onstagesport

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I understand the desire to ship but "we would find each other in every universe...as coworkers" is an insanely funny concept to me I'm sorry.

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Not to "old man yell at clouds" bc like you do you, have your fun, whatever. BUT

I hate, hate, HATE the trend of just putting two words together and calling that a ship name. I don't know if it's anywhere outside of Hatchetfield/Starkid fandom but every time I see one I literally get so mad and then go:

I feel like there is a spectrum of ship naming, and it's:

Creativity (twowords) to Clarity (name/name)

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I think I’m going to lose my mind trying to figure out what random side character is now being named as Mike??

unless they for some reason added another character??

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just playing around with a couple grace transitions

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I’ve been having so many thoughts about Paulkins recently mainly because I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m so obsessed with them as I am.

The post here that described them as “a spark that never becomes a flame” I think encapsulates that perfectly but I also want to go a step further.

When I was waiting to hear back if my pitch to direct TGWDLM at my school got approved (it didn’t rip, but I’ll help out with the show one way or another) I was thinking about the ways I wanted to portray Paulkins because of how much I literally love them. And I do think there are some valid points in the way that Paul does seem to like Emma more than she likes him and how to make their relationship feel more balanced. Although I do love Paulkins, I am not a big fan of the idea of romantic love being the supreme of all loves, especially as someone who has never been in love at my age. I think it’s really easy, especially with a script like TGWDLM, to end up portraying romantic love as the end all of love. I wanted to find the little ways to establish that love is just love.

In thinking about this, Cool as I Think I Am (Reprise) came into my mind. NPMD… fantastic. Amazing. But the way I always interpreted this song was that both Steph and Pete know they don’t necessarily love each other yet but rather that they know that one day they will. If they get the chance to live a little more and live together, then they know their fates are sealed and they WILL end up being in love. And I realized that to me, that’s what Paul and Emma are every time.

I don’t think they fall in love with each other over the course of TGWDLM. Paul confirms this when he tells Gen.Mac “I’d like there to be. I want there to be” in regards to his relationship with Emma (which dare I say is the most important line in the show because it’s the first time Paul explicitly says what he wants). But I think, like Pete and Steph, they realize very early on that this is the person they WILL fall in love with… only if they get enough time.

They find each other every time, but they never get enough time.

This then raises another question- What if it was enough time? What if just the chance of getting to meet one another, to get to know one another, is enough. What if just getting to know each other, even for a short time, is enough time compared to never knowing each other at all. With the addition of Emdroid and Paul 23, it’s a double edged sword. Because on one hand, yes, even an Android and clone version of Paul and Emma will fall for each other, that’s how inevitable they are. But on the other hand, the real Paul and Emma never even got to meet each other. The Paulkins happy ending that exists doesn’t belong to them, because Paul Matthews and Emma Perkins will never have enough time.

This tragic aspect of them, the idea of them NOT being in love but very much so aware that they should/could be, I think is what makes them so engaging for me. I think too, this interpretation or line of thinking for me separates them from being a strictly romantic love. Because it’s not love. Not yet. It’s just a connection between two people at the time when they need it most. One of you is living your personal hell of being in a musical, one of you is having an existential crisis after the death of your sister.

Also, Hadestown is a huge inspiration on my art (Rachel Chavkin is a big idol of mine) and an indicator of my theatre tastes, so I definitely would say the idea of Paulkins existing in the same realm as Orpheus and Eurydice definitely gets me.

I also do want to say some very good advice I’ve gotten recently, especially about directing, is that you can’t control how your audience interprets what happens. Two people can be watching a play and an actor lifts a coffee cup by the lid, and these two people can have a totally different reaction. One person won’t think anything of it, while another, who has seen someone spill coffee from this motion, will immediately begin anticipating a spill. My perception specifically on love comes from my experience as someone who doesn’t really seek out romantic love but living in a society that holds it to a certain pedestal. Specifically, often times I feel like my peers believe I lack a certain sense of maturity because of this inexperience in both love and sex. At the same time too, as a director, I can’t control how you will interpret it, but I can do my best to curate it to my vision and goal. Little disclaimer at the end, I’m not discounting romantic love but I think it exists in a weird place in the art and media we consume.

