#this is a very funny scene but broderick's faces kind of ruin it

[cantsayidont]

March 1984. Poor Jason. Everyone knows it, but you can't just say it.

[bpdjennamaroney]

Here’s my scene-by-scene breakdown of Moonbox Productions’ Parade. It was written on the bus and I couldn’t dwell too much about it because I would cry.

I don’t even know where to begin. It destroyed me and I think it might have ruined all future productions of Parade for me. I thought Parade was perfect before I saw this, I can’t imagine anything topping this. 

 The boldest and most incredible choice, which enhanced the entire musical, was having Leo and eventually Mary on stage as spectral spectators throughout the show, able to see the events unfold before them but unable to intervene, and then slip back into the events when needed. Leo is on stage the entire time (except for one or two moments which were for Mary—I’ll explain later). On paper that might sound like a bad idea but it was delicately and thoughtfully done, moment-to-moment perfect, and evolved throughout the show.

 I can’t do it justice by describing it, I can’t even come close, but I need to break it down scene by scene anyway. 

So...it opens with Leo waking from a nightmare and menacing voices echoing, he runs across the stage in a panic, finding pencils on the ground. He pulls sheets off of boxes from his pencil company, then runs away. It was a weird choice that threw me at first. Then they go into Old Red Hills of home, and Leo watches from his desk. I thought it was just to emphasize Leo as an outsider, which was good, I liked it, but at that point I had no idea what it was going to become.

 Lucille/How Can I Call This Home—Some Leos are snippy and kind of mean, but this Leo in particular is a tightly coiled bundle of anxiety. It’s easy to be anxious on his behalf. I couldn’t help but get strong Matthew Broderick vibes, mostly his speech patterns but also the level of anxiety and maybe even a slight physical resemblance. It made me think of Leo Bloom in a serious, nightmare scenario. Lucille is playful and loving and particularly fiery here (more on that later). I never understood the original Broadway production’s dourness. 

Picture Show—Leo watches this part, too. It’s not obtrusive but it becomes clear this is going to be a thing throughout the show.

Newt Lee is played by a deaf actor, so he signs the Interrogation scene while the policeman taking down his statement sings it. I loved it! Mary’s body is front and center, which is first in a bunch of unsparing (in a good way) choices.

They mostly stuck to the London revision so when I heard the opening to Big News I just about busted a nut. I’m vocal about my preference for the Broadway version, and one of my major disappointments is when Big News is cut. But they did it! Britt Craig stumbles around drunk shoving newspapers in people’s face. Obviously the best staging of all time was the original production where he spends the whole song trying to find his shoe and then falls into a trash can but this was also  very funny and I’m just thrilled to hear Big News (and yes Leo watches this in the background).

The funeral was a game changer. To be honest it never particularly moved me. It’s not one of the songs I skip the most but it’s definitely not one I listen to most, and I find it a bit saccharine. But here, Mary watches her funeral—the actress is incredible, and it enhances Mary’s role. She’s now more than just a girl who was killed. My mind worked some quick mental calculations about the implications it would have for the rest of the show (her mother’s testimony came to mind, and her final scene with Leo--there was, so much more, though) and I started crying. She joins Leo as a spectactor, as a ghost, in a story where they are at the center and powerless to do anything. But she and Leo aren’t really together at this point—if I remember correctly, it’s one of the scenes where Leo isn’t present at all, or if he is, he is far off to the side. 

If there’s one inevitable downfall to the Mary+Leo watching the whole time thing, it’s that Lucille kind of gets swallowed by it. But she’s fierce in You Don’t Know This Man. She snatches Britt Craig’s notebook from him, and when she eventually hands it back to him, she holds on and pulls him to her to growl “I have nothing more to say to you” in his face. Yes! 

The trial—Jeesus fucking Christ so good! I need to single out the staging of Factory Girls/Come Up To My Office because it was thrilling and terrifying and incredible. Traditionally, Mary comes back on stage for this, but in this case, she’s already on stage, watching the proceedings with horror. When Frankie starts lying about what she said to him, Mary goes rigid as if she’s being controlled, and then she goes forward to act out the lies. When it’s Leo’s turn for his memory and reputation to be smeared against his will, the lights change, and he slams himself against the desk as if he’s trying to resist—and then Mary (they interact sparingly at this point) hands him a top hat and cane (she doesn’t want to, but neither of them have a choice) and he begins his part of the song. It’s violent. He’s a madman. The girls scream and fight back, but he throws them around, chokes them, it’s brutal and chilling. 

