#i left out a bunch of shows

[emailsfromanactor]

The Cast of Hamlet (1964) in Musicals: Part 2

Like Richard Burton, John Cullum (Laertes) started his Broadway musical career in Camelot. He played Sir Dinadan, understudied King Arthur and Mordred, and eventually took over Mordred full-time. Unlike Burton, Cullum kept doing musicals. A lot of musicals. Let's look at some of them!

Cullum's next Broadway show after Hamlet was On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. This is a selection of scenes and songs from the show, narrated by Cyril Ritchard. Barbara Harris gets most of the material here, but watch it all anyway, she's delightful.

After joining the original production of 1776 as a replacement Edward Rutledge, Cullum got to do the role in the film and sing "Molasses to Rum," a tour de force about slavery and Northern hypocrisy.

The shows that Cullum opened in as a star tended to be modest hits at best. Shenandoah was probably his biggest personal success. It ran long enough that he left and came back! He won a Tony! He reprised his role in a revival! Which ran for a little over a month including previews. Ah well. I don't know Shenandoah that well. The plot seems... politically iffy? The lead's whole thing is that he doesn't want to pick a side in the Civil War. But Cullum sounds great!

He won another Tony for On the Twentieth Century! Here he sings "I've Got It All" with the great Judy Kaye. (TW for a rape mention, here are the lyrics if you want to read before watching.) They're out of costume, so you get to see his very '70s outfit. For what he looked like in costume, here's their Tony performance!

And then he didn't originate a role in a musical until Urinetown in 2001. I'm pretty sure this is where I first heard him.

Also he played a dog in The Grinch.

And Audra McDonald's dad in the revival of 110 in the Shade!

In 2010, Cullum was in The Scottsboro Boys as the Interlocutor, who forces the titular characters to reenact their story in the form of a minstrel show. It's a very good, very heavy musical.

Cullum was most recently on Broadway as a replacement in Waitress in 2017-18, but who knows, maybe he'll be back! He did a solo show in 2021 and a movie in 2022. Anyone out there writing roles for 94-year-olds?

[susieandhobbes]

I feel bad because Ayo is clearly legitimately pissed about the baseball video of her and Jeremy blowing up like this and her feelings are valid but in my extremely unprofessional and not at all certified PR perspective - she/her team are handling it SO BADLY.

Deleting her tik toks or IG pics, not dropping another vogue partnership video that (allegedly) was coming today, reposting that video about filming people in public - BABY THE STREISAND EFFECT!!!

The more rattled you seem, the more the internet is going to think they caught you at something and the harder they're going to read into everything. Hell, half the people who saw the video were like "oh this must be a marketing strategy" and while that makes literally no sense because you don't promote a ~platonic~ friendship by stirring up dating rumors, it was still something people were willing to believe. She should have posted "anyway The Bear Season 3 airs June 27th! Go cubs" on her IG story and kept it pushing

[volitioncheck]

i think i wouldn’t hate disco elysium’s collage mode nearly as much if it weren’t for 1) the way that it was marketed in such a tasteless, soulless manner, let alone the fact that it was a last ditch distraction from a dead on its feet studio piloted by dumbass thieving execs and released on the day of the court declaration, and 2) those dumbass fucking stickers

like if it had been included with the base game from the start and had been titled something a bit more tasteful and in-line with how i would have liked the feature to be marketed as— something like “exploration mode”, something that perhaps could only be unlocked after completing the game for the first time, AND didn’t have those stupid as hell visually and tonally incongruent with the artstyle stickers, i would have applauded it as a nice little bonus for being able to study and appreciate the 3d models and environments for reference.

[aq2003]

it IS weird that the general consensus on twelve is that peter capaldi is an excellent actor but his episodes are bad (esp in comparison to the general consensus on series 5 being that it's some of the best the show gets) bc i am overall really enjoying series 8, a lot more than the last 3

[earlgodwin]

lucrezia: *attempted to kill juan to avenge paolo and threatened to drop by him in spain to fulfill her revenge*

juan: my angelic sister 😇😍🦋💞❤️‍🩹🩷

[sovonight]

mini plush charms of radri and xan, complete! they're about 5.75" tall :)

[thedegrassidiaries]

@userbettycooper @hydesjackiespuddinpop @deliciouspirateangel

@lola-miles @maya-matlin @crashingwavesinmyworld @randomwriter23

[highfantasy-soul]

Re: Netflix's live-action Avatar the Last Airbender

I was 12 when the animated series started airing.

