#shewhich life

[not-she-which-burns-in-it]

Well TikTok has officially died. The last video to load on my FYP was Kennedy Kanagawa and Milky White saying goodbye to “Children Will Listen” that feels right.

It was very close to being a Magnus Archives fanart post, if it had been artwork of The End/ Terminus I think I would have closed the app and thought. “good. Appropriate”

With Twitter decaying and TikTok suddenly perished… does that mean Tumblr is my main social media once again?? Am I about to be way more unhinged than normal?

[not-she-which-burns-in-it]

I never tag “the creators,” but fuck it. They’ll probably never see this.

Tonight I was driving home from my Saturday night show, it’s a blizzard out here. New England is getting 12 good inches tonight (aren’t we lucky) it’s the kind of night where you hit send on the performance report the second curtain call ends and race for the parking lot. You gotta get home before the roads become an ice rink.

So I turn on my favorite podcast for the slow careful drive. I’m early days into Magnus Protocol, I have a few minutes left on episode 10. And hey, the next episode is an Easter Special. Perfect, a nice hour long episode where I don’t have to look at my phone, I can keep both hands on the wheel and not take my eyes off the road. I assume it’s probably a Q&A or maybe a one-shot table top game. Love that.

Episode 10 ends just as I’m getting on the snowy highway. The roads are bad. I’m gonna need all my focus.

And then the most unholy sound starts. “Mr. Bonzo’s on his way”

Oh, ok, it’s not a Q&A. It’s gonna be something in-world. Cool.

….

Hey, this was intro is going a little long. Wow, this song is really annoying. I’m sure that’s intentional. Ok. Hang on. It can’t be just this? For an hour. Surely @rqbossman wouldn’t inflict this on us.

But I don’t dare pick up my phone to scrub through the audio. Because wow the snow is REALLY coming down and these roads are slippery. I could probably just skip to the next episode, but my luck after a few minutes of this there’s gonna be something worthwhile.

A couple minutes pass and I think. “They could use this to make somebody confess to murder.” I can’t drive all the way home like this. I can’t.

So I just turn the volume down. A lot. The drive is quiet. But I keep fiddling with the knob because, what if I miss something? But know the horrible song is just seeping into my brain in short bursts instead. And I keep taking my hand off the wheel to do it.

No, after 9 minutes I decide to risk driving into a snow bank in order to switch off the podcast app and over to Spotify.

@jonnywaistcoat I hope you’re happy. I have never before felt trapped in your hellish creation. 10 minutes doesn’t sound like a lot. But I promise it really really was.

[not-she-which-burns-in-it]

Ok, my fixation on the Magnus Archives isn’t going away any time soon, and I don’t want to jump into Protocol yet because I’m not ready to say goodbye to Jon and Martin. And I don’t want resent some fabulous new characters just because they’re not my boys.

Instead, I played one of my favorite games. Turn on an album and use my theater brain to figure out how I would stage it. I had a 3 hour drive for an out of town gig, so I listened The Mechanisms all the way there and back.

Each album got 2 listens in a row, one for vibes and appreciation, and one to dissect and take notes.

I think I like The Bifrost Incident the best. The songs are so good. A train set would be totally reasonable to build. Utterly destroying it a little bit harder, but I was thinking of a large scale regional production (something like Papermill, ART, La Jolla) where automation/projection/special effects aren’t an issue - so we could explode a train.

The problem is that it’s a train … In Space!

Outer Space and Theater feels so deeply incompatible. Not that people haven’t tried, I’m just not sure I’ve ever seen someone do it successfully (sorry Jonathan Larson) But that’s fine. This is a reimagining, it doesn’t have to be an outer space train, it can just be a train traveling through the BiFrost.

Ok, then I started thinking of design, maybe more of a steampunk aesthetic to go with the train. But hey, wait a minute, a pantheon of gods, in a tragic story about a doomed train, singing a little jazzy-folky, cabaret tunes.

Oh. Fuck. We’ve just invented Hadestown. 

And every design and staging idea, I’ve been mulling over for the past hour drive vanishes in a puff of smoke. Nah, I can’t do a big intricate metal spiral staircase. That’s too fucking close to Hadestown.

It’s even got the narrator that pretends to be neutral, but is actually deeply emotionally invested in the story. And while I like Jonny’s vocals very very much it’s just mean, - for any performer - to allow the audience to draw a direct comparison to Andre DeShields.

So it’s with a heavy heart I put The Bifrost incident down and try the Snow White/Rose Red album Once Upon a Time (In Space). And unfortunately, I think we’ve hit market saturation of gritty warlike retellings of Grimm’s fairytales. I’m sure this absolutely fucking slapped in 2012, but in 2024 Disney’s Once Upon A Time has ruined the possibility for everyone. I tried so hard to imagine a design, but all I could see was either that or the new generation of Disney live action remix. Or even that one Huntsman movie with Kristen Stewart as Battle!Snow White.

I kind of love, weird, obscure shit, though, I could totally see this, finding a home in fringe circuit. Unfortunately, you need those institutional dollars if you want highly stylized, long wigs and battle armor and spaceships. It’s the intrepid black box theater troupe that gets a show that looks like this:

But with less tailoring.

So with a great sadness, I put Once Upon A Time In Space on the reject pile for my fantasy new musical development workshop.

The next time I have a long drive I’ll try out Ulysses Dies at Dawn but unfortunately, that would be a race against time since there are about four different odyssey themed musicals in development right now. One of which, epic, is getting a lot of traction online. And another will be coming to one of the LORT theaters I mentioned earlier. (Fucking call me back [Redacted] am I working on [redacted] or not UGH)

So, I’m about three years too late to win that game. [inset joke about Gatsby vs Gatbsy here].

All this is just fantasy of course, even if I did strike gold I would still need to convince actual-human Jonathan Sims to engage in a years long, time consuming, deeply frustrating development process, on the wrong continent. So for the absolutely microscopic overlap of my followers, who are both invested in The Magnus Archives/ The Mechanisms and also Musical Theater, I’m sorry to disappoint.

But it is nice to think about New Ideas tm for theater while making my yearly sacrifice to the gods of freelance employment and do another year of The Nutcracker. Oh well at least I’m not Christmas Caroling this year.



[not-she-which-burns-in-it]

My current theater is next to a Panera.

And today we found it on the ceiling.

The Bread Valve.

We control the bread now.

[not-she-which-burns-in-it]

In a meeting today someone said “ it makes me very sad for _____ as the archivist, he has to deal with all that disorganization”

And I’m so brainrotted from The Magnus Archives that I almost swallowed my tongue. Sir, you can’t just casually drop in a conversation that our organization has a staff Archivist.

I swear to God, I couldn’t even say the word for fear that it would come out of my mouth in a British accent.

Does our Archivist have evil, sexy, compulsion powers?

Is he beset by horrors?