like me, in another body

bernice | mid-twenties | musical theater, wretched second acts, that kind of thing | follows from bunnycorcorans!

[duncansheiks]

#love the ending of Alice By Heart

[duncansheiks]

"alice by heart is an alice in wonderland retelling"

[ghostlypawn]

my evening thoughts

[thewhizzyhead]

my alice by heart brainrot has gotten to the point that my mind often goes back and forth with imagining a deaf west production of ABH and a Manila ABH production with the setting being in the Philippines and GOD I REALLY WANT EITHER OF THOSE TWO TO ACTUALLY BE A THING AAA-

[duncansheiks]

Slime for sale

Hello! I came into an unexpected expense, so I’m opening boot sales for a limited time. I observe NFT and NFS as you should, but everything else is fair game. Send me a chat if interested in my list!

AUDIO: $1 VIDEO: $3

[eurydiceh]

Evita at New York City Center

[duncansheiks]

☕️ + abh book?

I really wanted to like it because I just adore the musical. But it's very obvious to me that S*ter is new to the form. I'd be the first to defend poetic, stream-of-consciousness narration, but writers also have to earn their prose. The story has to be grounded first, must work as a story first, before language rules are played with. (On the most obvious level, it lacked serious editing. Commas, italics, etc.)

In relation, while the flashback scenes are nice, I think they're superfluous. It's smokescreen for the fact that in the present timeline, S*ter wasn't able to imbue them with personality separate from their meta counterparts. It feels distant from the lived reality of the war (which I thought the musical, at least in part, is better at)—a shame, considering that the singular fixation with the book is the color around the egg.* It also makes it seem as if there's no character development.

My personal rule—which serves me well here—is that I consider different forms to be their own canon. Reading the book doesn't change what the textual canon of the musical is. (A note on ages: I like thinking of Alice and Alfred as being in their mid-teens, which the staging supports. I likewise argue for older Tabatha, Harold, and Angus.)

At times, I also thought that the author obviously never knew what it was like to live as a teenager girl, but my meaner moments are held back by this line, which makes me go absolutely feral:

But how could she speak it, really, the anxiety of feeling? Of all she wanted from him. It was like she was forever listening for some key in the door, for some way out of the sensation of herself, that she might touch what was him. Some stupid kiss: was it only that? But was a kiss ever just that? Not that she knew, really. But maybe it would be like not disappearing. Like tasting yourself on the lips of someone else.

Thank you so much for sending this in!

[any7a]

Me? Posting abh content that doesn't have anything to do with the irrelevant minor characters?? It's more likely than you think

Also the quality is making me cry sdkdjdkdj I would appreciate if you clicked

[muppetmagic]

the roses...

[anamericansinger]

send me ☕️ + [topic] and i’ll tell you my opinion on it!

[newlyorange]

Okay so a production of Hamlet that ends with “Goodnight, sweet prince,” etc. and then Horatio looks up and sees the audience for the first time and is both shocked and furious, because his world is falling apart and you sat there and watched.

[devilsss-dyke-deactivated202202]

This idea would go fantastically well with my director’s idea that Hamlet knows the whole time that he’s in a play. He had me (when I played Hamlet) interact with the audience, exchange looks with people in the front row, deliver my soliloquies to people in the first few rows casually like I was just talking to them, and I even had the idea to not freeze and just walk about the stage when other characters had their little ‘asides,’ which he allowed me to keep in.

Basically, if Hamlet continuously acknowledges the audience unnoticed by all the other characters (almost Fleabag-style) and then suddenly he’s gone, and obviously he knew he’d have to be gone at the end, and then poor Horatio is left all alone to finally realize there was someone else there the entire time, now that would make it all the more devastating.

[wisteria-lodge]

There’s no difference between the Danish courtiers, who showed up because they wanted to see the Mad Prince get his butt kicked in a staged sword-fight, and us the audience (who… also showed up to watch Hamlet loose a sword fight.) 

I want to see a production where Horatio just stares at us, and screams “Now cracks a noble heart!” with the subtext “You fucking fuckers. He was better than all of you, you watched him die, and you just stood there.

Then, he just silently cries over the body. For like FIVE MINUTES. And the courtiers peel away into the wings, one by one, until Horatio is alone on stage with a lot of dead bodies. It starts getting uncomfortable. You’re thinking… is the play over? Am I supposed to go? (hamlet is just about the *only* play where the final scene is cut about 50% time, so use that uncertainty, use that ambiguity.) Maybe some people do get up to go. There’s definitely muttering. And then there’s smashing sounds coming from the direction of the box office, and Horatio looks up, with an expression like something’s gone wrong. 

But then he says, “Why do the drums come hither?” Fortinbras enters though the audience, and the play continues. 

(I *also* think it would be really cool to cut for intermission right after Claudius freaks out and breaks up the play-within-a-play. Just imagine it: king yells “Lights! Lights! Lights!” And the houselights come up.) 

