time and relative dimension in space

The Tony Awards Present: Broadway's Back! A Multi-Platform Celebration of the Best Of Broadway.

Or, you know, the belated Tony Awards ceremony from the 2019-2020 season that was cut short.

( 2021 Tony Awards )

Weird season! Weird ceremony. Good, though. Many great speeches. Great performances. I want rips of so many of those performances.

Oh, hey, it's a list of mostly-unrelated things. Haven't done one of those in a bit.

- I update my LJ once in a blue moon and mostly post about Doctor Who, using the same two or three icons. Therefore I obviously took advantage of LJ's birthday sale to buy a userpic package for the next year and expand my userpic storage to 393. OBVIOUSLY. . . . I maybe have an impulse-control problem.

- Working from home is going . . . well, it's going. I don't enjoy my job but working from home isn't any worse than working out of the office and in these current times it's a lot safer.

- Shortly before all of this this-ness happened, I started making arrangements for my first-ever trip to New York City to spend a long weekend seeing Broadway shows. It was going to be awesome, I was going to go with teh Niki, we were going to see four shows, we got amazing seats to Hamilton and Hadestown and very-slightly-less-amazing-but-still-very-good seats to Sing Street and Beetlejuice, I was holding off on posting about it here until we finalized the last couple of details about the trip and then all of the pandemic shit started happening and obviously it was not going to happen and it was just a matter of playing the waiting game until it was officially cancelled. I got the cancellation emails for all four shows last week. In light of everything else that's going on this is a very small thing, and one day there will be live theatre again and other trips to arrange, but I will admit to being disappointed nevertheless.

- So instead I used one of the vacation days I was going to use towards that trip and took most of today off work. Declan Bennett had a livestream concert for The Theatre Cafe/Leave A Light On and I got to catch it; he's one of my favorite musicians and he played some of my favorites of his songs, it was lovely.

- There is so much Doctor Who content coming out right now, it's incredible. I have not been able to participate in the watchalongs because they've mostly been arranged for times when I've been working, but I've read the tweetalongs afterwards and they're fab, and the videos and short stories and things being produced are amazing. Some favorites, if you haven't seen them yet, are Rory's Story, an introduction to The Doctor's Wife written by Neil Gaiman and filmed by Arthur Darvill; The Terror Of The Umpty Ums, a short story featuring the Thirteenth Doctor (...sort of) written by Steven Moffat; and Incoming Message From The Doctor, a short webcast starring Jodie Whittaker and written by Chris Chibnall. But all the ones I've seen have been wonderful. Also the suggestion that Neil Gaiman write a series for Big Finish starring the Corsair is perfect. Please do so.

- On my own I've also been rewatching New Who from Nine onwards via my collection of Blurays and DVDs, and including all special features. Which has been a bit of an education in how many special features I just never got around to seeing. I'm into series 6 now and a bit disappointed that I have it as 6A and 6B instead of the complete series 6, because the special features, comparatively, are rubbish.

- I've been pretty much all abut the comfort watches/reads, really. Doctor Who, obviously. But also I've been rewatching Derry Girls and Red Dwarf and So Weird and reading the Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels and the Iron Druid Chronicles and basically avoiding anything that is not escapist-y enough right now. New Amsterdam came out and said "We decided not to air an episode because it was about a flu pandemic and nobody needs that in their fiction right now" and you know what I am your target audience, New Amsterdam. I'm not rereading Doomsday Book anytime soon and that's usually one of my go-to rereads.

- I hope you are all staying safe and staying inside.

This is a quick post because I'm in the middle of an exhausting work week, but I wanted to note how pleased I am with the Tony nominations, especially but not only the recognition for Hadestown and The Prom. Excited for the awards!

I had to work tonight and therefore missed a good chunk of the Tonys, but here are a few highlights from what I did see:

▪ The Parkland tribute ♡
▪ John Tiffany getting everyone to sing Happy Birthday to his boyfriend
▪ That arrangement of For Forever was gorgeous and moving. If mildly inappropriate, given the original context of the song.
▪ The Once On This Island performance was fabulous.
▪ Literally everything to do with The Band's Visit, I love that show so much. Katrina Lenk, omg. And Best Musical. Obviously

While I'm waiting for BBCA to air the Doctor Who finale (don't leave me Peter)...

( basic stats )

Individual thoughts:

( Books )

( TV )

( Movies )

( Music )

( basic stats )

Individual thoughts:

( Books )

( TV )

( Movies )

( Music )

Karen Olivo will be playing Angelica Schuyler in the Chicago production of Hamilton.

I mean the odds that I will have the opportunity to attend this production are essentially 0%, but OH MY GOD I'M SO EXCITED.

Today I went to see the second national tour of Once.

( cut for length and gushing )

It's almost 9PM, I attended the matinee, I'm still very emotional about this show right now, okay.

So my copy of the Hamiltome arrived yesterday; I got it after work and promptly sat down and started reading. I read it cover-to-cover in two sittings.

First of all, the book as a physical object is gorgeous. It's substantially lighter than you'd expect a book that size to be, beautifully printed, and full of photos both black-and-white and full-color -- a mix of shots that everyone in Hamilton fandom has probably seen (though I'm always up for seeing that picture of Lin in full costume sitting at his laptop during a tech rehearsal!) and new photos (special love to all the dressing room shots).

The content is a mix of things: the full libretto (extensively annotated by Lin), a few cut songs/lyrics (the full Adams Administration takedown, the Cabinet battle over slavery), and essays about the cast, the development of the show, the influence and work of various people (the chapter before Hurricane is primarily about the lighting design and it's fantastic), Lin's writing process, and the impact of the show, with a particularly moving section on the student matinees.

Some things that particularly hit me: Lin's description of Leslie and why he's perfect for the role of Burr ("He is cool, his blood runs cool, he is elegant. It sounds like I'm reverse-describing myself as feral monster. Anyway he's my opposite."); every single description of Phillipa Soo (Pippa and her performance of Eliza means everything to me); Vanessa Nadal-Miranda's favorite line in the show is "I'm a trust fund, baby, you can trust me"; everything about the description of recording the cast album; there is quite a bit of confusion over when Lin-Manuel actually got the idea for a hip-hop musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton; in early workshops Lin sold Chernow on the idea that he had Hamilton, Laurens, Lafayette, and Mulligan meeting in 1776 out of dramatic necessity, but admits that he actually just forgot they hadn't met yet (lol).

And as for the essay immediately preceeding It's Quiet Uptown and the fact that it's the only song in the book completely unannotated . . . I needed to take a breather after that part, let's put it that way.

Another quote: "Keep it in mind the next time you go to the theater: Some gifted men and women have built a community in that room, and the immigrant is you."

Five stars out of five. I'd rank it higher if it wouldn't break the ranking system.

And then today I went out and saw Into The Woods.

( spoiler-laden rambling )