#ALSO CHRISTINE DOESN'T EITHER TOWARDS MICHAEL | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

glassprism · 3 years

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I hate being critical about actors, because I know they are giving their all and are surely really excited to be in the show, but I just don't like Holly ann hull's voice for Christine, it's too pop and just doesn't fit the world. It feels out of world for me. But it seems like most everyone really loves her! What do you think?

So, here’s the thing about being in any fandom: you’re not going to agree with everyone’s opinion, and they’re not all going to agree with yours. Many love Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman, many do not. Many will defend to the death the 2004 movie and its cast, many will go just as hard criticizing it. Many adore Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess, many don’t care for them. It doesn’t mean that either side is wrong, it just means you feel differently, and that’s okay. Nobody will ever agree perfectly with everyone else.

For Holly-Anne Hull, I think there are several factors going into why she’s liked. Several of them have actually seen her live and seen her acting, her interpretation, her chemistry, and based on reviews, she is very strong in that area; those of us relying solely on audios have not had that privilege. The unfairness of the show closing is also a factor. And finally, she is quite active on social media and enthusiastic about the show, which goes a long way towards garnering fans (and is kind of how I felt about why, say, Amy Manford was so popular in the fandom - she’s a perfectly decent Christine with a lovely voice, but at least half her popularity seemed to be because she’s incredibly photogenic and knows how to use that on Instagram).

Having said that, you certainly don’t seem to be the only one who doesn’t care for her voice. I saw a fair few comments similar to yours after her performance on Britain’s Got Talent. In fact, here’s an ask I got saying just that, so you are definitely not alone. I also remember that after a couple of clips of Anouk van Laake came out, a number of people said they preferred her voice to Hull’s (I’m in that camp too, I will admit).

For myself, Holly-Anne Hull’s voice is not my favorite, but it’s not too dissimilar from some Christine voices I’ve heard in recent years, something which I talked about just a couple of hours ago and have sort of resigned myself to. (Pop musical theatre voices - wave of the future, I guess.) But I’m also aware that listening to audio is only half the performance, that her acting was highly praised, and I myself prefer a Christine with great acting and a mediocre voice over a Christine with mediocre acting and a great voice. So in the end, do I agree with you? Yes... and also no.

And at the end of the day, it’s just an opinion!

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paladin-lynx · 5 years

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"That doesn't sound weird at all."

Today on “Things I Didn’t Appreciate/Notice While Watching BMC the First Two Times”:

(aka, “Sarah is Over-Analyzing Moments in BMC Again”)

So I tend to listen to the Be More Chill soundtrack on my commute to and from work and I'm always noticing new things. And the other day while listening to "The Play" for the million-and-tenth time, I realized that Jake's reaction to Michael asking him to force Jeremy to drink the Mountain Dew Red while he holds him down is...in itself kind of weird? It’s obviously supposed to be a comedic moment with Jake acting so nonchalant while Michael is losing his shit, but still. Like, why doesn't Jake think Michael's request is at least a little bit odd? This is also coming from someone who I think we can safely assume Jake doesn't really know that well, since Michael wasn’t invited to the Halloween party. He may know that he's Jeremy's friend but that's about it.

And this is Michael saying what he's asking for is weird. Michael, who fully embraces weird and uses it as a positive term according to Jeremy ("Michael thinks that weird is rad"). So like, if Michael is calling it not only weird, but super weird, then you know it's out there. And yet Jake is calm about it. When he first comes over and Michael addresses him, it seems like his SQUIP hasn't activated yet, since he'd probably have a much more violent reaction to the mention of Mountain Dew Red if it was, even if it wasn’t synced with Jeremy’s.

So what if...just, what if...Jake has had someone ask him to do this before? And it was weird then, but now not so much?

And who else do we know that was looking for Mountain Dew Red and was struggling against himself to get it? Someone who's extremely close to Jake?

Yup, that's right. Rich.

