The world's worst game of hide and seek
Musical adrenaline, a murderous handyman and a Unified Theory of Sondheim
Hello! In the last newsletter, I promised to reappear, and it feels like the right time as we’re all having to learn a new Greek letter for no reason in particular, no reason at all.
What I’ve been watching, reading and listening to:
I really liked Tick Tick Boom, the Netflix adaptation of Jonathan Larsen’s autobiographical musical about a failed musical workshop. It’s directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who has made the shocking professional decision to produce something about a man who writes like he’s running out of time. (And of course we now know that was true: Larsen died the day before the Off-Broadway premiere of RENT.)
I think you will have a pretty good sense of whether you will enjoy it based on that description, plus whether you enjoyed the musical style of RENT, plus whether you have any sympathy for ambitious 29 year olds who are worried about aging. (I will say that I was reassured to see that this movie has a much better understanding of why its characters might be difficult to live with than RENT does.)
The casting of Andrew Garfield instead of A Broadway Person was a bit controversial; it worked for me. Highlight is the Sondheim pastiche stuffed full of Broadway veterans, which felt appropriate this week of all weeks.
I liked it a lot, and if you think you’ll like it, definitely spare the two hours. (If you actively recoil at the idea of a Broadway meta-musical in the style of Rent and directed by the guy from Hamilton, I’d encourage you to follow that urge. It will only make you angry.)
Don’t sleep on the soundtrack, either - there’s a bonus Mountain Goats track on there and a full version of Green Green Dress. (I was, however, disappointed to see that despite Netflix’s advances in Vanessa Hudgens replication technology, there was only one Vanessa Hudgens in this movie. If you’re going to spend the billions, use the machine!)
If you’re looking for choice Sondheim clips, I recommend any version of the tongue-twisty patter song that is Getting Married Today, a song many performers surely have nightmares about.
Fast lyrics are one thing. "I telephoned my analyst about it and he said to call him Monday but by Monday I'll be floating in the Hudson with the other garbage" delivered at lightning speed asks so very much of your literal face.Like, "I am the very model of a modern major general/ I've information vegetable animal and mineral" is similar in theory but does not move your mouth around so mercilessly.I’m sure Company’s appeal to me has absolutely nothing at all to do with me being a perpetual eleventh-wheel. (This remains an extremely half-baked theory, but I think you can split theatre-goers into two categories - people who prefer Act One of most musicals, which is full of world-building and relationship-building and cleverness, or people who prefer Act Two, where stuff actually happens. I’m Type Act One. Most normal people, I suspect are Type Act Two. Company is all Act One. Merrily We Roll Along is all Act One, but backwards, and no wonder [other] people struggled to get on with it. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.)
Unified theories aside, I also recommend Raul Esparza doing Being Alive, also from Company, Carol Burnett doing I’m Still Here from Follies, and the overture from Merrily We Roll Along. (Is it weird to have a favourite Broadway overture? Anyway, I do, and it’s that.) And if Linda Holmes is going to write a list of her favourites, I’m always going to point you to it. Oh, and we’ve got the small matter of the West Side Story remake in a week…
Killer Camp is back on ITV2, a weird mish-mash of The Mole, Release The Hounds and Love Island where a group of British and American contestants at a summer camp cooperate to win money while one of the group is secretly conspiring to murder them one-by-one with the help of vicious camp handyman Bruce. In theory it’s about working out who’s sabotaging you, in practice, it’s more vibes, showmances, bromances, arguing, and increasingly obvious clues from the production team. The format functioned a bit better second time around in a few obvious and less obvious ways, but it’s still two or three steps away from being great, and that’s enormously frustrating. The horror movie exits remain fun, but only one of them was quite weird enough for my taste. Nothing quite on the level of the contestant last year who was impaled with a [redacted - this is a family newsletter]. The Americans cancelled it after two episodes, the Brits are burning it off at 11pm - my sense is it’s not going to get a third go. But if you have some spare time this weekend, and enjoy both horror movies and reality TV, you could definitely do worse.
I really enjoyed this feature-length Defunctland episode on the history of the Fastpass at Disney’s theme parks. If that sounds esoteric, wait until I tell you it involves queueing theory, A/B testing, and (spoiler alert) a giant theme park simulation model. In short, Disney managed to create something which was better for guests and made the park work better for them… and then they got greedy and absolutely destroyed it.
Is putting this in here self-indulgent? Yes. But we’ve just done an ITV2 show that airs at 11pm and a Unified Theory of Sondheim so self-indulgent is the name of the game and you’re going to have to live with it WAIT WHY ARE YOU UNSUBSCRIBING. If 100 minutes is too long - fair - it is the sort of thing where you can happily hit the 1.5x speed button and get through it in about an hour.
And I went to see the cinema broadcast of the Barbican production of Anything Goes a couple of weeks ago - unfortunately you’re too late to catch that now, but you can watch Sutton Foster lead a couple of big dance numbers from the original 2011 Broadway production if you’re so inclined. Just a shot of musical adrenaline to keep in your back pocket for when you need it.
The tweets:
Click through for… well, I think it’s explained pretty well.
I saw the first of these, hoped against hope that it would become a meme, and the internet delivered:
More… at some point. Possibly next week. Possibly another six months. We’ll see. Stay safe out there.