Thread by @InnuendoStudios

Alright, you know what? This has been occupying space in my brain for 7 years so I'm gonna put this 8th grade musical ON BLAST here on Twitter.

I am daring you to mute me.

https://twitter.com/InnuendoStudios/status/1199542656201904128

Not too long after I moved to Boston I got an internship gig with a freelance videographer. I loved working with her and she wrote me a recommendation that helped me get back into college. We're still friends! I even hired her to film my talk a couple weeks ago.

She semi-regularly got hired to film theatrical productions so cast and crew and whatnot could get DVDs. So we went out and filmed this middle school musical and then it was my job to edit the footage - color correcting, switching between camera angles, etc.

She took the work seriously, so each scene I would edit, show to her, get notes, and re-edit. Did about three cycles of that. I also had to watch every segment from three angles to decide which shot to use.

So I saw this show A LOT.

I have no idea who wrote this show, and I don't remember what it was called or which school it was. Neither do I remember if this was the shoot where I bent over during intermission and my pants ripped so I filmed the second act with my jacket tied around my waist. Couldn't say.

It was a fairy tale mashup in the Into the Woods mold.

I'm gonna try to walk you through what I remember.

No, I know you don't care, but I DO and I NEED you to hear about it.

I need this out of my head.

It opens with a speech from the Hairy Godmother. I guess she's the Greek chorus. She asks if you were expecting a FAIRY godmother. Well, friends, a running """"""""gag"""""""" is the phrase "it's a typo."

She had long hair and a Brooklyn accent. Is that a thing with zoomers? If a girl has long hair you call her hairy? Maybe she had hairy arms that the camera didn't pick up.

I don't know why the Brooklyn accent.

So she sets the scene, which is that the moon wonders what it's like to be in love so she sings a song about it. The song is the 50's doo-wop chords. So that's how we're opening.

Then she decides to take human form and come to Earth.

Where she lands is in some standard, vaguely medieval fairy tale land, where there's a small kingdom that is "terrorized" by a giant who is cast, I'm pretty sure, by the only 8th grader in school who knows how to walk in stilts.

"Terrorized" here means the giant comes into town sometimes and everybody freaks out about it, so he's a bit surly. He's never actually, like... done anything to anyone.

Oh, but he kidnaps a princess later? I think? We'll get to that.

Anyway, stiltboy sings a song called It's Lonely at the Top, but not the Randy Newman one. (Get it? Because he's tall.)

Kid has this issue where he'll start singing in falsetto and then hit a note that's out of his range and just switch to a lower octave mid-song.

Happens with every song. I think he may sometimes start in the lower register and then switch to higher because something is too low for him.

This is not the kid's fault, it's the director's fault. Shoulda changed the key.

Anyway there's also this prince wandering around. He's sad because the woman he loves doesn't love him back.

Though the moon is canonically a woman, she disguises herself as a man. Why? Because Shakespeare, probably. I don't remember if there was a reason.

So moon meets sadprince and falls in love with him and starts tagging along with him.

I don't remember why the princess gets kidnapped by stiltboy, or if someone kidnaps her and takes her to stiltboy, or what. But sadprince might be looking for princess? Memory's fuzzy.

Moon is like "don't give up on love, sadprince." But she can't express that she loves him because she's disguised as a boy.

Princess and stiltboy sing a song called "You're Driving Me Crazy" about how much they hate each other.

Somewhere in here moon finds Rapunzel cussing out her prince. Prince is like "hey, I still haven't gotten around to rescuing you but I swear I'm gonna" and Rapunzel's like "you're a deadbeat, I don't need you, you're literally worse than a ladder."

So she's doing this whole Grrl Power thing about how she ain't need no prince, she can rescue herself. Prince fucks off. Then moon steps in and is like, hey girl, it sounds like you're giving up on love and I have feelings about that.

So moon sings her a song about how rescuing yourself is less romantic than having the one you love rescue you, and, if you think about it, REALLY rescuing yourself would be to keep believing that fairy tales can come true.

And here's where I was like hold up.

Some dude wrote a song for 13-year-old girls to sing about how female empowerment is ruining the nuclear family?

They did this instead of doing anything else with their brief time on this earth?

This is echoed later when a bunch of other princesses complain about their princes. I think there's four of them, but I don't remember them all. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are among them. Snow White? Maybe?

Anyway, they talk about how they all got rescued by princes who turned out to be shitty husbands who never wash dishes or want to leave the house. Sleeping Beauty is exhausted all the time because she's got 4 kids and her prince won't lift a finger to help raise them.

They sing a jazzy number called "Happily Never After."

But moon sets that shit straight.

Moon is all like, "but love isn't about your lover being perfect, it's about loving them despite their flaws!" And all the princesses are like, shit, you're right, and they all yell offstage to their princes, like, hey, do you wanna go see a movie?

See the problem wasn't that their HUSBANDS weren't making enough effort, it's that the people already doing all the work weren't ALSO initiating all the romance!

No princes are ever told that true love means doing literally anything for your wife, btw.

(I can still sing the last line of the chorus to Happily Never After. Ugh.)

-more coming, sit tight, there's a max number of tweets you can thread at once-

Anyway, sadprince and moon keep wandering around, maybe looking for the princess, I don't remember. Princess and stiltboy have one decent interaction and then since a reprise of "You're Driving Me Crazy" that's about how they're falling in love with each other most unexpectedly.

There's a point where sadprince and moon run into someone who is also sad, and moon is getting real sad that sadprince won't stop thinking about the other girl he's sad about, so all three sing a sad song about heartbreak.

It's probably the most compositionally interesting song, because each singer has a different melody sung over the same chords, and there's a part where all three sing at once.

It's not, like, brilliant counterpoint or anything, but it's sorta neat.

But the chords are mostly Pachelbel's Canon which is probably illegal, so it's still not ok.

Somewhere in all this the first act ends. I don't remember anything important happening, but I guess something must really set the town off, because they all sing a song about hunting the giant which is a near-exact copy of "Kill The Beast" but with boring music.

But then Act II begins and it's just sadprince wandering around with moon looking for the giant again, just like half of Act I was, so the song about the townspeople hunting the giant was pointless.

The whole thing is very episodic, I can't even remember which act what happens in.

But the Big Moment, for me, is when they run into the Three Blind Mice, who - and I cannot stress this enough - do a rap about PC culture.

They're all "we don't like the term 'blind,' we prefer 'optically darker.'"

Optically darker.

That is a real line that my brain decided to memorize and keep with me for seven years.

One of the kids playing a mouse is clearly super psyched that he gets to rap onstage. He's the only kid who genuinely seems psyched to be in this show. Most of the kids look pretty uncomfortable.

So this rap song. I don't even. Like. What.

It's just listing off all these different nursery rhymes and then "correcting" their phraseology to something more politically-correct, but it's all PC terms that no one has ever used. It's reductio ad absurdum. Take that, PC culture!

rapping mice to own the libs

I don't remember any of the terms other than "optically darker," but they're all in that vein.

The three mice trade off couplets, with one rapping and the other two doing hype work, going "whaaaat" after punchlines and suchlike.

Clearly Migos bit their style.

I don't know what the fuckin' plot of this thing is. At some point in Act II everything comes to a head somehow, and princess, moon, stitlboy, and sadprince all converge on the town. I think sadprince dies?

And it's like "only true love's kiss can bring back sadprince" and everyone's like "but no one love sadprince, that's why he's sad" and then moon is like "I love sadprince, I will kiss him" but moon is still disguised as a boy.

So sadprince's first words upon rising from the grave are a gay panic joke.

Also I think stiltboy isn't even actually a giant? He may have been cursed? Was there a witch somewhere in this play? I have no idea. So he may get uncursed and turn into a normal boy, and moon reveals she's a girl and also the moon, so everyone gets a happy ending.

All the narrative about accepting the giant's differences are negated by turning him into not-stiltboy, but he gets to marry princess or whatever. And sadprince is no longer sad and he and the moon fuck off to space.

And Hairy Godmother comes in and says "and that's why there's a man on the moon" and someone says "isn't that the man IN the moon?" and the whole cast yells "IT'S A TYPO."

Drop curtain.

In summation: this rebuke of the SJWs written by some dad in rural Massachusetts for 13-year-olds to perform, probably to get back at an ex-wife or something, has been living rent-free in my head for 7 years and now it's in yours.

Normally when something is on my mind this long I make a video about it BUT NOBODY ELSE HAS SEEN IT.

thank god for twitter amirite

exeunt

HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS IS A PUBLISHED SHOW AND IT'S WRITTEN BY JODI PICOULT

https://twitter.com/AScoopOfJoelato/status/1199723492343734272?s=20