time, but just as I was about to tell her that I got the leading lady role in Hamilton…..” she trailed off and clasped her hand over her mouth.

I did the only thing that I could think of. I wrapped my arms around her and lay her head on my shoulder.

“Tell me…..how do you make the pain go away?” she whimpered out.  I squeezed her shoulder and rested my head on top of hers and answered her as honestly as I could.

“It’s hard, and it may never go away. But something that helps me cope with Freddie’s death is that I try to think of all the great times I had with him. I’ve been around the old bastard so much I know exactly what he would say to me if I allowed my grief to overcome me. He’d tell me; ‘oh stiff up a lip blondie! Stop feeling sorry for yourself, you tried your best and I know what you did. Now stop your whimpering you big softie’.” I soon heard a small laugh coming from her.

It was small but I at least got a smile from her, her mother’s smile just as I remembered it.

“Your mum knew you’d get the part, I’ll bet she had no doubt that you would. So I have a feeling she’d tell you to keep performing and don’t let her death stop you from your dreams.” I rubbed her arm comfortingly and kept her in my arms for a little bit longer until she finally calmed down.  She separated herself from me and said.

“God I probably look like a mess right now.”

“Not at all.” I replied as I wiped a few tears stains from her face.

“Thank you Roger, I—haven’t been able to cry like that since the funeral.”

“I’m always here whenever you need to vent your grief. It’s not healthy to keep it inside, especially for a long period of time.” I said as I rubbed her back.  She nodded and that’s when a knock was heard.

“Ms. (L/n), it’s time for final curtain rehearsal and discuss when you and Queen and Adam are going to perform.” One of the volunteers spoke out from the other side.

“Be right out just give me a few minutes.” She called back.  “Well I better clean myself up.”

“I’ll leave you to it then.” I stood up and prepared to leave her dressing room when I was suddenly hugged from behind.

“Thank you again Roger, really. You don’t know how much it meant to me.” I heard her voice say into my shoulder.  I smiled both with happiness but also grief as I turned and hugged her back.

“Anytime darling. Whenever you need to talk, I’ll be there.” She nodded then headed back over to her makeup chair and began cleaning herself up.  I stood there and watched her for a few minutes, just seeing her mother in her and remembering all the times I spent backstage on her shows seeing her get ready.

Soon the big day arrived, the Grammy awards 2016. Brian, Adam and I were in our car being driven to the award show where we would walk the carpet and do a couple of interviews.  Once we arrived, the crowd was already huge.

Hundreds of people screaming and cheering, hundreds of performers and nominees were strutting around getting their pictures taken. God what Fred would do if he were here right now, probably photobomb a few singers just to be cheeky.  After getting a few pictures in, we were stopped for an interview.

Much of it I barely paid attention to, that was until a question regarding to (y/n) came up.

“So singing along with famed Broadway singer of the American musical Hamilton, what was that like for you? Is working with a Broadway star different than other singers?”

“Oh (y/n) was a huge joy to work with. She and I are practically best friends right now and promised me tickets to the next show.” Adam laughed. “No, no she’s an amazing performer and it’s no different than working with any other singer. Less drama of course but no she was wonderful to rehearse with and I can’t wait to perform live with her.”

“And Brian, Roger? Did you guys feel out of sorts working with her? Like did she feel lower to you cause she’s just a Broadway performer?” What kind of question is that?

“No, not at all. As Adam said she was wonderful to get to know. She’s definitely got some surprises in store for us tonight as she sings with us.” Brian answered.

“Yeah Broadway performers are no different than any other singer. It’s all about just mixing in the differences each performer’s got and she was a wonderful mix into this performance.” I replied without wanting to ring the interviewers neck speaking so lowly about Broadway performers.

After the interview I then saw (y/n) talking with a female interviewer.  Wow and did she look beautiful.  She wore a spaghetti strapped royal blue backless dress which had a small train at the bottom of it.  Thinking it wouldn’t hurt to just go up and say a quick hello (after all I’ve seen actors and singers interrupt artists for a quick hello or greeting all the time).