I caught episodes as they came on Nickelodeon, but I didn’t watch it religiously start-to-finish. I caught episodes when they happened to be on and I happened to be watching TV (I was NOT part of the generation that had unlimited access to shows - tv/computer/video game time was strictly monitored in my household) so there were some episodes I saw over and over again, and others I never did see.

I think it was around middle/high school (honestly can't remember - it was one of the two) that the show got put on Netflix and I started watching it from the beginning with my brother and some friends. Needless to say, I've been a die-hard fan ever since.

I think the animated show is incredibly well done and the storytelling is super on-point for what I love in media. Zuko's redemption arc is still the best arc I've ever seen, and the character growth is amazing.

I had never really fallen into the 'it's not perfect, but…' way of analyzing media, so I never dwelt too much on its flaws - I'd much rather focus on the things it got right as literally every piece of media has flaws and things that could be changed to make it better.

So yeah, hyperbolically, the animated version of ATLA is 'perfect' - but since people insist on anything that's not perfect being drug through the mud and hyperbolically being called 'garbage', I guess I have to dredge up the things I didn't care so much for in the animated version while analyzing how the live-action handled it (or avoided handling it).

I was super excited for the film adaptation - again, announced while I was in high school. I was looking forward to it so much - then, well, we know what happened there.

Things were changed that didn't make sense to change (the pronunciation of character names, the 'test' for figuring out who the Avatar is, the poor bending where movements didn't align to what was happening with the CGI, casting of white people when the characters were always meant to be indigenous and all asian ethnicities, among other issues people have made many essays about)

So, when this was first announced, I was SKEPTICAL.

While the trailer looked good, it seemed very safe - I recognized everything in it and it looked well made, but like, that doesn't mean the whole thing will be good - or justify its existence.

I tried to ignore any 'leaks' or interview quotes because those are always misconstrued so much and people hear one sentence and create a massive narrative in their head about what that sentence means and usually, all their bellyaching assumptions they made from that piece of info is just a non-issue once the show actually comes out.

I didn't give any credence to people screaming about "Sokka isn't going to be sexist anymore?? It's ruined!!" or "They're going for a Game of Thrones tone?? They don't understand Avatar at all!!" or "No side-quests?? They don't understand the point of the show!!"

First off, invoking the demon that is Game of Thrones is just a marketing tactic - that's all it is: MARKETING!! Just like EVERY YA book for years was 'The new Hunger Games' now it's 'The new Game of Thrones' even when the story at hand is NOTHING AT ALL LIKE THOSE THINGS!! It's literally, let me cradle your face gently in my hands, JUST a marketing ploy to get you to see a recent title you DO recognize and have (assumedly) heard good things about (ie popular) so that you then pick up the thing that they slapped that name onto.

Creators rarely have say in what their creation is likened to, they're told by marketing companies to go with it (if they're told anything at all) and they just say "yes, marketing team I have no control over, whatever you say".

Also, a passing comment in an interview is off-the cuff and when someone makes a comment like that, people read WAY too far into it and it's usually not nearly as deep as people make it out to be. That's why I just wait for the actual thing to come out and just watch it and judge it based on what it is, not some narrative someone else has created for it based on half a quote from some random interview.

So going into this: why the live-action adaptation? Why was it necessary?

In my opinion, the answer to this question is the thing many fans hate the most: altering the original story.

A beat-for-beat remake isn't necessary - the original is right there, so in order to 'earn' the right for this adaptation to exist, that necessitates changes to be made that add to the themes, deepen the lore, and delve into different aspects of the world in ways a child's cartoon can't.

So, I'm looking for not a 1-1 remake, but rather an adaptation that enhances the themes, irons out some uneven characterization/pacing, updates the story just enough to really get what they want to across, and delve more directly into some of the harsher aspects of the war.

I have always felt that Iroh's involvement in the Fire Nation military was glossed over a lot in the cartoon - I suspect because he's supposed to be a good guy and we can't have our good guys be overtly war criminals responsible for the deaths of thousands of people.

The effects of hard decisions made during war are shown in the animation, but the decision making process itself is rarely talked about until the very end with the gaang's struggle to keep helping people while also knowing where to focus their energy and Aang's struggle finding a way to stop the firelord without killing him.

something this adaptation can do is actually show the people making the decisions - and directly talking about the horrible effects of it. I'll get to it later, but that's one of the major themes in Episode 4 that I'll talk more on then.

Especially in Book 1, like many first books/seasons, the worldbuilding isn't fully fleshed out and the themes that really come to fruition later aren't as tight as they could be at the beginning. If the adaptation can go ahead and seed/tighten the themes that become big deals later on here at the beginning, it will 'justify' it's existence as the story retold after the whole story has already been plotted out.

Just like with the Percy Jackson and Wheel of Time adaptation, those writing for the show have the benefit of knowing how the story ends and all the stuff that's added to the world building as time goes on that wasn't necessarily known by the authors when they wrote and published the first books - the benefit of hindsight allows the show's script to take into consideration these additions and seed them early on to make the story more cohesive and reinforce themes.

So, this analysis is going to be long and filled with minute details, beat by beat for the episodes.

I have seen so many takes that I just sit and scratch my head at and think 'that was so obvious in the show - how did you miss/misinterpret that thing so wildly?' that I guess what I took for granted as obvious in the show, others didn't, so here's me being pedantic and over-explaining everything so maybe others can see that 1) they aren't the only ones who saw this interpretation and 2) maybe others will see the scenes a different way

Still trying to decide how to break up the analysis as the episode recaps are going to be LONG and since people now demand to see all the citations for stuff, the character analysis posts will be long too as I pull direct scenes to show why I feel the way I do.

I don't want to overload the posts and make it so they're just annoying to read, so I'll probably break them up into the sections of the episodes and maybe break up the character posts.

[Masterlist of my NATLA thoughts]

[sonknuxadow]

NOOOOOO i caved and decided i would just buy the lps from the target website anyway and they decided to go out of stock as i was about to check out. throws up

[psqqa]

truly ted lasso gave us the best gift a show could ever give a fandom: complete lack of confirmation or denial either way

[aparticularbandit]

So I started the dub of Fruits Basket again.

Forgetting, of course, that the primary theme is about life changing and having to be okay with letting go of the past even though the future is uncertain.

More importantly, forgetting that one of the main threads of this throughout the series is Tohru's grief (and guilt) over her mother's death.

....

Well, you know what, my therapist told me to engage with grief as homework the past couple of weeks, so between this and starting Anohana again I THINK IT COUNTS.

[1ovestay]

have had a very disappointing and stressful morning but at least i am sitting by the ocean with the sun shining on my face

[ssaalexblake]

also lol @ the chirping crickets from the ‘the dw showrunner shouldn’t be a white man we’ve moved past this’ crowd from the past 5 years suddenly going radio silence. 

[liquidstar]

I'm working on my next oc set rn (as always) and this one is going to be the first, like, trinary guild to have more than 8 characters on account of twins sharing a spot lol

[lesbianralzarek]

sometimes i want to get back into the vtm fandom and then i see a billion “oh my god what were they thinking? do NOT read the lore” comments on, like, actually cool lore. because some of the old canon sucked really bad, theres just... 0 good faith and it shows with people thinking its dumb that unreliable narrators tell contradicting stories of myths carried over from before recorded history. sorry but thats just convincing worldbuilding and is good, actually

not tagging this cause i dont wanna start shit, but it kinda sucks when half the fandom actively hates the source media

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

littol brown snake at work today. juvenile. apparently their bites can be fatal even as juveniles! but it was really cute - I saw it first and trotted off and told higher-ups like a good little girl. we closed the door so the snakeling could not get out and cause havoc; I kept walking past and wanting to open the door and look at it again, because it was so beautiful. but I refrained.