ALRIGHTY Netflix I am so done with your ass right now.
WHAT IS THIS - Where is latina flora or asian Musa? WHERE IS TECNA????
Bloom I like, Stella and Aisha too. I do however appreciate the use of body types But come onnnnnnnn.
Why you gotta be edgy? Why not give us color and glitter, fairy wings and A MUSIC FAIRY. We don't mind some edgy but Winx was a great series cause of the colors and the diversity.
ON A SIDE NOTE - No hate to the wonderful woman who are in this show. Im sure they are all talented and they are beautiful. They just don't fit our idea of Winx.
Netflix better not touch anymore of my childhood shows or movies.
And I think she's talented and all. But like......she is so not right for the seelie queen. That little girl was 100% better. I really hope that they didn't just cast her because dominic Sherwood is her boyfriend. Like that's cool and all I just hope they cast her fairly. I just don't think she was the right choice.
Who did the casting for this show? It’s fucking horrible. They should’ve made them into college kids. They look way too old to be in 10th. I know television shows hire actors who are in their 20s to play high school students but this casting was very poorly done. Archie and his teacher look like they’re same age for crying out loud.
Can we get rid of Bryan Singer, please? He doesn’t know how to balance mood in a film at all. It was pretty good, but it was a serious downer, even with the happy ending. His casting choices suck, too. Ellen Page as Kitty Pride? Kitty is a sweetheart and is a little bit shy. Ellen Page always looks like she hates whatever she’s doing and can’t be bothered to give a shit, and that definitely showed in this movie, just like every movie she’s in. I also didn’t appreciate that Apocalypse, a burly African character in the comics, was played by waifish, pretty, white boy in the stinger.
Even if Singer is taken out of the equation, as a matter of personal preference, I’m not interested in seeing any more X-Men movies without Nightcrawler. He’s my absolute favorite character, and he has been in only one of the many films.
Even in the one he was in, he was completely sidelined because of issue number one: these directors and writers can’t get off of angst, angst, angst. That’s why Quicksilver played a minor role in DoFP. He’s cheery, sassy, and always making jokes, much like Nightcrawler (who also holds the bonus of being canonically adorkable). For some reason, these devs hate levity, and it makes the movies a bit of a chore to watch.
So my most recent role/show is Ensemble/Rocky Horror Show
Color me fucking delighted right? WRONG.
It all started with callbacks, where things were SO emphatically disorganized that I didn't even get a chance to sing for the roles that I was explicitly called back for. At this point I figured I was doomed, because I stupidly decided not to be an asshole and say "Yes" to the "Would you accept any role other than the ones you are vying for including ensemble?" Every guy that DID get to sing at the callback said "No" FUCK. Okay, well maybe my reads were enough to get me the role I wanted, right? Oh wait, my only read for Brad was a side in which I literally said 4 words... FUCK... What about my other reads? Oh yeah, those, um, I wasn't actually read for any other male role but for 3 female roles to "fill the character." Awkward. Okay well my singing definitely would let them know that I could easily fill out any of the tenor roles in the show (there are 4).
Email received. Verdict: Ensemble and attached was a message saying "Hey we loved your vocals so we are thinking about just giving you the opening solo of "Science Fiction Double Feature" and the ending reprise"
My reaction: OKAY YEAH THAT'S GREAT ACTUALLY BECAUSE THAT MEANS I GET A SOLO BUT I ALSO GET TO DANCE THE WHOLE SHOW. COOL.
So the cast list trickled out and here was the breakdown:
Frank: A guy that I previously saw portray the role, he is GREAT.
Brad: An operatically trained bass... Excuse me? Do they know that he cannot sing that part or?
Janet: Pretty great, fits the role aesthetically and vocally.
Rocky: The perfect aesthetic Rocky, like, wow, so many muscles. Vocally, um, "well", and a baritone, barely? The Sword of Damocles literally opens with the singer belting G4, that can be difficult even for some low register tenors.
Magenta: A dude? Why would you cast a dude in a female role when you already barely have enough males to fill out your principle roles? The world may never know. This guy is my close friend but even he was confused as shit when he got the casting because he's a baritone...
Riff-Raff: This guy LITERALLY looks like Riff-Raff, it's fucking nuts. His singing isn't "bad" per se but listening to him attempt the classic Riff-Raff extreme belts can be downright painful because his voice wavers and he cracks a bit. Also, not a tenor, "bari-tenor" at best.
Columbia: WOW THIS GIRL CAN SING. OKAY.
Eddie: Pretty decent from what I have heard, not anywhere near awful. But then again this is just from hearing him sing one time, he probably will be great in the end.
Dr. Scott: (They went with the female casting.) This woman is actually pretty fucking great, she is a true fan of the show AND the movie and she's taking on the DeLaria-style vocals that were in the 2000 revival AHHH.