My Child Will Forgive Me—A song I always skip, but  here, ghost! Mary kneels at her mother’s feet and tries to reach out to her, and it’s an emotional knockout. Summation & Cakewalk—I’m just sobbing at this point.

Rumbling and Rolling—The white people are frozen in stage, oblivious to Newt, Jim, and Minnie’s lives, except when Minnie sings “Mr. Frank, at your service...” and jostles him forward. He’s confused and troubled as she takes his coat. Another skillful demonstration of him as a memory and his lack of autonomy. 

Do It Alone—Lucille starts out so strong in this production, and Leo is fairly meek in the moments leading up to it, so she seems disproportionately angry at him here, but by the end, it made sense—she’s human, she’s frustrated by the whole situation, so even if she’s not angry *at* Leo she’s directing her anger at him, because where else? And then at the end she softens, and the lyrics (“I can do more, Leo...”) which usually read as her asking him permission to let her, here read as her making a vow—she *will* do more.

Ghost Mary and Ghost Leo gradually start interacting more throughout. Again, it isn’t obtrusive, and I only paid so much attention to them because I’m so familiar with this show that of course I’m gonna allot my attention to something so innovative.The only break in my investment, as always, was The Glory...it’s incredible that Jarb took the worst, most skippable song in Parade (Letter to the Governor) and replaced it with something even more boring and forgettable, when all I really want to do is get to the money shot, This Is Not Over Yet, my favorite song ever, and then full momentum straight to the end, but I digress—I’m a whimpering trembling mess when the opening notes to This Is Not Over Yet start playing. The performances were incredible. There’s a moment where he looks back at Mary, too, like it’s all going to be OK, and Mary’s happy for him.

 Blues/Feel the Rain Fall—This is the other moment where Mary is left alone on stage, because in all likelihood, Jim Conley was her killer, so at the end, she’s left alone in the middle of the stage, on her knees, crying. The guy playing Jim Conley is great--smarmy and menacing and charming as needed.

Where Will You Stand—Another song that I enjoy but it’s not my favorite, that this production blew open. Spectral Mary and Leo are both lost in the mob, and though Leo quickly gets away from them, Mary stays in the thick of it, watching on up close in horror and disbelief. Leo repeatedly beckons for her to join him, away from them. There’s a line in the beginning of the show about Leo and Lucille wanting to start a family, and it’s a throwaway line in that it never comes up again. I realized that I usually can’t imagine Leo as a father--until now, where he is protective and fatherly and playful and kind to Mary. This is the only production where that can happen, and it’s breathtaking and shattering at the same time.

All The Wasted Time—This is usually where I *start* crying. I’m emotionally spent at this point. It’s my second favorite song, and it’s perfect, and there’s not a lot I can say about it.

The hanging scene—Leo is surprisingly calm and dignified. Usually he asks for his pants frantically but not here. He starts crying when he prays, but is still composed. The lynching scene is unflinchingly violent. He’s kicked and thrown and dragged across the stage with the noose around his neck. He’s taken off stage, and the men continue to scream at him (also off stage; it’s longer than usual). Mary wanders around the stage. She picks up the ring Leo wanted to give Lucille and sits on a swing hanging from a tree. Finally, Frankie shouts “This is for you, Mary!” And the scene ends.Lucille gets the ring from Britt Craig. Mary and Leo reenact their only scene together, as always (“Mr. Frank?” “What?” “Happy Memorial Day.”) It’s the first scene I thought of when I realized Mary and Leo were going to be ghosts together. He smiles at her warmly and genuinely (a lot of the time it’s an immediate fade to black—after all, it’s usually a flashback to the fussy, grumpy Leo of the start of the show, but here, it can be Leo at the end of his journey.Then Frankie comes out and sings “Old Red Hills of Home” in modern garb and I start sobbing, because the entire cast comes out in modern dress, too. But the show ends with a glimpse of Leo and Lucille during their picnic, which I absolutely could not handle. It fucking wrecked me. 

