to be fair, they also talked about other musicals i didnt care about, but I wasn’t feeling it, lmao. i would have been happy with literally any other topic, but i fall asleep during this shit, cant help it
As a bisexual and former theatre kid, it does feel like certain stuff like broadway and that particularly bombastic pop existing in gay communities is some sort of psy-op or gaslighting. I hate the stuff, honestly. Lotta great gay music out there and its rarely the stuff pushed by the machine.
Musicals are what happens when you place incredibly high demands(singing, dancing, acting, tons of extras) on performers to the point that it hurts their singing and acting. And then decide, its just a style of performance everybody! Like theyve turned the affect of bad performance into a stylistic choice and its sooooo fucking grating.
If your desired takeaway is anything other than, cool costumes! Impressive coreography! Fun performing! What a voice! You probably wont like musicals.
I like Encanto as a musical because of the anarcho-feminist themes. Most movies have the hero do productive labour like fighting bad guys, disarming bombs, or performing art. Mirabel is a hero frustrated she can’t do productive labour on the same level as her family, but she spends the entire movie fixing problems through caring labour and learns to value her abilities for that, which exposes an important dimension of labour theory to the casual watcher. Also the Encanto is an anarchist commune.