“So yeah at first I was really nervous but then—Oh my god! Hey Rog!” She hugged me and I hugged her back saying.

“Hello love.”

“Also joining us is Queen’s drummer Roger Taylor, Roger how are you feeling?” the interviewer asked.

“Tired.” I answered which made us all laugh. “But also honored to be here, this is our first Grammy performance in like 20-30 years so it’ll be interesting to see how much has changed.”

“Don’t worry not a lot. I was just asking (y/n) how she felt singing with Queen and Adam.”

“Well I can tell you it’s been an honor to perform alongside a talented young woman like (y/n). She’s been an absolute pleasure to sing with and I can see why so many people love her in Hamilton.”

“Oh Rog stop you’re making me blush.” (y/n) groaned out as she tried to hide her face.

“Well I won’t keep you guys any longer. Good luck tonight and we’ll all be cheering for you.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you so much.”

“No thank you. Cheers you two.”

“Bye.” We both walked away and as the press continued to holler and command more photos I said to (y/n).

“You look beautiful love.”

“Thanks, and you pretty handsome yourself.”

“Once a long time ago.” I stated.

“Hey now don’t say that.” She said as she playfully shoved me.

“Well then, shall I have the honor of escorting you inside milady?”

“Why of course you may.” She said in probably the most exaggerated British accent I had ever heard but I let it slide.  I hooked my arm out and she wrapped her arm around mine and the two of us walked inside.

“Well I’ll see you soon up on stage. My assigned seating is with my cast members since Hamilton is up for best musical album.” She said.

“Will do love, and good luck. I have a feeling you guys will win so many awards.” I told her.  She kissed my cheek and then headed out to meet with some of her cast members who were already there.  Seeing her with all her friends made me feel warm hearted.

“So you still gonna tell her after the show?” I heard Brian’s voice say.

“If I don’t I may never get a second chance. But there’s also something in me to not tell her. I mean what will she think of me when I do tell her?”

“I wish I could tell you what to do Rog, but only you can make that call. But whatever you choose, just make sure you don’t regret it.”  It was decided.

As the show went on, (y/n)’s first performance would be with her cast members singing the opening number of Hamilton. And hearing the song with my own ears, I was mesmerized, especially when she got to stand center stage singing the story of Alexander and his mother’s life after the father split.

Much like Queen, every voice blended so well together.  Even though there were so many of them, I could easily pick out each voice individually and hear it and their harmonizing just sent shivers up my spine.  By the end of the song, the audience roared in applause that I only heard in our concerts, but of course I was probably the loudest cheering for my girl.

As the show continued, we were now preparing to do our number.  I saw (y/n) take her spot by the piano and I walked up to her and said.

“You’re gonna do great love.”

“I know, I’m just nervous that I’ll mess up a key or note and end up messing you all up.”

“Don’t worry love, you’ll do great. I have faith in you.” I assured her as I placed my hand on her shoulder giving her a gentle squeeze.

“How do you always know what to say Roger Taylor?” she asked as he placed her hand on top of mine.

“It comes with being old.” I teased which made us laugh.

“Okay boys, Miss, we’ll be live in 2 minutes.” Said one of the producers.

“Well better get back up there.” I gestured towards my drum set.  She nodded and I walked away from the piano and sat down at my drum set twirling my drumstick in hand getting my head in the game.

“Welcome back to the 58th Grammy awards. And now for the long awaited performance of a lifetime. These guys have been kick butt in the music industry for years selling off millions of records since the 1970’s and joining them the runner up of American Idol as well as the leading lady of Hamilton. Here is (Y/n) (l/n), Queen and Adam Lambert.” The audience cheered and soon (y/n) began playing the piano as Adam began to sing “Don’t stop me now”.

Adam took the first verse of the song and as the song picked up Brian and I joined in with (y/n)’s piano playing as well as the bass player who was up on stage with us.  Lights flashing and Adam’s vice echoing through the speakers as he led the crowd in his own fashion.

