Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999)

I was fairly young the first time I saw this filmed special, maybe back around the time it first came out, and I liked it a lot back then. As such, I’m glad The Shows Must Go On replayed it, because it was one that I missed when they showed it at the start of the lockdown and it was nice to revisit it.

A musical rendition of the biblical story. Joseph is his father’s favorite son, which puts him in the crosshairs of his eleven brothers. When, in a fit of envy, they throw him into a pit and then sell him into slavery (Joseph’s brothers don’t mess around,) God helps him survive his new circumstances through his gift: the ability to interpret dreams.

It needs to be said that this is an incredibly-cheesy rendition of a moderately-cheesy musical, and I don’t just mean Donny Osmond’s performance as Joseph. A number of the songs are very winking and most of the actors are mugging for all they’re worth. A few years ago, I saw a fantastic regional production of Joseph that admittedly blows this filmed version out of the water, but even if the cheese factor is even hammier than I remember, I enjoy it for the nostalgia aspect.

This isn’t one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s best-known scores, but I like it. “Any Dream Will Do” is a solid Lloyd Webber ballad, and I like the early Narrator-led numbers like “Jacob and Sons” and “Joseph’s Coat.” The score plays around a lot with a variety of genres cranked up to eleven, and while most of these are very hokey, they can be fun – the Elvis-themed “Pharaoh’s Song” is a crowdpleaser. (Side note: in that regional production I saw, Pharaoh was actually played by a Black man in drag who performed the song as a Diana Ross-style number. Awesome.)

The best part about this production is probably Maria Friedman as the Narrator. Her singing is fantastic, and she brings a lot of snap and personality to the proceedings as practically the only woman onscreen apart from scantily-clad ensemble members (part of the trouble with musicals based on Bible stories.) As Joseph, Donny Osmond of course sings well, but his acting? Eh. He’s earnest, I’ll give him that. Seeing the film again all these years later, I picked up on some extra familiar faces: Ian McNeice (Doctor Who’s Winston Churchill) as Potiphar, Alex Jennings (David on The Crown) as Pharaoh’s butler, and Robert Torti (Jesus in Reefer Madness) as Pharaoh – Torti must specialize in doing biblically-based rock-star numbers in musicals, hehe.

Finally, it’s hardly a surprise, but this movie features a ton of white people playing Egyptian characters (I mean, Ian McNeice, possibly the whitest guy, as Potiphar.) White actors playing Egyptians, especially in adaptations of Bible stories, are still rampant today, so of course this hokey filmed musical from 1999 wasn’t going to pay attention to that kind of thing. At the bare minimum, they do have Judah, the brother who sings “Benjamin Calypso” (complete with a thick Caribbean accent,) played by a Black actor, but that’s about it.

Warnings

Some suggestiveness/brief sexual content, scenes of violence, drinking, and thematic elements.

The Book of Rannells: Some Thoughts on Andrew Rannells’s Movie Roles

Chronologically in Andrew Rannells’s career, we’re back up to A Simple Favor, so today’s post is going to be looking at his roles in movies. Rannells isn’t an actor who sticks mainly to one medium.  Certainly, he first gained acclaim through Broadway, and that’s probably the arena in which he’s most famous.  But he’s also had some good visibility and success from TV, which is largely what’s kept him from doing any open-ended Broadway runs since The Book of Mormon.  Additionally, voiceover work on animated shows paid his bills for a number of years, and he’s gotten back into that in recent years.  What you couldn’t call Rannells, though, is a film actor.

I’ve seen Rannells in five movies, which are all he’s been in so far other than a “headless stripper” in Sex and the City, wherein he had no lines (as such, I find no necessity to see it.)  And while each medium Rannells has worked in has had its share of better roles and lesser roles, with differing amounts of screen/stagetime or importance to the story at hand, his film roles offer little to recommend them – not bad or anything, just not much that gives him a chance to show off what he can do, nothing like the opportunities he’s had onstage or on the small screen.

The word that most often comes to mind when I think of Rannells in movie roles is “functional.”  The characters he plays aren’t so much characters as purposes, requirements of the plot or a quick joke.  Take Manny in Bachelorette – he’s ostensibly a friend/coworker of Isla Fisher’s Katie, but as soon as he plays his role in the inciting incident that kicks off the story in earnest, he disappears never to be heard from again.  In Why Him?, Blaine is a glorified cameo, just a reason to have Rannells do a bit of comedy with Casey Wilson, make Bryan Cranston’s character uncomfortable, and vanish into the ether.  Although his role as Cameron in The Intern is much larger, Jules’s number-two at the company and the one who keeps track of the many balls she’s juggling, Cameron as a person is basically a non-entity.  He’s utterly nondescript, someone who’s there to pop up and deliver exposition or move the plot along.

Of course, I get that not every character in every movie is going to be meaty or memorable.  But when you watch a film for the sake of a particular actor, it makes you notice how carelessly-written these more functional roles often are, simple means of getting from point A to point B instead of anything worthwhile.  And when the actor playing that role is a two-time Tony nominee who’s also been an important regular on more than one TV show?  It stands out even more.  I understand that it’s in part of reflection of the difference between “movie famous” and any other kind of famous for an actor, but I imagine there’s at least a measure of discrimination there as well.  It reminds me a little of the post that prefaced my A Little TLC(w) series; in thinking about what kind of roles Tony Leung Chiu-wai could get in Hollywood, I noted how Hollywood’s most well-known Asian-American actors tend to have far bigger TV credits than movie credits. The success of films like Crazy Rich Asians and Searching have hopefully started to shake something loose, but there are plenty of IMDb filmographies littered with major TV roles and bit parts in films, and while Rannells's experiences as a white gay actor aren't the same as that of Asian-American actors, I think a similar dynamic may be partially at play.

A Simple Favor is the first movie of Rannells’s that seemed, to me, to give him a character worth playing.  While his character, Darren, is still very functional, leading the Greek chorus of parents commenting on the lives of Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively’s characters, he’s also entertaining and memorable in his own right.  He has a number of hilarious lines and some consistency as a character, and he’s worth watching as more than just a means to a narrative end.  In short, he feels like an actual supporting character.

And now we have The Boys in the Band, the first of two Ryan Murphy-produced Netflix movies based on stage shows. The latter film, The Prom, won’t be coming out until later this month, and unlike The Boys in the Band, it features Rannells in a role he didn’t play onstage first, so I’m not sure what, if anything, I can auger about The Prom based on The Boys in the Band (we’ll know soon enough!) But I have all kinds of appreciation for the film of The Boys in the Band. As I said in my review, it’s just a fine film altogether, but as a Rannells fan, it combines the amazingness of the kind of work he can do onstage with the posterity of film. Which, basically, is everything I could want from a movie with Andrew Rannells in it. (Side note: even though Falsettos was filmed and released, I’m classifying it differently than The Boys in the Band and The Prom, since it was made as a filmed recording of a live stage show instead of an actual movie adaptation.) Unfortunately, the specific Broadway connection of these two movies doesn’t really signal to me that Rannells’s film career is headed toward bigger opportunities in general, but I know I’m glad to have gotten/be getting these movies. If only the film industry would start to recognize Rannells’s talent the way that Broadway and the world of TV have, I’d be one happy camper.

Fleabag (2016-2019)

Fleabag, along with its creator/lead actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge, was something I heard about long before I saw it. Because I read a lot of feminist pop-culture media, it was on my radar as an Important Show, and Waller-Bridge an Important Voice. The main reason I didn’t get to it sooner was the “so many shows, so little time” issue, but now having finally watched it, I can say it lives up to the hype.

Our protagonist, never named onscreen but listed in the credits as the titular Fleabag, is a young woman messily trying to hold it together after her life is upended by a tragedy. After the unexpected death of her best friend, Fleabag struggles to keep the café they started together afloat on her own, sabotages her relationships while jumping into self-destructive sexual encounters, and keeps the world at arm’s length while simultaneously wanting to be let in.

This is the sort of show where it’s hard to really describe what it’s about in terms of plot. Instead, it’s about the characters, their inner struggles, and their relationships with one another. Fleabag is the one everyone holds up as being a mess, even as she badly insists she’s doing great, but no one else has it together all that well, either. Her sister Claire is a tightly-wound problem-solver who’s checked all the boxes on paper (thriving career, well-married) but who’s both personally and professionally unsatisfied, and her father has been struggling to relate to both girls after their mother died of cancer (and he got together with their godmother, which doesn’t help matters.) It makes sense that it’s so character-driven and delves so much into their psyches – Fleabag herself is constantly breaking the fourth wall to share an insight or a suggestive eyebrow-raise – since the story began its life as a one-woman play Waller-Bridge wrote and starred in before being it was adapted into a TV show.

The series is a lot of things. It’s outrageously funny, unapologetically filthy, and daringly vulnerable. Fleabag is just as likely to wreak havoc at a silent retreat, seethe as Claire derails Fleabag’s attempt to help her out for once at a clutch moment, or christen a sexual partner “Arsehole Guy” for more reasons than one. It’s easy to get drawn into the wreckage and root for Fleabag to get her life back on track. Because, despite a lot of cynicism and evasiveness, she is trying. It’s start-and-stop, but she wants to connect with people. She wants to be there for people. She doesn’t want to feel empty. It’s just so damn hard.

Also, I love how specific the humor and bizarre slice-of-life moments are. Whether it’s Fleabag’s horrified realization of how gorgeous she looks at her mother’s funeral or her father constantly buying Fleabag and Claire tickets to feminist lectures instead of spending time with them, the series frequently avoids tropes and instead goes for these incredibly-detailed nuggets you probably haven’t seen on TV before.

Obviously, Waller-Bridge’s performance as Fleabag is the biggest attraction here. In the center role, she’s by turns cheeky, infuriating, raunchy, defensive, and raw, and she holds your attention the whole time she’s onscreen. Sian Clifford hits every neurotically-precise note as Claire, and the show also features Bill Paterson (a Scottish Hey, It’s That Guy!, but I remember him best as the dad in The Crow Road) and Olivia Colman (now an Oscar winner, thanks to The Favourite) as Fleabag’s dad and godmother. Plus, I want to highlight Andrew Scott (Moriarty himself,) who joins the cast in the second season as a priest that Fleabag forms an unexpected connection with. As with the show’s surprising humor and offbeat plot points, I love how I can never expect what the Priest is going to say/do or how he and Fleabag are going to interact. While the character has no major traits in common with Moriarty, the connective tissue between the two is the unpredictable flair that Scott brings to his acting. Season 1 is excellent, but I’m even fonder of season 2 due to the scenes that he and Waller-Bridge share.

Warnings

Sexual content, violence, language (including the C-word,) drinking/smoking, and strong thematic elements (including suicide and references to eating disorders.)