Kevin's Watch

Well, it's out now, so I guess I can talk about it.

MagickMaker's high school staged a production several years ago, so I knew what to expect from the plot -- unlike some folks who walked into the pre-screening clueless. The first half of the movie is a mashup of several fairy tales -- Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, and the one Fractured Fairy Tales did about the pregnant woman who craved rampion. Meryl Streep is the neighborhood Wicked Witch, who sets things in motion. Everybody ends up needing to go into the woods, things get twisted around, but by the end of Act I it's all been sorted out and we've got our happy ending.

And then comes Act II, in which it turns out that the choices people made in Act I have consequences. The end of the show is less happily-ever-after, but more realistic -- which can be more satisfying *if* you weren't expecting a Brothers Grimm ending.

Meryl Streep did her own singing, and (as I said elsewhere) chews the scenery as usual. Johnny Depp's role is pretty small, but he makes a great Big Bad Wolf. Chris Pine plays Cinderella's Prince with all of the sensitivity of James T. Kirk -- which is absolutely perfect.

I'm more of a Rodgers & Hammerstein fan than a Sondheim fan. "Sweeney Todd" kind of grossed me out, to be honest. But that may have been the subject matter, too.

I will say that this production spent more on sets than MagickMaker's school did. At one point, she was supposed to be up in the catwalks, shaking some dead branches suspended by nylon cord or something. Then one branch came down in rehearsal and narrowly missed one of the actors on stage. Thereafter, she refused to do it.

Saw this [film] over the weekend and [sorry guys] I was not impressed. The people were tolerably good at what they were doing and the cinematography was ok - but the music! It was the same tuneless refrain over and over again from start to finish. What happened to musicals that had songs! Tunes! Ali I think above mentioned Sweeny Todd and the comparison is apposite. It was the same - I sat through it and at the end there was not one note, not one melody that had stayed with me - and ditto for this one. Where did the idea come from that you could make a load of actors sing lines up the scale and then back down it again for two hours and call it a musical come from?