By the second verse, the spotlight came onto (y/n) who kept playing the piano and I could hear the cast of Hamilton cheering for her.  Along with that soft soprano voice she used for her role as Eliza, for this song she unleashed such a raw, rock and roll alto range.  It was almost like if you could convert my rang into a woman’s voice, that’s (y/n).  

Also people suspect that most Broadway stars just sing and dance, well not this girl.  She’s told us that her mum taught her how to do the piano and guitar so she truly is a triple threat.

Along with playing and singing backup vocals on my cue, I couldn’t help but watch my daughter perform as at the instrumental break, her and Adam now stood side by side together and side stepped with each other like they practiced during rehearsal, she was a born performer. Whether Broadway or Rockstar, she was mine and her mother mixed together.

And that was enough for me to love her even more.

By the end of our piece, the audience was in a stadium sized cheer as we all came together at center stage, (y/n) standing between Adam and I as we waved of saluted to the audience in thanks.

More awards were given and soon it came time for award for ‘Best Musical theater album.’ An announcer read up all the musicals up for the award; Hamilton, An American in Paris, Fun Home, The King and I, and Something Rotten!

“And the winner of the best musical album goes to…..” all was silent and even I was tensed up with anxiety as I just wanted to race up there and rip the envelope myself.  I could do it much faster than this guy.  Finally it was open and he smiled and exclaimed into the microphone, “HAMILTON!!” I cheered out as loud as I could and whistled just as loud.

I could see (y/n) hugging her cast mates and everyone involved with the musical raced down the runway and up the stage as the audience roared with applause as the score of the opening number was playing and on the screen showed some shots of some of the actors in costume, including (y/n).

I wiped away the tears in my eyes as I kept cheering for (y/n).  She may think that no parent was there to see her get this award, but in truth she did have a father who was so proud of her and I just know (m/n) is cheering and crying in heaven.

Once the award show was finally over, I could see the entire cast of Hamilton all outside in a group huddle cheering and crying out as some of them including my girl holding a Grammy trophy.  Everyone was talking over each other in pure excitement that was until Lin’s proclaimed.

“Okay Hamilton cast, first round of drinks are on me tonight!” Everyone cheered and they all walked on ahead, that was until (y/n) spotted me.  She smiled and ran towards me and tackled me in a hug.

“Ohh I’m so happy you got to see it happen!” she exclaimed.

“Congratulations love. You and your castmates deserved to win.”

“Why don’t you come celebrate with us?” she offered.

“Oh no, no. You wouldn’t want an old grizzly man to cramp your style dear.”

“Hey what did I just tell you earlier?” she mocked.

“Besides; Brian, Adam and I need to be on the next flight out of here back to London to start planning our European tour.”

“So—this is it?” she asked sadly.  “Wow it…..it feels like this has all ended too fast.”

“I know what you mean. But you still got so many more awards to win love, you should be focused and celebrating every chance you get. Especially since rumor has it you’re up for a Tony award.”

“Yeah, never did I think I would ever get nominated for one. It’ll be my first nomination.”

“And I pray that they’ll call you Tony Award winner (y/n) (l/n) after you win it.” I said as I cupped her face and stroked her cheek.

“Thank you for everything Roger. And it was an honor to play alongside you. Give my love to Brian and Adam for me will you?”

“Of course.” We both kissed each other’s cheek and she went on ahead.

“Oh hey, next time you three are in New York, come see us. I can have security let you in backstage before and after the show!”

“We’ll take you up on that offer.” C’mon you old fool she’s walking away. You’ve got to tell her now. Do it! Do it! “(Y/n) wait!” she stopped and turned back around.

“Yeah Rog?” I walked up towards her and nervously stammered out.

“I—I uhh….Can we…..can we talk for a minute before you go? Privately.”

“Sure Rog, let me just text Leslie since he’s my ride to the bar.” She quickly sent a text to Leslie and once she saw the reply she said, “Okay he’s gonna wait for me in the parking garage and let the others know to wait for us. Where do you want to talk?”