Narrator: I could listen to this woman read for days...
Ensemble Consists of 10 people (3 males, 7 females).
2 Sopranos
2 Mezzos
4 Altos (counting the Narrator when she backs vocals)
1 Tenor (great, I'm alone)
2 Baritones (and I can sing lower than both of them).
So on the first day things were kinda awkward? It was strange that a good portion of the leads (Brad, Rocky, Janet, Riff-Raff) didn't know the melody (and sometimes even the words) to their own songs. And we ended up skipping SFDF and the Sword of Damocles. Three things really quick:
1. Please do a good amount of research before auditioning for ANYTHING. (Unless you literally cannot, like if it's an original or new piece, duh.)
2. Once you get cast, how about you listen to your own songs so you don't look like a straight up fuck-nut in front of your cast when you don't even know the words or melodies.
3. DO NOT claim to be a fantastic sight-reader when you are, in fact, not. You'll just embarrass yourself even more.
When rehearsal was drawing to and end I was helping clean things up and I stumbled upon the directors book and her notes and being the nosy little fuck I am, I read some and one clearly read "Most likely going to cut The Sword of Damocles." And I got very offended and I was thinking, very angrily, "WOW WAY TO SACRIFICE TALENT FOR AESTHETIC, YOU KNEW FOR A FACT BEFORE EVEN CASTING HIM THAT YOU WOULD HAVE TO DO THIS BECAUSE HE DOESN'T HAVE THE VOCALS." So that was just, sad to me. And then I packed up and left.
And that was only act one...
The second day we tackled act two, and went back to learn the choral parts of act one. (I was still really confused over the fact that we had not only skipped SFDF on the first day but were also skipping it on this day.) This day was definitely better than the first for Janet, she knew all her songs and even Brad's! She tried helping the helpless Brad through "Once In Awhile" while he stammered through it (I wasn't shocked at all to learn he couldn't sing it.) And the director loudly announces to the whole room "I hate that song! I think I'm gonna cut it." I literally buried my hands in my face at that point, because little did she know that I already knew her intentions with TSOD and that cutting this too was verging on fucking ridiculousness. At this point we took a break, I decided to go out and chill with the director and the rest of the smokers and chat with them. One of the ensemble guys was out there and asked "Hey what are we doing for Science Fiction?" and the director responds "Oh the whole chorus is singing it from beginning to end with tiny little solos." My jaw fucking dropped, at this point I felt that I was truly emulating the word "bye" but I didn't say anything and went back inside. We ended the break and got back to work and listened to the male leads (aside from Frank, and surprisingly Riff-Raff) stumble their way through the rest of the songs. UGH.
Here's a short list of my favorite quotes from the cast members, ordered from most overheard to least overheard:
"Wait, there's an actual musical? Not just a movie?"
"Did the musical come before the movie? Or after? Once again I didn't even know there was a musical..."
"I've never actually heard this song before."
"Once In Awhile? That wasn't in the movie, why did they add a song?!"
Now it does seem rather extreme to get all up-in-arms about songs being cut from a show, right? It happens all the time. Well, not in this show. The Rocky Horror Show has 17 songs, the total run time of those 17 songs is roughly 1-hour (53 minutes exactly). Also, die-hard fans of this show/movie do not want to see any changes made, at all. So cutting the Sword of Damocles is kinda a big deal, not so much with Once In Awhile, seeing that it didn't even make it into the final cut of the movie. (But is in the directors cut, deleted scenes, and the stage production, so people DO know about it). So cutting two 3 minute songs kinda puts a damper on things. So there's a lot of dialogue to cover the span of the show, right? Wrong. The full show lasts just under 90 minutes (do remember that there are two acts in this show, and the average first act of a musical is roughly 75 minutes) so cutting those numbers just makes a short show even shorter PLUS you will be cutting some lines too, thus also further shortening it. To even further put this in perspective, act one has only 132 exchanges (where one character stops speaking and another character starts to speak) whopping 56 of those are 3 words or less. Act two has 166 exchanges where 47 of them are 3 words or less (this act is by far much meatier than the first, odd, but also contains scenes where all the loose ends are tied up so that makes sense). In total that means that roughly %35 of the lines in the show are 3 words or less (the script also counts screams, laughs, and shhh-ing as lines and I included these in the exchange count, so even if you were to exclude them you would still reach a percentage of 35).
So to wrap this all up! You are expecting people to come see a show that will be roughly 80 minutes long and a very watered down version of what they are expecting it to be performed by a community theatre where most of the roles are cast poorly? Here's the kicker: The tickets are $30...
Just... my god... I'm so scared for this.
This show is iconic and a cult classic, it's SO HARD to ruin it, and at this rate this could very well be an outlying case.
