Bring It On: Songs 1-5

When I found out that Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tom Kitt tag-teamed the score for Bring It On, I knew I had to check it out, but I hadn’t expected to enjoy it as much as I do.  This is a show with plenty of awesome music, and the blend of the two composers’ styles makes for an interesting combination (much like Campbell and the Jackson kids.)  As with my In the Heights song rundown, I’ll be repeating the entries I originally posted in my Top Five Songs write-up for the show.  Also, while there are definite places where you can feel Miranda’s handiwork as opposed to Kitt’s and vice versa, I won’t try to parse out each song.  So, we’ll just look at the whole thing, five songs at a time.

“What I Was Born to Do” – This showcase for Campbell opens the show with energy and spirit.  The chorus, with its mantra “These Truman girls / Are superhuman girls,” is ridiculously catchy, and I love the cheer introductions in the middle.  Right away, we see that Campbell is a cheerleader because she loves it, not because of stereotypical high-school-movie pecking order reasons, which gives us a better idea of what kind of show we’re about to see.

Best line:  “We got one shot that we work all year for - / We got more balls than the team we cheer for.”

“Tryouts” – Short but amusing, with the lofty melody at odds with Skylar’s bitchy lyrics.  Very fitting for her character, to respond to the demands and insults she received back when she tried out by doing the same thing to the new cheerleading hopefuls.

Best lyric:  “I’ll uphold the great tradition / With these young lives on my watch. / Let’s set the stage, / I’ve come of age / To be a raging castrating / Bee-yotch.”

“One Perfect Moment” – We’re trained to think of cheerleading as something frivolous and silly, but the show defies that notion.  Some really nice lyrics here as Campbell thinks about what cheerleading gives her.  There’s her desire to win and her drive to execute her moves flawlessly, but there’s also the pure physical sensation of flying, just for a moment, and that’s the feeling this song chases.

Best lyric:  “High in the air / There is a moment just before you start to fall -- / Live in that one moment.”

“Do Your Own Thing” – Lin-Manuel Miranda has such a talent for scene songs that establish settings and characters, move the plot forward, have insane hooks, and boast clever lyrics all at the same time.  This song, in which Campbell starts her apprehensive first day at Jackson High, is a stellar example of this.

Best line:  “Step one to become invisible: / Books up – de-accentuate the physical, / Head down – use only your peripheral. / Stick with me; we’ll be indivisible.”

“We Ain’t No Cheerleaders” – I’m so in love with the groove of this song.  Danielle leads us with strut and stagger, and she’s backed well by Nautica and La Cienega.  The dance crew wasn’t around for “What I Was Born to Do,” so their idea of cheerleaders is the teen movie stereotype, and they clarify their roles in this number that sizzles with attitude.

Best line:  “You can call your therapist / And complain, ‘Those girls ain’t right,’ / ‘Cause every day / We get haters / Who say they can take us. / Okay, baby - / If that helps you sleep at night.”

Adam Pascal & Anthony Rapp Live Performance – 10.27.18

First of all, there are two key things you should know here.  1)  RENT was one of the first musicals I ever loved.  The cast recording blew my mind when I first heard it, and a lot of my early exploration of musical theatre used RENT as a jumping-off point – I followed original cast members to other cast recordings and discovered new actors/composers, I followed Jonathan Larson to tick, tick… BOOM! and discovered Raúl Esparza, etc.  However, 2) I’ve never seen a live production of RENT.  I was probably 15 or 16 when I first got into it and desperately wanted to see a tour of it, but it was deemed too “adult” by my parents.  And by the time I was older and more able to make those decisions for myself, things just got in the way:  the national tours wound down, the original Broadway production closed, and other shows started vying for my attention.

All of which is to say that the opportunity to see two members of the OBC in concert together taps into a very particular, very special type of awesomeness in my life.  Even though my Broadway tastes have exploded outward in all directions since my RENT days, there was still something utterly astounding about seeing Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp onstage in front of me.

