![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Falsettos
Hey, I'm kind of catching up -- this is only two months late :)
So after falling in love with Book of Mormon of course my next step was to go look at what else Andrew Rannells has ever done (I also found that he's an excellent and witty interviewee, and writing this up reminded me to put his book on hold at the library), and when I found out he was in a musical with Christian Borle, whom I have been following ever since I found out about Legally Blonde lo these many years ago, I was going to be watching it despite its name (I'm sorry, but the name did not exactly evoke confidence in me), and I probably would have enjoyed it no matter how bad it was.
It was brilliant. (I watched an upload of a professionally filmed version -- I think they filmed it for PBS -- here, with the usual caveats about how they go down and back up again frequently, and if this link breaks let me know and I'll try to replace it if possible.)
I mean. It is set in the 80's, and originally produced in the 90's, and there's this sort of era where it feels like every story produced in the 90's and set in the 80's and involving gay men has to involve at least one of them dying tragically of AIDS. (And there's a distinct implication that his partner is going to die tragically of AIDS after the end of the musical.) But while that's the ending of the plot, it's not what the musical is about.
It's about family, and what that means, and how you make a family when you've intentionally fractured your own family, and how you recover from that, and it's about having a kid (Anthony Rosenthal is freaking brilliant in this, the whole cast is amazing but he's especially amazing) and how that kid relates to life and you and everything, and it's about being Jewish.
Borle and Rannells, as Marvin and his lover Whizzer, are both their usual great acting selves. I honestly think Borle's voice isn't that amazing, but his voice acting/acting can't be beat. He also is very convincing as a Marvin who is... very not-perfect, who is very flawed. I had never heard of Brandon Uranowitz before, but he's absolutely wonderful as the psychologist who marries Marvin's ex-wife Trina (and is often the voice of sanity when Marvin and Trina have conflicts). Stephanie J. Block I'd heard of before, but never really seen in action, and she is just amazing as the neurotic ex-wife. And just when I was starting to question why the only woman we saw was kind of neurotic, in Act 2, Tracie Thoms and Betsy Wolfe are just so great as the lesbian neighbors. (Can we have more lesbian doctor characters please? Thoms/Dr. Charlotte was so great!)
I was looking at a copy of the libretto for The Usual Reasons, and it struck me how much (and how well) it is written for stage; the dialogue doesn't seem like anything special written down on the page, but the actors make it come alive.
(I don't really have much to say about it, not because it was bad, but because it was so well done that I don't have much to say except "yup, that was brilliant.")
So after falling in love with Book of Mormon of course my next step was to go look at what else Andrew Rannells has ever done (I also found that he's an excellent and witty interviewee, and writing this up reminded me to put his book on hold at the library), and when I found out he was in a musical with Christian Borle, whom I have been following ever since I found out about Legally Blonde lo these many years ago, I was going to be watching it despite its name (I'm sorry, but the name did not exactly evoke confidence in me), and I probably would have enjoyed it no matter how bad it was.
It was brilliant. (I watched an upload of a professionally filmed version -- I think they filmed it for PBS -- here, with the usual caveats about how they go down and back up again frequently, and if this link breaks let me know and I'll try to replace it if possible.)
I mean. It is set in the 80's, and originally produced in the 90's, and there's this sort of era where it feels like every story produced in the 90's and set in the 80's and involving gay men has to involve at least one of them dying tragically of AIDS. (And there's a distinct implication that his partner is going to die tragically of AIDS after the end of the musical.) But while that's the ending of the plot, it's not what the musical is about.
It's about family, and what that means, and how you make a family when you've intentionally fractured your own family, and how you recover from that, and it's about having a kid (Anthony Rosenthal is freaking brilliant in this, the whole cast is amazing but he's especially amazing) and how that kid relates to life and you and everything, and it's about being Jewish.
Borle and Rannells, as Marvin and his lover Whizzer, are both their usual great acting selves. I honestly think Borle's voice isn't that amazing, but his voice acting/acting can't be beat. He also is very convincing as a Marvin who is... very not-perfect, who is very flawed. I had never heard of Brandon Uranowitz before, but he's absolutely wonderful as the psychologist who marries Marvin's ex-wife Trina (and is often the voice of sanity when Marvin and Trina have conflicts). Stephanie J. Block I'd heard of before, but never really seen in action, and she is just amazing as the neurotic ex-wife. And just when I was starting to question why the only woman we saw was kind of neurotic, in Act 2, Tracie Thoms and Betsy Wolfe are just so great as the lesbian neighbors. (Can we have more lesbian doctor characters please? Thoms/Dr. Charlotte was so great!)
I was looking at a copy of the libretto for The Usual Reasons, and it struck me how much (and how well) it is written for stage; the dialogue doesn't seem like anything special written down on the page, but the actors make it come alive.
(I don't really have much to say about it, not because it was bad, but because it was so well done that I don't have much to say except "yup, that was brilliant.")