The Woods Are Where All the Fun's At… and the singing, too.

For those of you who are not familiar with Into the Woods, here's my sum-up: Happily ever after?  LOL watch this!  Also, singing.  Lots and lots of singing.  You might remember from my last post that Annie (2014) didn't feel much like the musical it should have been thanks to several of the songs being skipped/cut short.  I did not get that feeling with Disney's version of Into the Woods, I'm happy to say.  95% of the time people were singing, so no one can argue that this was not a musical.  I watched a video of a production of this musical in my Core II Fairy Tale class last year, and after dissecting the original fairy tales to pieces, my classmates and I enjoyed seeing their traditional set-up get obliterated in the musical's second act.  Since I loved the original musical, and since it was Disney making it, you can imagine my anxiety regarding how it would be handled when turned into a movie.  I wasn't thrilled to see a poster of Johnny Depp as the wolf (more like a kitty cat with a snazzy tie, if you ask me) when I first heard about the movie.  However, I saw Chris Pine was cast as Prince Charming and figured I'd give it a shot. :)

The movie was surprisingly faithful to the story, even showing things that I didn't think Disney would portray due to their more, ahem, adult themes.  I won't spoil what I mean, but for those of you familiar with the musical you can probably guess what I'm talking about.  In the first half of the film, the childless baker and his wife have to get a hold of the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, and the slipper as pure as gold for the witch in order to lift the curse that has left them barren.  Their search in the woods incorporates Jack & the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Cinderella, whose stories play out in the way that you are already familiar with.  The baker and his wife succeed, but as soon as you think everyone is getting their happily ever after, everything goes wrong and the characters must return to the forest.  That's where the real fun begins.

(For the record I don't know why they're showing Rapunzel lying asleep.  She's not Sleeping Beauty, ya know!)

In terms of singing performance, everyone was good (no one was exceptional, in my opinion, but no one was mediocre either).  I forgot how funny the "Agony" song was until I saw Chris Pine and Bill Magnussen do it.  The actors got really into it, and I almost wish I could have seen a reprise of it like in the original musical.  You can watch the clip here (the part at 2:22 makes me crack up every time).  Meryl Streep's version of "Witch's Lament" was very powerful, both in terms of visuals and drama.  I was sorry not to see even more of her.

As good as a rendition I thought this movie was overall, there were a few things I missed from the original musical - nit-picky stuff, really.  The first is the part where the witch feeds the narrator to the vengeful giant in an attempt to fend her off, leaving the characters on their own to figure out how their tale will turn out.  I can see why they cut it out from the movie, because it's not like the narrator ever steps into the screen like he steps onto the stage in the play, but still.  It would have been cool to have a more striking end to the narration rather than it getting cutting off in the midpoint of the film and never being heard again.  My second complaint is the wolf.  I don't know why his face is always so big in the movie posters, because he does not play a large role.  In the original musical, the same actor plays the Wolf and the Prince (hinting that they're both predators), but obviously that didn't happen in the movie.  I liked the symbolism that it had though.  It's like the same actor playing Mr. Darling and Hook in Peter Pan.

My most significant complaint is what they did with the Rapunzel storyline.  Minor spoiler alert: In the original musical, both princes turn out to be jerks, but in the movie it's only Chris Pine's Prince that's "charming not sincere."  The Other Prince (seriously, that's what he's called in the movie poster) is the more clumsy yet also endearing one.  In the movie, Rapunzel has a fight with her adoptive mother, the witch, and runs off to presumably have a happily ever after with her prince.  At least I think that's what happened, because the two of them don't show up for the rest of the film.  It was an unsatisfying way to rework that storyline, even if I wasn't in love with the original one where the prince dumps Rapunzel after she suffers a mental breakdown (not one of the better portrayals of mental illness).

I think that Chris Pine's character was enough to get the point across that Prince Charming isn't great and is in fact exploitative, so I don't have a problem with the other prince's character being changed.  What I'm not happy about is how anticlimactic Rapunzel's runaway with the prince is.  I didn't feel any emotion or satisfaction about it.  If they had played up the mother-daughter relationship between Rapunzel and the witch more, I could have more easily seen the scene as a portrayal of a child growing up and a parent being forced to learn to let go.  I think that there was potential in the rewrite to make this scene happen in a powerful way, but it didn't.  It doesn't ruin the movie for me, but it's something that will always irk me.

Anyway, if you like to see fairy tales turned on their heads and if you enjoy watching musicals, I would say that Into the Woods is something I would definitely recommend.  As far as movie remakes go it's not totally perfect, but it kept me entertained and that's enough for me.