They began with two largely-separate acoustic sets, Pascal taking the stage first.  Accompanying himself on the guitar, he performed a mixture of mostly rock (some of which was his own material) and a few Broadway numbers.  I’ll cop to not being as familiar with most of the songs in his set, but his voice is still to die for, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.  I especially loved the two Broadway songs he performed – not just because both were songs I know well, but because of what he did with them.  The first was a lovely rendition of Sweeney Todd’s “Johanna,” slipped surprisingly into the middle of “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” by Jeff Buckley (it was so unexpected that Pascal had to ask someone in the front row, “Why are you laughing?” after the initial, “Wait – is that ‘Johanna’?” reaction that followed the first line.)  And later, after a story about how much it meant to him to be a part of Cabaret, he sang “Maybe This Time.”  What I loved about these songs was that he performed both in ways I’ve never heard them performed before.  They were true covers with his own take on them:  a light rock flavor with slightly-altered rhythms to fit the style, both sounding fantastic in his voice.  Overall, he did less talking than Rapp, but whenever he did, it counted – I loved Pascal’s story about how people would get the two of them mixed up when they were in RENT.

For the assembled audience, Anthony Rapp had the more notably-crowd-pleasing set.  With a few exceptions – R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” (Rapp’s audition song for RENT) and “Everybody Hurts” (dedicated to the people of Pittsburgh) – it was all Broadway stuff, a varied collection that included a bunch of favorites.  Some were from shows he’s been in, like “Origin of Love” from Hedwig and “Happiness” from You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, while others were from shows he loves but knows he’ll probably never be in, like “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” from Jersey Boys and “Falling Slowly” from Once.  Each number was accompanied by a personal story or a reason why Rapp chose it; he paid special attention to composers who’d followed in Jonathan Larson’s footsteps and changed the face of Broadway, and I loved the time he took to paint a mental image of himself in Hedwig for us (5-inch heels!!)  He pointed out, self-deprecatingly, that he didn’t have Pascal’s instrumental talent and was accompanied by one of the musicians from RENT’s original pit band, playing both piano and guitar and, for reasons unknown, sharing a guitar strap with Pascal – they literally had to pause the show a few times to swap the strap between guitars.

Rapp’s set also eased us into the RENT portion of the night.  He sang a gorgeous rendition of “Without You” (which he’d sung at his mother’s memorial service back when he was still in RENT,) along with the general “No Day But Today” theme, before bringing Pascal back out for “What You Own.”  Then, Pascal performed “One Song Glory,” and the two of them closed the show with “Seasons of Love.”  And okay, I know I’m just kind of listing the songs here, but that’s because I don’t know how to describe how amazing this was.  It was just me dying happy over and over again – as in, “Then they did ‘What You Own’ and I died… then Adam Pascal did ‘One Song Glory’ and I died…  How am I even here right now?!?”  So, so, so unbelievably cool.

Obviously, they knew that these were the songs everyone was waiting to hear, but I appreciate that they really gave them their due.  Both were gracious with their time and attention during these performances, and there was no sense of them phoning it in or getting the songs over with.  While both of them have gone onto varied careers, they’re still very much defined by their involvement in RENT, and they seemed to recognize and respect that.  Even if that was the 1000^th time they sang “What You Own” together, they gave everyone in the audience a specific, powerful performance to remember.  I’m really grateful to them for that.

Doctor Who: Series 11, Episode 4 – “Arachnids in the U.K.” (2018)

Quite the middling episode in my opinion.  Some good scares, jokes, and character moments, but the actual plot is pretty slapdash and sloppy, and the commentary is too on-the-nose for my taste.

Having managed to get her new friends home, the Doctor isn’t quite as ready to take off on her own as she professes, and an invitation to tea at Yas’s quickly turns into a sci-fi creep-fest.  Spiders have been acting strangely all over Yorkshire; a few of them have grown way, way beyond their natural size, and they seem to have acquired a taste for humans.  The investigation leads the Doctor and co. to a soon-to-be-opened luxury hotel, the epicenter of the mystery.

The giant spiders are suitably creepy, although I confess I was really hoping for a Metebelis III reference and was bummed that we never got one.  The episode does a good job alternating between an eerie sense of foreboding and more outright freak-out moments.  It also continues to solidify team TARDIS, individually and as a unit.  We get more on Yas here, including meeting her family and learning a bit more about what makes her tick, and Ryan and Graham have some nice moments together being back in Sheffield for the first time since the events of “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” (plus, there’s a background shot of Ryan making shadow puppets for no reason at all during an exposition scene, and it’s positively delightful.)

