Theatre Thursday :: my 5 “first” musicals

By “first” musicals, I mean the ones I have the most distinct memories of from my youth.  Not cartoons (that’d be a different post, wherein spoiler alert, #1 is Anastasia) but honest-to-goodness stage musicals.  I think it’s telling that while these are the ones I have memories of watching from childhood, I didn’t really connect to any of them in the way I do now (that wasn’t till junior high and Little Shop of Horrors, probably – it was all uphill/downhill from there).  They were just on VHS tapes or playing locally or some such and so I watched them.  Could I still recognize all the songs from them?  Probably.  Could I sing them for you?  Some of them.  This list will be ranked in order of familiarity/affection, I think.

5. Annie Get Your Gun
The exception, as this one we actually saw professionally done.  It was my first professional show, weirdly enough; my parents’ friend gave us the tickets.  I remember Tom Wopat and Marilu Henner were in the cast; though I don’t remember their performances at all, I remember asking my parents “who are Tom Wopat and Marilu Henner?”  More than the show itself, I remember that we were sitting right on the edge of the not-quite-balcony and I’m pretty sure I freaked myself out at intermission.  But I remember enough of the show to know that yeah, it’s a traditional musical that’s technically pretty okay, I just don’t really care that much nowadays.  (Considering how weird my eventual taste in musicals was, my childhood was exceptionally traditional.)

4. Annie
I’m pretty sure there’s a rule about how little girls who fancy themselves into theatre and are of a certain age should have an Annie phase.  Mine coincided with seeing it performed locally; mostly I just liked that since there were so many little girls in the cast, I could actually imagine being in it.  Of course, I look back on this phase and cringe, as Annie makes me cringe now overall.  Seen it one too many times, heard it many more than too many times.  Also, all of those little girls (and everyone else, for that matter) are so two-dimensional that it makes me sad.

3. Peter Pan
I had the Mary Martin stage version on videotape (I seem to recall getting a giant box full of videotapes of old musicals and things once as a child, though I don’t remember why and I’m fairly sure I didn’t ask for it or anything) and as I’ve said before, I watched it.  A lot.  It was there, I liked it.  Of course, some of it is cringeworthy now, but I did like back then.

2. The King and I
That same box of videotapes yielded the tape of the old movie of this, with Yul Brenner and Deborah Kerr; I suspect I watched it a bunch of times because it had a bunch of kids in it.  (I was that kind of child, I guess.)  I’m pretty sure I was watching it wrong, though, because when my friends and I got into musicals in junior high, I remember one of them got this album and we were listening to it and I had completely forgotten about things like the supporting characters’ romantic subplot.  Oh well.

1. The Sound of Music
This is the only one of these I’d ever chosen a character for: naturally Brigitta, the bookish middle daughter.  Because even though some children might have dreamed of growing up and being romantic Liesl, I… just didn’t care.  I liked being the smart one.  Oh, and this was also in the box of videotapes; it was a two-tape affair, so it was very serious business.

–your fangirl heroine.

Theatre / Things in Print Thursday :: 5 more musicals based on works of literature

Last week was five musicals based on works of literature that I am/was really deeply attached to in some weird, significant way (probably circa high school).  This week?  Just five more that I’m halfway familiar with.

5. Seussical, derived from the works of Dr. Seuss (musical by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty)
I actually… kind of hate Seussical.  Have I mentioned this before?  I’m not sure if I have, but it’s true.  I of course read Dr. Seuss stories when I was little, and I’ve seen the How the Grinch Stole Christmas cartoon a bunch of times, because when I was a child, I watched Christmas cartoons over and over during the holidays.  I wouldn’t say I was ever a big Seuss person, though, and the musical is really not my thing.  I don’t begrudge anyone their enjoyment of it, of course, but I’ve seen it twice and that’s two times too many.  (Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that both times were the junior version, and junior versions are often disappointing overall.)

4. Big River, derived from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (musical by William Hauptman and Roger Miller)
I have no real problems with Big River.  I was not a fan of Huckleberry Finn when I was in high school (though this could have been because most of the things I read in that particular English class were not things I enjoyed to read, largely because of the way the class was structured) and I don’t really feel compelled to ever read it again, but the musical is all right.  Not something I listen to for fun, but pretty interesting to watch.

3. Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie (musical by Mark “Moose” Charlap, Jule Styne, Carolyn Leigh, Betty Comden and Adolph Green)
I have never seen this staged, but oh my gosh, I think I almost wore out my copy of the VHS tape of the Mary Martin production when I was a kid.  I watched it over and over and over again.  I loved this tape so much, and despite loving the tape, liking the Disney movie okay, and the book being technically for children, I didn’t read it until I was in high school.  I’m sort of over the Peter Pan mythos as a whole now (okay, a lot over it, actually; I reread it for a class last term and sighed many times) but I do have fond memories of the production on tape from when I was little and didn’t know any better.

2. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, and Herbert Kretzmer)
I never finished reading Les Mis, as I’ve said before.  And I’m thinking that maybe someday I should; I’ve seen so much meta on tumblr lately that I’m starting to think that I’d actually kind of like Cosette if I knew her better, but without having read the book or anything, I don’t, really.  The advantage of a book being 1000+ pages is that it has more time to get into the intricacies of things that a 2-3 hour musical cannot really get into properly.  So, someday.  Maybe.  I have a few other 1000+ page books to get done first, but someday.

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (musical by Allan Knee, Mindi Dickstein, and Jason Howland)
It’s been made abundantly clear to you all how strongly I feel about Little Women, and this hasn’t waned as I’ve gotten older.  Little Women is a beautiful book.  The musical is pretty okay, too.  It’s not anything overwhelmingly showstopping or particularly memorable, but it’s solid.  It’s good.  It didn’t change too much of the original story, and the songs are nice, and also “Some Things Are Meant to Be” has occasionally gotten me choked up before, so that’s a high compliment.

–your fangirl heroine.

Sarcastic Saturday :: the ever-popular analysis of (largely nonexistent) Disney parents

Disney parents have this wacky habit of not being present in the stories: sometimes they’re dead, sometimes they’re just not there and we can assume they’re dead.  I’m sure I’m not the first to make this list, but hey.  This can mean various things for the story, but it’s a crutch I find strange.  A lot of the fables rely on it, and it’s not bad or good, just odd.  I’m also only going to discuss the humanoid characters, because if I got into all the animals with dead parents, I’d be going on all night.

Snow White: her father’s dead, and she’s got a wicked stepmother.
Pinocchio: he’s a puppet, and therefore has no biological parents, but his “father” Geppetto doesn’t have a female counterpart.
Cinderella: her mother’s dead, her father marries an aristocrat lady to give her female influence, then her father dies and said lady turns out to be evil.  (Really, she and Snow White are exactly the same.)
Alice in Wonderland: well, Alice’s parents are never present in the film, but her big sister is.  Presumably the parents are alive, but they’re irrelevant.
Peter Pan: the Darlings are existent.  But the kids run away from them, so there’s that.  Also, Wendy has to play mommy.
Sleeping Beauty: her parents are present, but she’s comatose the entire time, so they’re not that relevant.  And in a way, the coma is almost their fault, since they didn’t invite Maleficent to the party and prompted the coma curse.
The Jungle Book: Mowgli is an orphan and is raised by jungle critters.
everything in the Winnie the Pooh franchise: where are Christopher Robin’s parents?
The Little Mermaid: where is Ariel’s mother?  Is that why King Triton is such a bitch?
Beauty and the Beast: where is Belle’s mother?  Is that why Maurice is such a scatterbrain?  And where are the Beast’s parents at all?
Aladdin: where is Jasmine’s mother?  Is that why the Sultan is such a weirdo?  And Aladdin’s an orphan.
Pocahontas: where is Pocahontas’ mother?  Is that why Chief Powhatan is such a bitch?
The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Quasimodo’s mommy was killed at the beginning and his adoptive dad is a bitch.
Hercules: he’s got birth parents and adoptive parents both.  So, good for him.
Mulan: she’s got parents and a grandmother too!  Even though she runs away from them.  But she does that to save China, so it’s okay.
Tarzan: his parents are killed by jungle critters.
The Emperor’s New Groove: he has no parents, period.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire: (I don’t even remember having seen this, but hey.  Wikipedia.)  The girl hasn’t got a father at all, and her mother dies.
Lilo and Stitch: Lilo and Nani have dead parents, and Nani is being the motherly big sister.  Basically like Buffy to Dawn, but way less cool.
Meet the Robinsons: Louis is at an orphanage, but he’s adopted at the end.
The Princess and the Frog: Tiana’s father is dead; Lottie’s mother is nonexistent.
Tangled: despite her birth parents both being alive, Rapunzel’s got a wicked stepmother.  So she’s got too many parents.

The grand tally: 4 evil stepparents, 10 dead parental pairs, 5 dead/nonexistent parents and single remaining parents, 2 nonexistent parental pairs, 5 present parental pairs.  That brings the total of at least partially nonexistent Disney animated human parents to 80%.

A lot of these films are based on pre-existing stories, so that really begs a deeper question.  What is it about dead or nonexistent parents that just screams children’s story?  Sometimes the girls without one or both parents need saving by an outside man figure, sometimes they can take care of themselves and just happen to fall in love in the mix.  The boys without parents all end up in love, too.  I guess everybody just needs someone?  Is that the message?

Are they just making their own families?  ‘Cause of course once they fall in love, they get married.  An interesting notion.

–your fangirl heroine.