Annie

*Note on January 6, 2015:  I published this originally on December 28, but then the font got all funky when I published it.  Tried to fix it, but then I just ended up taking it down without ever putting it back up.  Oh well.  I'm re-posting it as originally published so that it's not lost in the bowels of my blog.

Considering how close we are to the end of 2014 (geez, I just got used to not writing 2013 at the end of my dates!), this will probably be my last post of the year.  I'll try to make this one count.  This past Friday I watched Annie, a musical with which most of you are probably already familiar, so I don't feel the need to give you any kind of blurb about the plot.  I've always loved Annie (most preferably the 1999 version in my case) and I was very interested to see how the story would be remade today.  As far as remakes go, the 2014 version doesn't stray too far from what I remembered from other adaptations - with the striking difference in casting, of course.  (I want to briefly applaud the movie for casting African American actors as the ones playing the leads this time around, something that unfortunately we don't always get to see in mainstream movies.  If the 2014 movie doesn't do it for you, you should at least give it credit for that.)

Since it is a musical, the most important thing that should probably be addressed is the singing.  The voice of Quvenzhané Wallis (playing Annie) was beautiful, as it should have been.  I liked her voice best when she sang "Opportunity," which is one of the songs unique to the 2014 movie.  Jamie Foxx pleasantly surprised me with his singing voice, a very rich but also sweet sounding voice that I liked listening to a lot.  Cameron Diaz disappointed me with her rendition of "Little Girls."  I actually wondered if she could carry a tune, because she seemed to talk more than sing in that particular song.  However, she sang pretty well in later songs, so I'm left wondering what was up with that first performance.  I loved hating her character during the "Little Girls" scene in the previous adaptation, as well as the "Easy Street" scene.  Both of those songs kind of flopped for me in the 2014 movie.  The other songs were done decently, but some of them seemed to be cut short or skipped altogether, and for what reason?  I had a hard time figuring that out, since it is supposed to be a musical as far as I can tell.

There were a few interesting twists to the 2014 movie that didn't have to do with the fact that it's a modern-day retelling.  One of them is Cameron Diaz's character, Annie's foster mom, who is presented in a more sympathetic light than I'm used to seeing her in.  Another was the fact that Annie couldn't read, which I thought should have been played with a little more to help build up her relationship with Will Stacks.  Overall I liked the movie because I inherently like the story of Annie and, despite the new setting, this movie was relatively faithful to it.  I had fun seeing actors I'm familiar with playing the characters I already loved, and I also had a few laughs throughout.  It's a cute movie - perhaps not a mind-blowing rewrite, or a perfectly executed remake in terms of singing performance, but still a cute movie.  Annie has the feel-good vibe that can make for a pleasant time if you decide to see it, even if it's not exactly a need-to-see film.  Whether you do watch it is up to you.

Little Shop of Horrors

Hey guys, I'm back with another review!  Okay, so from Wednesday night to Saturday night, West Covina High School's Theatre program put on a production of the musical "Little Shop of Horrors."  My dad and I agree that it was a great performance - it was totally worth the twenty two dollars I paid for his ticket and my ticket.  For those of you who haven't heard of this musical, here's the synopsis: a geeky guy named Seymour works at a rundown flower shop and finds an alien plant that feeds on human blood.  Seymour and the plant make a deal that if the plant continues to bring him fame, he'll keep feeding the plant human bodies (I know, it's gross).  By the musical's end the plant eats Seymour and his friends and it lives happily ever after.

The plot was certainly interesting as well as kinda disgusting, but in this review I'll stick to West Covina High's performance.  Although everyone had beautiful (or at least decent) singing voices, the ensemble singing could have used some more work.  Only one person sang so clearly that I could understand everything she was singing, and that was Andrea Franco; she was an Alumni playing the lead female role.  Not only did she have a great singing voice, her enunciation and acting was superb.  From what a cast member said, Andrea was not a part of the original cast, but rather filled in two weeks before the show's premier.  If so, Andrea pulled herself together masterfully.  I also appreciated the street urchins' singing, save for the times they tried to sing together.  Every time they tried, the words got somewhat muddled.  I don't know about you, but I personally like to understand what the actors are saying.

Musical performances aside, I think Everett Cabon was the perfect guy to play Seymour; he looked and acted the part very well in my opinion.  Stephanie Torres was an awesome Mrs. Mushnik, which I will tell her personally when I see her in Creative Writing.  It was kinda funny seeing my friends acting as homeless people, sitting lazily for most of the musical; I imagine that was loads of fun during rehearsals.  Oh, I also LOVED the live music being played throughout the whole performance; that was a job extremely well done.  Overall I think the Theatre department should be very proud of all their hard work and I can't wait to see their rendition of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite.