on why I feel like "Elisabeth" highlights everything that's wrong with "Evita"

tw for mentions of suicide and implied pedophilia

Elisabeth is really, really plainly borrowing the framework of Evita. There’s not really any contesting that.

They’re both rock opera/classical musical hybrids about the politically active, iconically stylish, body-image-obsessed wife of a man in power, whose life is presented in past tense through the narration of an antagonistic male revolutionary figure who assumes a number of other small roles throughout the story and only directly interacts with the heroine once in the course of the show. The heroine in each of them has a major power ballad anthem, the second acts of both shows begin with her at the moment of her greatest personal triumph, only to be reminded by the narrator that this is as good as she’s ever going to have it so she’d better not get too comfy, she faces massive resistance from the society she marries into, she’s first shown as a 14-year-old girl already profoundly influenced by a neglectful father (though Elisabeth, unlike Eva, doesn’t realize the extent of her father’s neglect of her needs until years later). Both shows were written largely to confront the popular image of their subjects. I mean, there’s even the rhythmic chanting of each of their names in the prologue by the ensemble. Whoever on TV Tropes said “Elisabeth is virtually Evita on an epic scale” had it almost totally right.

But there is a major difference between them that bleeds down through the fabric of both shows, and that is that Evita is an incredibly misogynistic show on a textual, built-in level. Elisabeth is flawed in that it’s a woman’s story told entirely through a man’s framing (actually, two men’s, Lucheni’s and Death’s) and doesn’t really have any female characters of import beyond Elisabeth herself and Dowager Empress Sophie (and, um, there’s the extraordinarily ableist asylum scene), but it’s not inherently hateful toward women in general the way Evita is. 

Read More

LES. MIS. DALLAS.

JFC Tumblr, NO, most women in the 16th century, when Shakespeare wrote, were NOT married off my age 14. It was UNUSUAL below the aristocracy (and those marriages were often not consummated until the bride was older) and that’s why Shakespeare makes a big deal about Juliet’s age, and about her mother’s. THEY ARE UNUSUALLY YOUNG.

Average marriage age for women across the board was early 20s, iirc, late 20s for men, late 20s for women and late 20s-early 30s for men, and our ancestors were not fucking stupid: they knew childbirth was dangerous (the number one cause of female mortality!) and that a 21-year-old was more likely to survive it than a 14-year-old. They also knew a man in his late 20s was more likely to be established and able to support a family, although that’s more relevant to the lower and middle classes. Did people get married younger? Of course! But on average, people were not getting married in their teens.

Think whatever you bloody well like about the “true meaning of R&J,” but the main characters—BOTH OF THEM—are unusually young for marriage, and Shakespeare damn well did it on purpose, and lampshaded it with Lady Capulet’s own unpreparedness for parenting, which she tries to tell herself is normal because it’s her own experience. (Would things have gone differently if R&J were older? IDK, maybe they’d have come up with a better escape plan, but since Laurence, a supposed adult, comes up with a pretty lousy one, who knows. Not my point.)

Seriously, there are hard stats to back up average marriage ages, and in very few agricultural or industrial societies has it ever been the teen years, for reasons of both biology and economics.

"Women in the past all got married at 14" is starting to rival the amazing gay paradise (women conveniently erased) of ancient Greece and Rome for historical bugbears in fandom that I want to fucking set on fire…

Les Miserables in Dallas, Texas- “Director Liesl Tommy brings a new, modern-dress, immersive production of the hit international musical Les Misérables to the Dallas Theater Center beginning June 27. A host of Broadway actors, including Nehal Joshi as Jean Valjean and Justin Keyes as Marius, are part of the multi-racial contemporary staging…”(cont’d)  BUY TICKETS and read more here!

please bring back that little moment after die unstillbare gier where alfred says “they have feelings” okay it’s so important why was this cut of ALL THINGS

*whispers* the finnish production did

the most important part of that line is the end of it. “they have feelings LIKE US.” it’s not just important for alfred’s character arc but it’s an important part of one of the overarching themes of the entire piece. the vampires are a reflection of the ‘worst’ parts of us. but what makes us at our worst so awful is not that we have no feelings; it’s that the feelings we have and express are impacting those around us negatively, because they’re selfish or otherwise destructive emotions. it’s easy for us to say that someone who does something bad is a monster and without feelings, because what we don’t want to face is that the potential for that behavior is in all of us.

so in tanz the vampires are presented as monstrous and without feelings at first, but as alfred learns and grows into someone who can think independently of the professor’s prejudiced framework, he—along with the audience, because alfred is our eyes and ears, our way into this world—begins to realize that the vampires are not a hell of a lot different from the humans. and that is about 500% more terrifying than an unfeeling nonhuman monster blob, because it means that anyone could become that, as in fact alfred does and that is the point of his arc within the musical, in my opinion.

and if you think about it, alfred’s vampire transformation happens BECAUSE of his feelings, not because he somehow got rid of them. if he had left sarah behind and saved himself, it would not have happened. but he loves her (or his idea of her, but this isn’t an alfred character analysis) and he still thinks he’s saving her, so it’s LOVE that actually pulls him into the darkness. love, an emotion we typically associate the most with the light and are constantly told will save you, in this context actually damns alfred.

SO LONG STORY SHORT (i’m so sorry this reply got away from me) YES THAT LINE IS TERRIBLY TERRIBLY IMPORTANT AND CUTTING IT IS NOT OKAY

Played by the VBW orchestra and arranged and conducted by Caspar Richter. 

actors policing and drawing attention to bootlegs pisses me off sfm like

bootlegs accomplish the following:

- allowing less privileged folk to be exposed to the incredibly elitist theatre circuit 

- exposing people to shows which they have never heard of which increases ticket sales if anything because ticket prices are fucking expensive and you’re probably not going to take a chance on a show that you’re entirely unfamiliar with

things that don’t happen as a result of bootlegs:

- people stop going to the theatre

bootlegs happen, it’s not disrespectful to the show or the cast; it’s allowing fans access to an extremely elitist industry and if anything generating interest in a particular cast or production rather than dissuading theatre attendance, so acting like bootlegs are going to be the death of theatre (as opposed to the ridiculous prices on broadway rn) is nothing short of ignorant