[spottedtoad]

Harry Potter has become a surprisingly obsessive allegorical tool for liberals’ opposition to the Trump Administration:

I already gave my medium-hot take as to why the early Harry Potter books were such crossover hits, breaking out of the Little League of children’s fantasy novels and becoming hugely popular among adults, but I’ll disobey Occam’s Razor and offer another mostly unrelated hypothesis about why Harry Potter stories are such useful allegorical material for contemporary liberals, aside from a general hunger for myth and meaning in a post-religious age.

Harry Potter, especially the movies, is about the legitimacy of authority that comes from schools.

A hint to what’s going on comes from this New York Times op-ed from a few years ago, by a high school girl about to go off to college, about how obsessively colleges trumpet their similarity to the imaginary wizards’ school Hogwarts:

I was surprised when many top colleges delivered the same pitch. It turns out, they’re all a little bit like Hogwarts — the school for witches and wizards in the “Harry Potter” books and movies. Or at least, that’s what the tour guides kept telling me.

During a Harvard information session, the admissions officer compared the intramural sports competitions there to the Hogwarts House Cup. The tour guide told me that I wouldn’t be able to see the university’s huge freshman dining hall as it was closed for the day, but to just imagine Hogwarts’s Great Hall in its place.

At Dartmouth, a tour guide ushered my group past a large, wood-paneled room filled with comfortable chairs and mentioned the Hogwarts feel it was known for. At another liberal arts college, I heard that students had voted to name four buildings on campus after the four houses in Hogwarts: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Slytherin. Several colleges let it be known that Emma Watson, the actress who plays Hermione Granger in the movies, had looked into them. I read, in Cornell’s fall 2009 quarterly magazine, that a college admissions counseling Web site had counted Cornell among the five American colleges that have the most in common with Hogwarts. Both institutions, you see, are conveniently located outside cities. The article ended: “Bring your wand and broomstick, just in case.”

Why, aside from the promise of the magical learning that you’ll acquire if you just arrive at one campus instead of another (in real life, one school teaches largely the same Intro to Sociology and Multivariable Calc as another, and the idiosyncrasies are very often not in the more elite schools’ favor), do these campuses want to highlight their similarity to an imaginary high school? Aren’t these kids just finishing high school, eager, as everyone who’s ever watched the Breakfast Club knows, to leave behind in loco parentis along with their parentis themselves?

High school movies of the 80s were obsessed with the illegitimacy of schools’ authority; Matthew Broderick hacks into his high school’s computer in both Ferris Bueller and Wargames, to make a mockery of the so-called permanent record, and John Hughes’s movies in general are always focused on the improvisatory genius of children and adolescents and the dull brutish obsessions of school personnel:

While parents in these films are sometimes kind and sometimes abusive, their bad actions are largely off-stage, to be psychoanalyzed and complained about by the teenage heroes, who are getting on with their real lives. The antagonists are not parents but the unimaginative bullies running schools, eager to ruin young lives out of jealousy for lost youth and beauty or envy of coolness they never had:

This is a remarkable contrast with the Harry Potter films, which (partly due to the superfluity of British acting talent available to the various directors) often make Dumbledore and the various Hogwarts teachers far grander and more impressive than the teenage protagonists:

Snape may be evil, he may be good, but he’s definitely the person you want to learn Potion-making from in that scene- his authority as a teacher is unquestionable. The illegitimate teachers are those who are recently arrived from outside the institution- Umbridge from her government position, Lockhart from his book-writing career, Quirrell from his adventures chasing trolls.

  It’s no surprise that the one Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher to teach Harry anything is Lupin, the one with the closest connections to the institution, with his own past as a student at Hogwarts central to the plot of the Prisoner of Azkaban:

Nor is it a surprise that Harry and his friends’ loyalty to Dumbledore is a strange fixation of both the books and the films, as if high schoolers’ loyalty to their principals is more important than their loyalty to their principles.

