mr magorium's opera emporium

I just wrapped up the packaging art for Alek Shrader's spooky-themed Barber of Seville project HOUSE OF BARTOLO. Alek will be launching the kickstarter campaign next week.

im not alone i have the sun and the moon

world class opera festival babey

as much as i will criticize some musicals i do this with the pretense that my criticisms are only so pointed because unlike other forms of theatre musicals are not allowed to change, and evolve, and run and play like the animals that theatre works are… to quote one of my dramaturgy professors “no play is ever ‘finished’ just abandoned”

do you ever think the musical rent- like as an entity, the musical itself- sees a glimpse of turandot every now and then, this tremendous beast of a creation perennially unfinished so grand and unwieldy in scope that urban legend says it killed its composer; how its wings glisten, how it’s taken apart now and then and doesn’t mind it, how it’s regularly given a new set of clothes and a new skin and even new endings for it to try on and take off like the tails on a dragon, how despite all its glaring flaws it is free… and do you think that as rent watches it fly away it is consumed by an envy so terrible that if musicals had corporeal forms it would start to claw at its face in sorrow at what could have been had it been born someplace else

nooo!!!! don’t make a musical that just combines a bunch of your unrelated and complicated oc ideas without further thinking!! noo that’s how you make terribly written musicals where each character steps up and sings a little aria instead of there being plot momentum and a sense of a cohesive dramaturgical vision!!!! oh no the composer isn’t even going through the effort to simplify his characters into one or two gimmicks so the vaudeville style presentation works they’re leaving them super complicated so the audience will suffer whiplash!! nooooo the composer has their airpods in they can’t hear us

I actually should get around to this bc i’ve been thinking about it. like usually i think this falls flat on its face because it’s like dear evan hansen style where they all go around in a circle talking about how they are sad/mad/whatever without anything actually happening in the music. SO there are SOME musicals/operas that pull this off WELL but there’s like a few uniting features there

cats is able to do this well because they get all 3 of the points down. we don’t actually care about who’s winning the cat rebirth contest (wild statement), the show is a spectacle, it’s basically a venue, and the cats all have like 1 gimmick and the songs are really good at selling the gimmick. this bitch has trains. this bitch does magic. this bitch is two bitches actually. like cats is a great show bc it understands that it’s a venue and not a musical.

the other two that follow the same principles are the opera l’enfant et les sortileges (which is basically cats if it were a 45 min french opera with the plot of toy story, like otherwise it’s a very similar spectacle driven setup and also it’s for kids so like further pass) and the 25th annual putnam county spelling bee (not my thing like personally but the spectacle here is the audience interactivity thing and also as said the kids all have like just a couple personality traits and are written to be likable so it’s fine).

Six tries. it really tries to bank in on that spelling bee-cats position where it’s like a little contest so the plot doesn’t matter however it kind of falls flat bc 1) the overwhelming girlbossism gets in the way and 2) the wives are all meant to be like, real flawed human beings and that doesn’t really work in a revue type show. Also the end where they’re like “psych you did the thing we told you to do and now you look real misogynist now!!!!” is such a major ass pull. like do you want the audience to interact with you or not

Anyway that’s my thoughts on “musicals where they all just go around and sing in a line” Actually probably one of the worst musicals that does this I am not mentioning bc I know some of my mutuals and followers enjoy it and I am jot touching that today. So just like… imagine your least favorite musical that does this and imagine me tearing it up

when you are alone, you are the cat, you are the phone- you're an animal!

it's always so fascinating to me how Turandot is upheld as this uniquely monstrous person in opera who "deserves what she gets". for the first two acts of the opera she does fuck all that would designate her as such – the men who fervently try to claim her are in effect slapping themselves with their own hands into a beheading (and we literally have her trying to warn Calaf off the same path!). Liù's torture and death is squarely and unforgivably on her, but "causing grievous harm to a woman" is a shared characteristic with every other leading male char of 19th century opera and somehow they rarely get hit with the "well he does deserve to get assaulted to set him right from his straying ways" line of thinking.

put up more of my lps childhood collection for sale... please if you would like them give them loving homes

wait I'm curious

I feel like this is a common enough experience but I don't know how much