“Mind if we go to my dressing room?” she shook her head and we both walked along to where Brian and I shared a dressing room before the performance.  Once we got in she immediately set herself down on the couch and took off her heels.

“God even though I wear heels every night on stage, I still don’t get used to stilettos. Whoever invented those heel brands must’ve had no skin whatsoever.”

“Yeah, they are a real pain in the arse.” I told her.

“So what do you want to talk about Roger?” she asked.

Here it was, the moment of truth.  It was either say it now or let it blow up in your face.

“You—you remember how I knew your mother’s favorite flowers?”

“Yeah.” She said wearily.

“Well, I was completely honest with you (y/n).”

“What are you talking about?”

“I—I knew your mother.” I saw her eyes slowly widen as she just stared at me.

“You knew my mother?”

“Yes. I first met her back in 1980. It was after a Madison Square Garden show, Freddie, John and I went to go see West Side Story at the time, and when I saw your mother on stage…..it was like I was looking at a true dancer on the stage. She outshined everyone.”

“Yeah she was known for that.” (y/n) reminisced.

“After the show I went up and talked to her. Of course she was feisty but I couldn’t help myself. I was drawn to her, and soon we eventually became friends. Very good friends.”

“But…..if you guys were so close, how come she never spoke to me about you?” I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled and I said.

“I’m sorry I have to tell you this, and you may hate me after I tell you. Maybe even think I’m a horrible person but I swear I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know what? Roger please you’re scaring me. Just tell me what this is all about?”  I looked down at my feet for god knows how long before I finally looked up at her and told her straight up.

“I’m your father.”

All was silent as her face slowly turned from shock to absolute horror.

“At first I didn’t know when we first met. But there was something about you that just seemed familiar. Then the dinner when you said your mum was a Broadway dancer it got me freaked out thinking that it wasn’t possible, but then seeing a picture of your mum it only confirmed everything. I didn’t know she was pregnant I woke up one morning and she was just gone leaving a note telling me she was sorry. I don’t mean to spring this on you at once but I—”

“Stop! Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.” She muttered in haste as she held out her hand.

“(Y/n) I’m sorry I just……”

“Stay away from me.” She sneered.

“(Y/n) please I swear I…..” but she kept interrupting me as I kept trying to explain myself as gently as I could.  She kept muttering to herself till suddenly I felt this sharp pain across my face and I found myself down on the ground.

“Just stay away from me! You’re a crazy, senile old man. Just stay away from me or I’ll call the police!” she then raced out of the dressing room, but I could hear the sounds of her crying echoing through the hallway as she ran.

I blew it.  Now that all was said and done, I blew it.  She knew the truth and seeing her so upset just broke my heart.  I didn’t mean to confuse her or make her mad I just—maybe I was being selfish.  

It had been about four months since the Grammy’s and ever since I told (y/n) the truth, I just couldn’t think right.  Even during rehearsals with Brian and Adam my head just wasn’t in the game as it usually was and they could tell but they didn’t push.  Can’t say the same for the managers as well as the touring manager since we needed to prepare for our next upcoming tour.

“Roger?” I heard my wife Sarina call out to me.

“Please love I….I need a moment to myself.”

“Rog, I think you should really come to the living room. Someone came all this way to see you, and it’d be rude to just toss her out into the London streets.” I looked up at her and asked.

“Who is it?” she gestured with her finger to follow her.  We walked out of my basement studio and came to the living room to see Tiger Lilly, Rory, and Lola sitting with (y/n).

I couldn’t believe it, all my girls together and talking with each other.

“I—hope I’m not intruding or anything.” (y/n) answered nervously as she fiddled with her fingers.

“No not at all.” I replied.

“Girls why don’t we give them some privacy?” Sarina suggested and soon my three girls left us to chat.

“Didn’t feel the need to tell them quite yet.” She replied softly.

