![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I approach musicals in one of two ways - I consume the soundtrack entirely and know almost every word by heart by the time I finally get to watch it, or I go in absolutely blind - although since many musicals are adaptations, I know the general story beats. I decided for the latter option with The Band's Visit, basically only knowing that an Egyptian band is stranded in an Israeli town.
To be fair, there's not much more than that.
While I've seen my share of musicals make themselves out to be sweeping epics with what may feel like large stakes at risk, The Band's Visit is more of a brief, lovely vignette on connection and loneliness, love and loss. It's a little slip of a thing at just under 2 hours with no intermission, but it was tender and sweet-natured in its own quiet way. It's just ordinary people living their ordinary lives, crossing paths and then moving onwards.
I suspect my mother would have enjoyed the theatrics and bombastic nature of Aladdin more, but she laughed at all the right places and seemed to enjoy it well enough. And that's good enough for me.
Joy and Allison are absolute fairy-godmothers. Or fairy-godsisters, whatever the correct term should be. They have gone above and beyond - Joy taking me to see a bit of Victoria I have never seen (which actually required some honest-to-goodness rock-climbing to get to the summit!) and Alison securing us tickets to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - something I had absolutely not anticipated. They are still making this short-and-sweet visit an actual vacation for me, and for that I am so grateful!
There are still a few people to see and things to do, though I have tried very much to limit myself so as not to be over-exhausted. Jury is still out on whether I am succeeding, but I am happy and that's enough!
Fox's Rent Live! aired yesterday and with no cable, (and dinner plans in place) I missed it. Of course, the whole thing ended up being less of a "live" event than anticipated when an actor took the "break a leg!" saying a bit too literally. Still, I'm sad I missed out and can't find a way to watch it because I will always have a soft spot for Rent. Back in 1999, my friend introduced it to me on a car ride back from a ski trip to Whistler, and I was more or less obsessed for the next few years. I have always loved musicals (see: a similar obsession with Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat in my grade 7 year, nevermind Disney movies, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, etc....), but Rent definitely pulled me back into that world almost single-handedly in high school.
I have had enough distance from the musical since then to recognize that it hasn't necessarily aged gracefully, and there are certainly songs that are - to be kind - a little lackluster. I may even be slightly embarrassed to have quoted from that musical in my yearbook graduation write-up! But I have no doubt the "I'll Cover You (Reprise)" still has the power to make me bawl, that "Christmas Bells" is an amazing feat of combining cacophony and harmony, and the sheer energy and occasional bawdiness of "La Vie Boheme" is still tremendous fun.
But it has always been "Halloween" that has grabbed me on a personal level.
"Halloween" is a little nothing of a song in the grand scheme of the musical. It's a short scene slipped between a funeral and the fracturing of a chosen family - two big moments tied together by the self-reflection of a character that he's almost a bystander in his own life. It's a little navel-gazing, yes. It's also self-deprecating, with Mark trying for a big poetic metaphor to sum up his feelings, only to immediately turn around and declare "That's pathetic". He then goes on to ask "Why am I the witness? / And when I capture it on film / Will it mean that it's the end / And I'm alone?" And I do relate to that feeling in my more dejected moments, when I feel that life isn't so much happening to me as it is around me. I have rarely felt like the main character in my own life, and so I connected to this song and to Mark. I suppose it's not that different from Eponine's "On My Own" from Les Miserables - another song that focuses on that kind of intense loneliness you can feel even with someone else there. But while Eponine is pining for an unrequited love in a world that doesn't value her, Mark is pining for belonging in a community he thought he was a part of already, only to feel he is on the outside looking in.
I guess the takeaway is that if I was a theater kid, I would be that dramatic theater kid with the self-pitying monologue!