It's obvious throughout the entirety of the Halloween party that Rich is slowly crumbling and is fighting against his SQUIP, right from his first lines in "Halloween" (the little "ow!" as he's acting silly -- check out this post for a cool analysis of that moment). I'm pretty sure Rich didn't actually drink any alcohol at the party, or at the very least he had very little but enough to at least briefly turn his SQUIP off like Jeremy did so that he could go around and ask for help without being interrupted. Which means that Jenna was right ("Rich had barely touched a drop, which means that you can't blame the things he did on alcohol.") versus the SQUIP when it tries justifying Rich's actions to Jeremy without putting the blame on Rich's SQUIP (”Rich was under a lot of pressure at home. With his SQUIP disabled, perhaps he lacked the proper coping mechanism.”), since chances are the reason it had started acting so demanding towards Rich is because it had synced with Jeremy's, which may have already been formulating a plan to take over the school and then some. Rich himself when he’s in the hospital with Jeremy says that his SQUIP started trying to get him to ‘SQUIP’ the entire school to make everyone happy, which was why he was fighting against it.

Rich spends the party spazzing out and begging everyone for Mountain Dew Red. In the original Two River script, the stage directions at the end of “Halloween” even say, “RICH’s dance becomes less joyful and more of a desperate freak-out. It’s clear something is not okay. People see this and exit to get away until he ends alone.” And on Off-Broadway, after Christine turns down Jeremy towards the end of the party, Rich comes over to Jeremy and can’t even get the words out to ask for the Mountain Dew Red, and he ends up just walking away almost robotically.

So like, what if while Rich was on his escapade of running around and asking everyone for Mountain Dew Red, he found Jake. Jake is his best friend and even if Rich is physically strong, Jake is stronger from all of his sports and is just in general bigger. Jake is someone that Rich trusts, even if he only became friends with him after he got his SQUIP. So what if, in his desperation, he asked Jake that if he did manage to get his hands on Mountain Dew Red, that he’d force him to drink it since it was obvious that his SQUIP would fight against the one thing that could deactivate it?

First of all, Mountain Dew Red is discontinued, so asking for it in the first place is odd. Secondly, Rich from what we’ve seen had been pretty chill up until the Halloween party, so Jake was probably put off by the way Rich was acting, all keyed up and nervous. Jake is also the host of the Halloween party, is already struggling to stay in sync with Christine, and at some point heard from Jenna Rolan that Chloe and Jeremy were screwing in his parents’ bedroom. (If a moment like this between Rich and Jake actually happened, it would have to have been before Jake confronted Chloe and Jeremy, since then after that he spent the rest of the time arguing with Chloe upstairs.) So Jake was probably already under some stress himself and, much as he loves Rich, his erratic behavior probably wasn’t helping.

So he either was weirded out and told Rich he couldn’t help him, or he got pulled away by Jenna Rolan and/or Brooke to go find out what was happening in his parents’ bedroom. Chances are this only made Rich freak out more since Jake is his closest friend out of the popular kids.

But then we get to “The Play” and here’s Michael, with Jeremy also freaking out and more visibly fighting something, and Michael actually has a bottle of Mountain Dew Red. Because of the fire, Jake by this point knows that something was seriously wrong with Rich and that maybe he should have heard him out, much like how Christine reacts to the news (”We were laughing at Rich. We could’ve helped him!”). So even if, in theory, this whole thing should be looked at as weird, it’s obvious that something deeper is going on here, even if Jake doesn’t know what it is, since by this point he wouldn’t have had the time to go visit Rich in the hospital yet and potentially get an explanation. And Jake, in his own way, does try to be a good person, so now he has a chance to help someone else when he neglected to help his best friend.

So, making Jeremy drink Mountain Dew Red while Michael holds him down to keep him from escaping?

“That doesn’t sound weird at all.”

#this is so random but i needed to get it out of my system lol #sorry if it's a mess i wrote it in a rush #Be More Chill #Jake Dillinger #Rich Goranski #Michael Mell #Jeremy Heere #BMC SQUIP #analysis #mine #BMC The Play #BMC Halloween #Chloe Valentine #Brooke Lohst #Christine Canigula #BMC Jenna #Jenna Rolan #lynx tales

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glassprism · 4 years

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Hey! In your opinion, what are the most E/C representations, (not only in the musical, but also in it)? I like both E/C and R/C, but I rarely feel the E/C vibes, especially in more recents shows. People always talk a lot about the RAH and Ramin and Sierra, but she always looks so afraid of him. Like how she's so "immune" to him in Point of no Return when in others Erik doesn't need to pull her along during the song