“Although I bet Tiger and Lola would flip knowing that Elizabeth Schuyler is their sister.” She softly smiled and then looked up at me.

“I—I made some calls to my uncle Bobby and aunt Jodie, my mom’s siblings and told them if they knew. And—turns out you weren’t some crazy old man. Apparently when my mom found out she was pregnant with me, she didn’t want to tell you. She claimed that Queen was finally getting the recognition that you guys deserved and she knew you weren’t the type to settle down. She thought you’d leave her or ask her to abort me. So she just decided to pack up her stuff and moved back to the states and never wanted to contact you again.”

“What?” I muttered in shock.

“That’s what my aunt and uncle said. And now that I think back, she always did step out of the room and never spoke when I would play a Queen record or when one of your songs came on the radio. She never said she hated you guys, just—couldn’t listen to your songs. And apparently she knew when it was a song written by you.” I smiled sadly and stated.

“(Y/n) I—I never wanted to confuse or hurt you.”

“I know you didn’t. I shouldn’t have acted like that.”

“No you had every right to act the way you did. I know I would.” I said as I sat in front of her.  Hesitantly I reached out and cupped her face in my hands and lifted her head up so that I could look into the blue eyes she inherited from me. “Listen (y/n); I have missed so much in your life. Your first steps, first word, the first show you got casted in, every important thing in your life. And I can understand if you don’t want me to be a part of it now. After all you’ve become successful on your own and have grown into such a beautiful young woman.”

“It was hard believe me.” She choked out.

“But you made it. Look at you now. And your mum would be so proud of you.” I saw tears drip down her face and she nodded.

“It’ll be hard, after all I never knew I had a dad. So I assumed it was just my mom and me, it’ll take some time to get used to having a dad but—will you be a part of my narrative?” I only smiled and quoted her character’s famed quote.

“That would be enough, love.” We immediately held each other.  I felt her bury her face into chest and I buried my face into her hair inhaling her scent.  I held her as tight as I could and couldn’t stop the tears falling down my face.

God I can’t believe this.  I had another baby girl, and at last I finally got the chance to hold her in my arms.  My eyes, attitude and looks along with her mother’s as well as her mother’s hair, we made a perfect Broadway angel.

About a week later it was the premiere of the London production of Hamilton.  As a first success, the American cast came to kick off the show and then auditions would begin here in London.  With the help of (y/n), she gave all of us tickets and the best seats for the show. Not just my family but Brian’s as well as Adam and his parents.  And seeing my angel in her element on stage in full costume and makeup, she reminded me of her mother but also had the front lady essence that Fred once had.

But the number that got me the most was the number ‘That would be enough’ when Eliza confirmed to Hamilton of her pregnancy after he was forced to be sent home from the war.  The lyrics hit me so hard and the chemistry between my daughter and Lin-Manuel Miranda made me think of me and (m/n).

I also saw how on certain parts of the lyrics especially towards the end of the song, I saw how she would look right at me. The way she evoked raw emotion and even allowed tears to fall down her face just shot some serious feels (at least I think that’s how Lola says people call it now) right in the heart.

I was proud of my Broadway baby, I’m glad that now we can be apart of each other’s lives now.  And that was enough.

[jobrosupdates]

‘We needed to speak our truth – and forgive’: Jonas Brothers on music, marriage and making up | The Guardian

Six years ago, on the back of 17m album sales, the Disney stars split, devastating their fans. Now they’re back with a No 1 single. They talk about family rifts – and why it took so long to patch things up

“Good to see you,” smiles Kevin Jonas, the first of three Jonas brothers to arrive in the back room of an upmarket hotel in Fitzrovia, London. Kevin and I have indeed met before, many years ago, for an interview he has no reason to remember. Between then and today, the Jonas Brothers have split and now re-formed, and for anyone querying just how in sync the newly reunited band are, Joe is the next to join us. “Good to see you,” he says. A few seconds later, here comes Nick: “Good to see you.”

