30 January 2019 Thursday

[KathyB]

The roads are semi-cleared, meaning the busiest ones are cleared and the not-so-busy ones, not so much.
At least it isn't -20 degrees here, like it is in many parts of the country. Today is supposed to get up to the mid-40s, so there should be some melting of the fun slush.

[scenicdesign71]

Except the 30th was Wednesday;  today (Thursday) is the 31st.

The difference, it turns out, may have been mildly significant: had I seen this around midday yesterday, when Lance emailed it to me, it's barely possible it might not yet have been sold out, whereas fifteen hours later there's not a ticket to be had (unless I shell out $99 for a subscription to the entire festival series, which, nah).

Oh, well; not a devastating loss, but it does sound like it might've been fun.  I suppose after the Documentary Now! episode airs next month, I can always watch both it and the Pennebaker original at home.  Or even listen to the forthcoming Co-Op (the musical) album on vinyl.

Speaking of musicals which don't exactly exist, and yet, for elaborately facetious purposes, sort of do:  has anyone heard about Skittles Commercial: The Musical?  There was an article about it in the Times yesterday.  (And speaking of Rent -- well, on the other thread -- remember back when actual reality, to borrow Collins's term, was a thing?  Sigh.)

It's 4 degrees here, rising to a high of 19 right around the end of my workday.  Here's hoping we won't have to spend much time outside -- although, given our grip crew's infuriating penchant for leaving the shop's huge roll-up loading door (i.e., pretty much its entire 20-foot-high front wall) wide-open, in the dead of winter, for longer and more often than necessary, it's unlikely we'll escape the chill entirely.

[scenicdesign71]

Sorry to bump back to Thursday, but in the interest of continuity...

Out of pure boredom I just listened to the Skittles Commercial "cast album" on Spotify: three songs, one essentially a reprise with a new lyric; plus a four-minute track of Michael C. Hall chewing what must've been an impressive quantity of Skittles disgustingly close to the mic, with occasional musings on the candy's "rainbow of fruit flavors" (in the general tenor of "ha! you can make a stoplight!" or, after munching for quite awhile: "it's like, the only cure... is more").

The ratio of laughs and surprises per minute (spoiler: "Michael" dies in the end)* actually isn't too shabby, though it might be more impressive if it wasn't dwarfed by the number of false rhymes and word choices just "off" enough to sound awkward.  But I suppose lyricist Nathaniel Lawlor might possibly defend such imperfections on parodic grounds.  (Along similar lines, Forbidden Broadway's creator used to reject costumes that were too elegantly close to the Broadway originals, arguing that Forbidden's "brand" depended on a certain impudent scrappiness).

More interesting to me is Drew Gasparini's music, channeling Next To Normal, Dear Evan Hansen and their ostensibly pop-inflected ilk -- and in the process, foregrounding (or inverting?) a now-longstanding trend that I first noticed in some of David Shire's work back in the 1980s.  Namely: it's seemed to me, for decades now, that most musical theatre scores claiming to incorporate any kind of "contemporary pop" sound as their basic musical language actually tend to sound more like contemporary TV-commercial music than like actual pop songs.

That may or may not be an inherently terrible thing -- I actually admire the scores of both N2N and DEH, the foremost recent exemplars of this style, quite a bit (notwithstanding their audio resemblance to ads for cars or antidepressants).  But the deadpan appeal of Skittles Commercial, such as it is, consists for me in the way it brings that resemblance full-circle:  it's an infomercial-length ad (though written in a radically different style and tone than any hitherto-known infomercial), created for a single live performance (tomorrow), and deliberately composed to sound like a genre of Broadway musicals whose scores -- generally not deliberately, I'd guess -- themselves already sound like TV ads.

Whew.  What was Collins's Theory of Actual Reality, anyway?

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* At the end of "Advertising Ruins Everything," Hall is apparently killed by an angry mob of Broadway musical-lovers for selling out their beloved genre to the Mars candy corporation -- but on the bright side (?), the show manages to sell "almost 600" packs of Skittles in lobby concessions... at a sold-out 1500-seat theatre full of viewers paying premium ticket prices to be advertised-at.