Weeellll... to be perfectly honest, I feel like if Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess don’t seem very E/C-centric, then I’m not sure anyone I suggest will be able to fit your criteria? Because Karimloo and Boggess on the 25th anniversary concert is one of the most E/C-centric couples I’ve seen yet, especially when you compare either to their runs in the actual productions (Ramin Karimloo is noticeably colder with both Leila Benn Harris and Gina Beck, and Sierra Boggess is even more afraid with Brent Barrett, Hugh Panaro, or Norm Lewis). I think it would be immensely difficult to find a Christine who does not show any fear or resistance against the Phantom. By the end, Christine has to leave the Phantom - it’s part of the show’s ending, after all - and if a Christine is constantly hurling herself at the Phantom, going “Take me master!”, it’s hard to buy that she’d want to leave him at the end.

I think it’ll also be difficult to find a Christine who is not “immune” to the Phantom in ‘Point of No Return’, and I’d argue that by that point, she’s supposed to be. Christine’s arc is about growth, and part of that is putting aside her childhood naivete because it makes her vulnerable to the Phantom. So we need to see a change in how Christine reacts to the Phantom and his voice, from the instant entrancement during ‘The Mirror’, to a more resistant, though still hypnotized, state in ‘Wandering Child’, to ‘Point of No Return’ when Christine can finally throw off his spell without outside help. Also, if a Christine doesn’t struggle when the Phantom forces her back out at the end of PONR, then it’s generally because she’s standing stock-still in petrified terror, IMO.

But moving onto your actual question, I suppose here are some pairs that, to me, leaned pretty hard towards E/C:

Michael Crawford and Dale Kristien - Dale Kristien is one of the few who, supposedly, did not struggle in PONR. Apparently her Christine’s goal was to warn the Phantom of the police and get him offstage to safety, which the Phantom misinterpreted. She is also not that kind towards Raoul in interviews, and I think she’s one of the first Christines who looks visibly sad when she leaves the Phantom.

Scott Davies and Meredith Braun - Here’s an interesting one, a couple that’s more E/C in Act One, and that’s almost entirely due to Meredith Braun’s absolutely orgasmic faces. Her Act Two is the total opposite, a Christine who could not give less of a damn about the Phantom and his sad backstory.

Any Hungarian couple - I kind of threw this one in because you mentioned Christines looking afraid of the Phantom in PONR, and that’s definitely something Hungarian Christines are not. (If anything, they seem to know it is the Phantom, and their reaction is... to perform a strip tease.) I also think this is because the Christines in the Hungarian production are more active than in the replica. Either well, something to break up the list of replica couples.

Gary Mauer and Elizabeth Southard - A well-known, married-in-real-life Phantom and Christine couple with famously good chemistry. As with Dale Kristien, Elizabeth Southard has made some comments in interviews suggesting she cares less about Raoul than the Phantom. I think Southard’s Christine does look afraid at times of the Phantom, but also continues to show him a lot of sympathy even in his worst moments.

Earl Carpenter and Katie Knight Adams - Katie Knight Adams was said to have come off quite cold to her Phantoms in her initial run, but by the time this video was taken, she had replaced that with orgasm faces. They’re not exactly good orgasm faces, but since we’re looking for a Christine who’s really attracted to and unafraid of the Phantom, I might as well throw her in.

David Shannon and Gina Beck - While Gina Beck does claim in interviews that, by the end, her Christine merely pitied the Phantom, she does show a lot of sympathy towards him throughout the show. And some of her acting subtly suggests that she subconsciously favors the Phantom over Raoul.

Anyone with Elena Bahtiyarova - Apparently Elena Bahtiyarova absolutely loved Sierra Boggess’s performance in the RAH concert and heavily drew upon her acting, and since I think Boggess is pretty E/C in the concert, I might as well add Bahtiyarova. (Personally I don’t think she has enough range in facial expressions to convince me of either side, but that’s just my opinion.)

Also, since I think you asked for most E/C representations outside the musical, I suppose I would add either the Yeston and Kopit musical or the 1990 miniseries with Charles Dance, as they have the sweetest, most wholesome E/C representation I’ve seen. There’s also the Susan Kay novel, which goes E/C to the hilt at the end. Now whether I agree with that is another matter...

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