It is three months since they announced their reunion, more than half a decade since a split that was blamed on a “deep rift within the band”. The pandemonium surrounding their getting back together, which has seen Sucker become the band’s first US No 1 single, feels like a mirror image of how fans reacted to the brutality and abruptness of the split in 2013, when, having sold 17m albums and achieved widespread international fame, the brothers ditched a half-made fifth album and cancelled a world tour they were in the middle of. Nick instigated the split, it emerged; there were musical differences, along with the deep rift.

I ask them how being back and once again hurling themselves into full days of press, fan meets-and-greets and invite-only concerts is going. Kevin is the first to respond: “Well, we haven’t wanted to break up yet.”

The Jonas Brothers began life as a standard teen band. Columbia Records had already released solo music by Nick, who had been performing on Broadway since he was seven. (Today, he describes his seven-year-old self as “incredibly driven and focused and not very fun to be around”, which prompts a knowing laugh from older brother Kevin.) The preposterously wholesome New Jersey brothers’ cover of Busted’s Year 3000, in which their vision of the future referenced girls with “round hair like Star Wars” rather than Busted’s “triple-breasted women”, brought modest success. But when their debut album flopped, Columbia dropped the band and around the same time, their father, a pastor whose involvement in the church had a big impact on the family, lost his job. Joe was 17, Kevin was 19; Nick was just 14. “Lost in the shuffle of major label ‘stuff’,” is how Nick puts it now. At the time, emotions ran higher. “We felt like our journey had come to an end.”

But in the words of another sibling pop band, it had only just begun. In 2007, just weeks after leaving Columbia, the band signed with Disney’s record label Hollywood. Disney’s pitch to the Jonas Brothers was simple, according to Nick. “They called and said: ‘You’ve been working with someone who doesn’t know how to market to this audience. This is literally what we do. We see an opportunity and we want to help you grow.’” Disney’s power had already become obvious to the band when the Year 3000 video was played on one of its TV channels. “I saw our Myspace followers go from 100 to 10,000 in just one day,” Joe says.

Only with hindsight is it clear just how effectively the Disney machine made good on its promise. They inserted the Jonas Brothers, albeit not as the Jonas Brothers, into the TV show Hannah Montana, as Miley Cyrus’s favourite band, in an episode that aired directly after the premiere of High School Musical 2. They gave the siblings their own sitcom, Jonas, in which they played a band (again, not the Jonas Brothers). Then came the movie Camp Rock, in which the Jonas Brothers starred alongside Demi Lovato as the band Connect 3. Once again, not the Jonas Brothers, a strategy Joe now recognises as both “genius and confusing”, but the audience joined the dots, thanks in part to another series, Living The Dream – a fly-on-the-wall show in which the band finally starred as themselves.

Those years involved so many of what Nick describes as “pinch-me-I’m-a-Jonas-Brother moments”, such as performing at the White House as favourites of the Obama administration. Joe recalls playing with Stevie Wonder at the Grammys. “The curtains open and there’s Paul McCartney and Chris Martin, and they’re the first ones out of their seats.” They were applauding, not leaving. “Obviously it was for Stevie Wonder, but that felt rewarding.”

Inconveniently, the brothers, being living organisms, got older, and while the Jonas Brothers owe their success to Disney it was inevitable that they would outgrow the channel’s values. Joe wrote a frank assessment of that time for New York magazine in 2013, saying the band were like “frightened little kids” when faced with Disney’s demands for a clean-cut band. Today, he says simply that Disney was “very helpful when we needed it the most”.

Internally, things were also complex. There is a throwaway comment in one episode of Living the Dream in which the brothers discuss their father, who by that point had taken on the role of the band’s co-manager: “The problem is, we’re never sure when he’s just being dad.” Equally, the band realised the line between brother and bandmate was frequently, inevitably, ill-defined. “Sometimes you just want a dad, sometimes you just want a brother,” Joe says today. “There was confusion when it came to family versus band, and what comes first.”