The Doctor is a near-endless source of great lines in this episode.  Off the top of my head, my favorites are 1) her attempts at small-talk with Yas’s family, 2) an amusing tangent she makes about Ed Sheeran, and 3) her uncertainty when Yas’s mom asks if Yas and the Doctor are “seeing each other” – I love, love, love that the Doctor isn’t sure and looks to Yas for a yay or nay.  Additionally, she offers up handy spider facts and has zero patience for Mr. Robertson, the brusque hotel-mogul-turned-politician (gee, sound familiar?) who owns the unnaturally-infested hotel.

All that said, as an episode of Doctor Who, it doesn’t rate more than an “okay.”  It manages to feel underwritten and overwritten at the same time.  The resolution is incredibly hasty, so much so that there’s a moment where I thought we somehow skipped a scene, and there are a few dangling threads that don’t get resolved at all.  However, it also lays on other areas much too thick, namely the Doctor’s guns-are-bad stance and the characterization of Robertson himself.  On the first point, it’s no secret that the Doctor hates guns, and it’s certainly not the first time the show has belabored that point.  But it’s only on occasion that it’s written in such a way that it feels too anvilly, and this is one of those times – it feels pitched down a little bit, like it doesn’t trust the kids to get it unless it’s spelled out more than once.  And with Robertson… it’s weird, because he doesn’t actually act much like Trump at all, but a bunch of the details surrounding him are so Trump, and even though Trump is way more outrageous than anything a fictional TV show could dream up, it still feels like too self-conscious a reference.

I wouldn’t say these flaws get in the way of the good, fun parts of the episode, but the flaws are sort of threaded throughout this story, while the fun parts are mostly individual scenes, lines, and moments.  As such, the overall impression made here is “not all that great.”

Favorite Characters: Donna Clark (Halt and Catch Fire)

I came to Halt and Catch Fire for Lee Pace, but Donna is the biggest reason I stayed through the rocky first season.  I just love this character, beautifully played by Kerry Bishé, and even when Donna loses her way a bit, I still root for her to find her way back (some Donna-related spoilers.)

At the start of the series, Cardiff Electric has the most dysfunctional dream team ever in Joe, Gordon, and Cameron – there’s plenty of talent and knowhow there, but their interpersonal relations are a mess, and it’s a wonder they get anything done at all in Cardiff’s venture to expand into personal computing.  As they careen from crisis to crisis in developing the Giant, it becomes clear that the real lynchpin of the project is someone who doesn’t even work for Cardiff:  Gordon’s wife Donna.  A Texas Instruments engineer working well below her potential, Donna envies Gordon’s talk of the inventive and challenging work he’s doing at Cardiff.  Where he sees roadblocks, Donna sees opportunities for innovation.

Donna’s creativity is instrumental in bringing about one of the Giant’s important design features.  Her technical skills and attention to detail is also valuable – when a major meltdown threatens the computer’s OS, Donna is literally called in to save the day, retrieving vital data in a painstakingly meticulous process.  There’s no way the Giant could reach fruition without Donna.

As the show goes on and Donna gets more involved in working with the other characters, she finds herself taking on another essential, albeit undesirable, role:  that of team mom.  In a crew of mavericks with more talent than sense, tons of important-but-mundane things would get dropped completely if it weren’t for Donna cleaning up after everyone.  This is especially true when she and Cameron get their own gaming operation, Mutiny, off the ground.  While Cameron creates, it often falls to Donna to put out fires, manage the staff, and keep the lights on.  It’s admittedly a role she does well – as a working mom with two young daughters and a pretty immature husband, she’s no stranger to having to be the responsible one.

But even though she’s good at juggling all these demands that wouldn’t get done without her, Donna chafes under this role.  It’s a thankless one, and she’s done enough of that in her life already – Mutiny was supposed to be about doing exciting, creative work, something she hasn’t had much of a chance to do, and instead being forced to spend a lot of her time cleaning up other people’s messes feels like more of the same old thing. 

It’s far from the only conflict that arises between Donna and Cameron over Mutiny, but it’s a major one, this idea that Cameron can wholeheartedly chase creative innovation without having to worry about “the little things” because Donna will take care of that.  It fuels resentment in Donna and makes her feel possessive of the company that she knows couldn’t survive without her.  As things implode between the two women, it gets ugly, but even as some of Donna’s actions make me want to cover my eyes, I get where those feelings are coming from, what’s driving them.  And as Donna gets more and more isolated from the crew, going down some unnecessary rabbit holes in search of what she really wants to do, I watch and wait for her to find it.