[illonink]

All good. And also–

As Hamlet is dying in Horatio’s arms, he puts his hand on Horatio’s face and turns it toward us. And that’s when Horatio sees the theater.

[ghostlypawn]

my evening thoughts

[duncansheiks]

She’s not used to the quiet. After all those years, living with others and picking out their voices—their inflections, the lives their languages betrayed—the sound of teacups clink, clink, clinking—the sirens overhead—the silence is unkind, is all. She’d put music on if she could afford it, if it didn’t remind her too much of dancing. Flashes of her bent wrist over a pale hand, an arc tracing farewell. As it is, she has to make do with pitter-patter, the constant reminder she’s above-ground.

She could imagine it all too clearly, “come here,” two words slurred into one. Alfred had always known of this simmering sadness, this residual grief—not hers, really, just inherited. “Come here,” he would say—c'mere—dragging her to his warmth and then that complicated tangle of hands, touching like they found they were now allowed to. Like the very act could shoo the sadness away. If he were here, he would sway her to humming under their breaths, a melody she can now barely recall, so sweet as to be from a dream. If he were here, perhaps she could stand her own mind.

too tender for talk (this dream now) | quote send me a prompt! | buy me a coffee? | (remake)

[usergrantaire]

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

[playbill]

Check Out Production Photos From the New West Side Story on Broadway

[meggtheegg]

Guys this is very important

[angualupin]

I feel like I need to tell everyone how brilliantly the Globe incorporated a deaf Gildenstern into the 2018 Hamlet and then force all of you to watch it

ok, so Gildenstern is played by a deaf actor, Nadia Nadarajah. he* signs all his lines, and either Rosencratz interprets for him, or the person he’s talking to says something that makes it obvious what he just said, depending. how each character reacts to Gildenstern is completely in-character and often hilarious

Claudius and Gertrude are intensely awkward around Gildenstern. they obviously don’t know BSL so they just gesture emphatically but aimlessly when they talk.

Hamlet, who of course is friends with R&G, *does* know BSL. he starts off by signing fluently whenever he’s talking to them but, as his distrust of them grows, he signs less and less until he’s only signing the equivalent of “fuck off” whenever he talks

Polonius just shouts really loud whenever he tries to talk to Gildenstern

it’s all brilliant and adds another layer of humor and pathos and you should all watch it

*casting at the Globe right now is gender neutral so I’m just going to use the character’s pronouns

[angualupin]

guys I know I’m wittering on about this but the thing I want to emphasize is that there is no tokenism here. they didn’t just shove a deaf actor into a speaking role so they could pat themselves on the back about how progressive they are. they went to the effort of fully integrating Nadarajah’s deafness into the story so that it not only fit organically within the narrative but actually enhanced it. watching Hamlet’s signing disintegrate as his trust in R&G disintegrates adds a depth to that storyline I’ve never seen before. Claudius has exactly the awkwardness of someone who thinks of himself as a good person and therefore thinks he’s being kind and generous with his accommodations for disability, but has never even once actually asked a disabled person what they need, which is so on-point for his character it hurts.

I know Michelle Terry gets a lot of hate mail for her policy of race-, gender-, and disability-blind casting, but fuck all those people. long may that policy continue.

[lostsometime]

the glenda jackson production of king lear on broadway did something similar with the Duke of Cornwall, and it was actually the best part of the play, imo.  because when Cornwall was speaking to Lear or to the Court, he had a sign language interpreter to speak the actual literal words aloud, but when he was talking to and conspiring with Regan, his wife, they were just signing back and forth with no translation for the audience, and it emphasized the intimacy between the two even as they turn against literally everyone else in the play, which was fantastic.

and the best part of it was, by the second half of the play, you were so used to it, that you didn’t even blink anymore when watching him and listening to the spoken words come from the interpreter - you just watched the actor playing Cornwall and let the words come from the other guy, but the guy kind of fades into the background.  it didn’t hurt that the actor for Cornwall was one of the tallest on stage, and had bright red hair - it was easy to watch him, instead of his interpreter.

which is why it was so shocking and so perfect when the interpreter is the one who kills him.

See, they folded the character of the servant who kills Cornwall into the person of this character who had been such a non-entity that you almost forgot he was on stage - until you realize, no, this is another person, and he’s been here, watching all this the whole time, and he finally gets to the breaking point where he can’t stand by and translate anymore, he has to do something to stop the cruelty he’s seeing, and it’s not just a random guy who comes in for the scene and sees them blinding Gloucester, it’s the man whose been by his side for the entire play, the man who was his voice who finally has a line of his own.  who finally speaks on his own behalf to say “no.”

and then, of course, he gets killed, but Cornwall dies in the same scene so it’s not like they need to get a new translator or anything.  but it was the most fucking brilliant choice i’ve ever seen re: casting in a Shakespearean production, and the rest of the play pales in my memory in comparison.