“When the band broke up, he balanced both really well,” Nick says of their father. “Because I had initiated the conversation for the group to break up, he was comforting to me while I spoke my truth. Then when Joe and Kevin’s reaction was complicated, he was a father to them, and managerial to me.”

I ask Joe and Kevin if they can expand on “complicated”. “Sure,” Joe says. “I was mad as hell.”

The split, Joe says, wasn’t something he was expecting, even if the signs were all there: “The music wasn’t as strong as it had been, we weren’t selling as many tickets. And our relationship was unhealthy. We weren’t communicating as we should have been.” Still, Joe remembers thinking that things would work themselves out. “I kind of just assumed we’d get through this bad phase and something great would happen again.”

By 2009, the Jonas Brothers had been releasing an album every summer since 2006 but their fourth album, Lines, Vines and Trying Times, sold less than half its predecessor, and less than a third of the band’s breakthrough album. After that, Nick and Joe released solo albums, which were poorly received. I ask if the failure of those initial solo outings, followed by the ill-fated retreat to the safety of the band, could have fostered resentment that led to the eventual split. Joe nods. “I wanted to at least get that personal win of being able to do something on my own, which I carried for many years, just thinking: ‘I can’t do anything without these guys.’”

After the band’s split in 2013, Kevin spent time with his wife, Danielle, raising their two daughters, starting a construction company and investing in a handful of ventures including a food app called Yood and a service for social influencers called The Blu Market. Nick released two albums, resulting in some decent airplay and chart hits such as the 2014 single Jealous. Joe formed a band, DNCE, whose 2015 billion-stream behemoth Cake By the Ocean was No 1 from Ecuador to Israel. Despite movie roles for both (Nick in Goat and Jumanji, Joe as a voice actor in Hotel Transylvania 3), and a slot judging on Australia’s The Voice for Joe, their projects hit a wall – one of the tracks from DNCE’s latest EP has broken 7m Spotify streams, while Cake By the Ocean stands at 806m.

Although the brothers were hardly estranged during this period, there was a multi-platinum elephant in the room at family events. In 2017 came the idea of a Jonas Brothers documentary, Chasing Happiness, which is out this week on Amazon. The main aim was closure. “We definitely didn’t think we were going to get back together,” Joe says. During one pivotal moment the band took part in a drinking game (the documentary was not being made by Disney), in which residual issues were pulled out of a hat, and each member rated the other on the honesty of their responses. “We all needed to speak our truth, and be able to forgive,” Nick says. “It’s easy. Say the truth, then it’s behind you. Just say it out loud.”

The brothers insist the plan was simply to draw a line under the band, but a full reunion happened anyway. They contacted the songwriter and producer Ryan Tedder, who has worked with everyone from Adele to U2. They knew they needed to update to reflect pop’s new sound, and what Nick describes as “the ever-changing landscape of the way music is released and how people consume it. We were conscious that there would always be a new wave of entertainers you can feel you’re in competition with but rather than be frustrated with how quickly things change, we’ve chosen to lean into it.” Tedder’s early enthusiasm for the project gave the band the confidence to approach other pop overlords such as Greg Kurstin and Max Martin. “Before,” Joe says, “when it was slowing down, we were nervous to reach out to big producers and writers, thinking they would say no to working with us.”

The result is an album, Happiness Begins, that is arguably better than anything the band made in their earlier years. Free from the late-00s shackles of over-enthusiastic hair straightening, the Jonas Brothers rather suit being older. They seem happy that their audiences in 2019 will generally have drinks in their hands and much like the fans who have grown up with them, these brothers seem more like individuals, too, from Nick in his designer bomber jacket to Kevin in an unassuming lumberjack shirt.

The march of age – Nick is 27, Joe, 29, and Kevin, 31 – also means the brothers are no longer synonymous with the purity rings they once wore as a display of abstinence, which quickly became the target of a rather odd media obsession. Nick has since said that the purity rings ended up shaping his view of sex. “They did,” he restates today. How? “The values behind the idea of understanding what sex is, and what it means, are incredibly important. When I have children, I’ll make sure they understand the importance of sex, and consent, and all the things that are important. What’s discouraging about that chapter of our life is that at 13 or 14 my sex life was being discussed. It was very tough to digest it in real time, trying to understand what it was going to mean to me, and what I wanted my choices to be, while having the media speaking about a 13-year-old’s sex life. I don’t know if it would fly in this day and age. Very strange.”

In any case, the band are all now married. Kevin got hitched to Danielle a decade ago while Nick’s wife is the actor Priyanka Chopra, and Joe married Sophie Turner, Game of Thrones’ Sansa Stark, in a Las Vegas ceremony last month. All three significant others feature in the video for Sucker. “Sophie was pretty adamant that she play the love interest in every music video we do from now on,” Joe notes. “I told her I didn’t think that was possible, but we’d give her the first one.” I ask him if there’s been a strange atmosphere, with one major chapter ending for Turner just as a new one begins for Joe. “We’ve definitely spoken about that. It’s difficult to say goodbye to one … But it’s amazing timing that we could be starting our life together right now.”

The couple’s refreshing approach to dealing with paparazzi in New York, where they live – staring them out, giving them the finger – often sees them go viral. “Early on, we were trying to be secretive about our relationship,” Joe explains. The problem? “We like to sit outside. Pulling faces at the paparazzi is sometimes the best way to handle the situation – and then I see myself on the top of Reddit.” He suddenly becomes rather animated. “I love Reddit! I got so excited when I saw that. I went: ‘We made it!’ She wasn’t as excited.” (He adds that he mainly visits Reddit for Gifs, memes and pictures of “any cute animal”.)

I ask Nick how he and Priyanka, who has experienced a similar level of a different type of fame, manage their public lives. “She’s coming up on 20 years in the business, and weirdly, so am I,” he begins. “But she wasn’t really familiar with us, or me, when we first started dating.” One of their first steps, within their first few weeks together, was a show-and-tell session. “We actually sat down and educated each other, playing videos we were both embarrassed and proud of. It was a helpful way to get to know each other.” (Nick adds, ominously, that Chopra “did a little digging of her own and found out some things about my past”.)

The band’s not exactly hermit-like private lives have undoubtedly boosted their comeback, but, along with Sucker being a nailed-on hit, they have also benefited from a curious type of nostalgia. Their return does transport the mind to a time when their music seemed to soundtrack things slowly getting better, rather than rapidly descending into what Nick describes today as “an incredibly negative time across the whole globe”, and what the rest of us might term an international dumpster fire.

“That should be our album title,” Joe decides. “Before The Dumpster Fire. Six years ago was a lot different everywhere, but we like the idea that we can take people out of it and smile and bring some joy to 2019.”

This feels like as appropriate a time as any to bring up the internet theory that Kevin’s appearance on the US version of Celebrity Apprentice was directly responsible for Trump’s presidency. The Jonas Brothers aren’t known for their political views but the theory goes like this: Kevin’s presence gave the ailing show an early ratings boost, but after Kevin attempted to outfox Trump in the boardroom and got himself fired, the rest of the season’s ratings were poor, and now here we are. “You can do the math on it, and it lines up,” Kevin accepts. “It’s plausible, I guess, that the need for attention could have led from bad ratings to the presidency. I hope that’s not the case.” Would he like to apologise to the world? “No. I do not take credit for it.”

I ask Nick if, as he has previously stated, he would still like to run for president himself one day. “Politics is a very tricky thing,” he diplomatically responds. “It’s a very different time to when I first mentioned my desire to be president.”

“He’s practising,” Kevin laughs.

“We’ll take what we can get,” Joe mutters.

With that, it’s time for the band to clear off and perform for fans in Kingston, London. Before they go I ask what Connect 3, the band they portrayed in Camp Rock, are doing now. “I think,” Nick says, “they’re just really jealous that the Jonas Brothers are back.”

Jonas Brothers’ new album, Happiness Begins, is out on 7 June on Polydor/Republic Records

Source: The Guardian