Also it’s like past 3 am in the morning as I did this but I have no one else to talk to about Starkid or TGWDLM or Paulkins about.

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Rachel Zegler Sally Bowles

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Women in Shakespeare

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hatchetfield voted most bisexual town in america 2025

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five o’clock can’t come soon enough

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the funniest part of much ado is after claudio and hero get engaged and beatrice is like “meanwhile I’m over here!!! forever alone!!! I wish someone like don pedro would ask me to marry him haha!!” and don pedro is like “would you like me to marry you?” and beatrice says no.

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this is the consequence for what you've done

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While thinking of audition songs for Hatchetfield characters, I came to the horrible realization:

Ted absolutely considers himself a "Rum Tum Tugger" from CATS

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While I've got your attention, I would also like to use this opportunity to say:

Bryce Charles u/s Charlotte Sweetly & More

Exhibit A: "Next month it is!"

Exhibit B: Nora preparing to fire Emma for refusing to sing

Exhibit C: Deblice

Exhibit D: "It is time... TO DIIIIIEEEEE"

Exhibit E: Col. Schaeffer saying "Kelly" and "Ben Bridges" are very good friends

Since Starkid does understudies now, I have some propaganda to pitch:

Angela Giarratana u/s Emma Perkins

Exhibit A: Live footage of her talking to Coffee Jerk

Exhibit B: listening to Paul tell her he thinks the world is becoming a musical

Exhibit C: Emma when Ted speaks

Exhibit D: how she looks asking Paul for a kiss before spitting blood in his face

Thank you

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just remembered that Emma died in Clivesdale, poor woman. Truly one of the worst ever fates of anyone in the Hachetverse.

[onstagesport]

Since Starkid does understudies now, I have some propaganda to pitch:

Angela Giarratana u/s Emma Perkins

Exhibit A: Live footage of her talking to Coffee Jerk

Exhibit B: listening to Paul tell her he thinks the world is becoming a musical

Exhibit C: Emma when Ted speaks

Exhibit D: how she looks asking Paul for a kiss before spitting blood in his face

Thank you

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Smarter people than me have probably made this analysis, but I've been getting into Jesus Christ Superstar recently (1973 movie and 2012 arena tour) and I'm obsessed with how Not The Main Character Jesus is. For the first half of the musical, we see him predominantly through everyone else's idea of and reactions to him— he is loved and hated and worshipped and asked for things by all of these people, but he himself is mostly silent, and when he says anything at all, it's less like the words of a revered teacher and more like the outbursts of an aging teen heartthrob whose fanbase has started to get a little too entitled to his personal space.

He doesn't become a person, within the narrative, until Gethsemane— until all that external validation and adoration is stripped away, leaving only an interior perspective that we haven't seen until now. The outbursts that seemed egocentric and shallow before suddenly seem symptomatic of knowing one's fate and being unable to do shit about it.

I'm not Christian anymore, but I see a lot of parallels— probably intentional ones— to how the church I grew up in utterly refused to assign Jesus any kind of human emotion or interiority, even while harping on and on about how He Sacrificed For Us™™™. He was always pictured as enduring great physical suffering, without any emotional suffering at all— no abandonment, no resentment of his purpose, just calm contentment and knowledge that all was going according to plan. Which I understand, in a way. Depicting Jesus as being angry at God would be a slippery slope to 15-16 year old me feeling like I was allowed to be angry at God, and we can't have that. 🙃

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a month ago i picked up a book on stage directing in my school’s black box and opened to a random page and it was something about making shakespearean actors rehearse by adding the word fuck to their lines to turn the archaic language into something familiar for the emotional resonance (of course taking it out as rehearsals move along to fix rhythm/etc but just to start off) and the example it gave was the solid flesh speech. like. iirc it was specifically “but two fucking months dead”

and like. im obsessed with this. as a concept. not even for acting i just think it’s so fucking funny. to be or not to be, that’s the fucking question. is this a fucking dagger i see before me. this is the excellent fuckery of the world -