Nor is it a surprise that one of Voldemort’s key betrayals was his cursing of the school when he was refused a position there, or that the culmination of all the films comes as a direct attack on the school itself, with the various legitimate teachers coming together to form a shield protecting it from the assaults by the outside world:

From an outside perspective, Harry Potter is a funny fantasy for liberals to cohere around. Going off to centuries-old boarding school where your mum and dad were Head Boy and Head Girl, where tolerance and broadmindedness consists of admitting that  lowerclass people can *occasionally* have the same genetically-mediated gifts as the gentry, where the greatest possible action for a woman is to let herself be slain so her son can grow up to revenge himself on your killer, where ignorance of the supernatural is a form of willful self-delusion,a pathetic blindness to the real forces that move the world, where all the kids eat Merry Olde England foods like Roast Beef and Kidney Pie and Yorkshire Pudding all the time, all sounds more reactionary than progressive. But if contemporary liberalism is the ideology of imperial academia, funneled through media and governmental agencies but responsible ultimately only to itself, the obsession with Harry Potter makes a lot more sense.

Contemporary on-campus social justice activism is often seemingly directed against the loci of institutional power in the universities themselves, like Princeton students occupying the President’s office to demand that the university change the name of buildings named after Woodrow Wilson.  Often these political actions take the form of “demanding the institution lives up to its creed”- if Princeton currently teaches that racism is wrong, how can it honor an acknowledged racist like Wilson? But, as Dimitri Halikas notes in a smart essay about Yale’s Halloween protests last year, the actual intent is overwhelmingly to increase institutional and bureaucratic power rather than to disable it:

Having all but abandoned their radical skepticism toward the controlling power of mass social judgment and the implicit power of entrenched hierarchical elites, today’s campus activists are quite explicit in their appeal not to demolish the power of administrators, but to expand it. Of course faceless bureaucrats should be allowed to issue behavioral codes of conduct, of course mandatory sensitivity training is needed to instruct students and faculty how to act appropriately, and of course new administrative appendages are indispensable in the moral guidance of university life. Each of the remedies called for at Yale and elsewhere is symptomatic of a new-found faith in university administrators as responsible guardians of social justice and as legitimate moral authorities.

Harry Potter, especially as realized in the films, is a fantasy of institutional legitimacy, that loyalty to the idealized form of the School is equivalent to an individual moral sense. Individual teachers or administrators might fail that grand destiny, but it is matter of bravery and not intelligence to make the school live up to its ideals; there’s a reason that intelligent Ravenclaws are almost absent from the stories, which are almost exclusively about brave Gryffindors facing off against sly Slytherins. Curiously for a story concerned with ancient magic, we are told over and over again that Dumbledore is the greatest Headmaster Hogwarts has ever known; the institution gains authority from its storied past but no one need look into any of those stories too closely, since the present is far greater. Like the College Gothic buildings that make up most Ivy League campuses, that resemble Oxford and Cambridge but were actually constructed in the 1930s, the appearance of ancient wisdom doesn’t need much to concern itself with anything particularly old, and even a fake Sword of Godric Gryffindor is sometimes just as much use as the real thing.

There are, of course, lots of things to love about colleges and schools, which are among our few remaining sources of in-person community in an increasingly isolated and atomized world. To a degree, the affection alumni have for their schools and the reverence that the public still often accords professors is understandable, if not always well deserved. As the left-wing 19th century social reformer Arnold Toynbee wrote, college “is where one walks at night, and listens to the wind in the trees, and weaves the stars into the web of one’s thoughts; where one gazes from the pale inhuman moon to the ruddy light of the windows, and hears broken notes of music and laughter and the complaining murmur of the railroad in the distance.” The ideal of college, Toynbee said, is “the ideal of gentle, equable, intellectual intercourse, with something of a prophetic glow about it, glancing brightly into the future, yet always embalming itself in the memory as a resting-place for the soul in a future that may be dark and troubled after all, with little in it but disastrous failure.” Whether you need $60,000 a year to do all that stuff is another unanswered question, but perhaps the Harry Potter allowed its fans to participate in the dream of an ideal community, even if the real thing remains as the complaining murmur of the Hogwarts Express vanishing in the distance.

  Getting Your Owl Harry Potter has become a surprisingly obsessive allegorical tool for liberals' opposition to the Trump Administration: