That is a Terrible, Dumb Show! — Ep. 51 of Intentionally Blank

[Music] so is this our musical episode do we have to sing do we have to sing the entire time yes uh once more with feeling that was the the buffy one yes sweet i'm not gonna do that i'm excited that we're doing a musical episode yes an episode about musicals not us not us singing which is too bad i was looking forward to singing all night um that's gonna be like the mr rogers opera musical if i just wretched evo all of my dialogue for the next hour um i'm excited to talk about musicals i did not know you were a musicals guy so i am a um shall we say a casualty of having a family that loves musicals i'm not i'm collateral damage i'm musical collateral damage in your family or emily's family because i know they're super musical they're super musical but they're more folk song musical okay my mother and sisters just love broadway musicals just absolutely the the amount of times i have had to hear when i was growing up bless your beautiful hide you know over and over and over and over again and um the number of times i watched cats the direct videos recording of the old one um the the number of times that i've had to i don't know had to is a strong term i enjoy a lot of this just not on the extent that my family does but i never saw the weird ones that you and ben love until i got to college because my musical theater experience was with what my mother and my sisters love so they're not watching sweeney todd yeah yeah yeah see i uh i kind of group broadway into three broad categories and this is these are not fair categories at all okay uh but there is the uh kind of feel-good show right which is the the rogers and hammerstein kind of the classic you're going to perform this in your high school that kind of stuff yep then there is the tired businessman show which is phantom les miz lots and lots of spectacle that's kind of in my sour opinion where a lot of broadway has gone over the last couple of decades is shrek the musical like we're bored let's go see this thing and relax and okay yeah and then there is the the weird stuff the indie stuff the off-broadway the sondheim that you know sondheim despite being the absolute beloved godfather of broadway most of his shows didn't actually make money on their first run because they're so weird and different and so i grew up as i say collateral damage i enjoy a lot of this but i i know them all really well because of this and um i legitimately enjoy theater uh i like the live experience um and i can point to a few like seeing les mis for the first time um by the the new york cast when they were traveling was one of those experiences as a teenager that's eye-opening that just is like oh yeah this is why my family loves this so much this one really worked for me um and when i was in college you know we started taking road trips and we would go down to san francisco and go see things uh my roommates and i would go down and see phantom or we go down and see whatever yeah so um so i can't just only blame my family i do i do have a fondness but i feel like i have a fondness for what you just described as uh bored businessman we're tired business businessman musicals and there's to be clear there's nothing wrong with any of those categories right okay i will still argue that shrek the musical or seussical or whatever is is probably too far over the line for me personally but that doesn't mean that it is inherently bad art i would i would say that there's there's there's something else there that was started off by the blockbuster smash success of the 80s and 90s rock musical-ish you know modern musical yeah the the the phantoms the les mis to a lesser extent lion king the well we're taking something beloved and well-known and doing a musical adaptation of it that has name recognition attached yeah and that's like that's maybe your category but it's that name recognition that i think is driving this and you you say to lesser extent lion king but really what was going on behind the scenes there were the huge shows you know chorus line ran forever and made it a jillion dollars cats then did the same thing phantom les miz they came in but it was disney moving in with beauty and the beast and lion king that brought big corporate money to broadway that had never been there before right and so that more than anything else i think is what has created modern blockbuster mentality in in musicals i think it happened all through media but it's fun to see it happening here because it seems very clear to me it happened in epic fantasy too yeah i know uh if you realize this but epic fantasy novels this was a pulp genre until tolkien tolkien came about and still when tolkien was publishing it was pulp but it was selling best seller numbers and the whole industry's like what's going on why are things selling best seller numbers in the this little niche genre and that's where the epic fantasy genre came from and why i have a career and why robert jordan had a career is that big money in publishing said wow people want to read this we'll invest real money into making high-class expensive lavish productions big hardcovers and we will push them very hard with a lot of marketing budget and low and behold they became blockbusters yeah well and you do make a good point that it is a during the 80s and 90s is kind of when that mentality went everywhere right that's when that's jaws that's uh star wars yeah yeah but but then to even you can point to the early 2000s that's when people started you know camping out for book launches with uh harry harry potter and twilight and things like that so yeah anyway before we get too deep into this oh oh we're backing up we need a food heist oh okay we do i was wondering if we were going to have a food house you do have a food heist a few episodes ago we posited we we wondered if there were any historical food heists and i have been sent a great many historical food heists so for the next year we're going to be dipping into this one not quite that many i'm going to combine a few of them tonight and talk about coffee ready for this so coffee the actual original original coffee plant is actually comes from yemen okay and coffee was exclusively a yemeni product for quite a long time okay uh and then you know eventually sold uh smuggled out this is where we get the heist side of it there's actually multiple coffee heists where coffee was such a popular and such a lucrative product that everybody wanted it so there's a theories a series of thefts there was a dutch guy and i don't actually have his name uh who first smuggled coffee out of yemen and uh you know the original city uh where they sold it was called mocha that's where we get our word mocha that's a yemeni city was yemen like was it a country then uh an independent country was do you know was it part of like the ottoman empire was part of saudi arabia this was the 1600s okay so yeah and this is pre-ottoman empire so this is an empire it was kind of its own thing um and i uh actually there's a really fascinating book called the monk of mocha by dave eggers if anyone out there really wants to read about the history of yemeni coffee it's spectacular but um so this guy smuggled coffee out of there and then in the 1700s uh so the this dutch guy had like the absolute monopoly on coffee but then king louie the 14th uh managed to get that sun king louie the sun king that's the sun king yeah is that that's louis xiv right i know right i don't what i've never heard this label the the big extravagance uh france is doing really well uh this is the era of the man in the iron mask king louis type yeah build versailles and spend all the money and dance around in hoes and uh is this that might be one generation before that because french revolution is still like 70 years off yeah 70 or 80 years off but yes yeah oh sun king 14 king son king so he managed to get uh two of those dutch coffee plants but then one of his naval officers a guy named gabriel de clue he stole some of those coffee plants some cuttings he kept them alive on a voyage to the new world wow and he started uh growing coffee over in the new world and in the caribbean can i say how much i love that hit you pronounced his first name with a spanish accent and then shifted to french for the second first last name yeah i don't know how to say gabrielle in a french accent i don't know how to say declue in a french accent either as long as we're not talking about my terrible french accent so he went to america he went to america he started um basically a bunch of caribbean colonies french and dutch colonies then had again the now shared monopoly on coffee okay but this is where we get into the last and in my opinion the very exciting the most exciting of the food heists because in 1727 french guiana right on the border of brazil somehow coffee showed up in brazil in huge numbers today brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world by like double any other competitor or more more coffee is grown in brazil and nobody for 200 years knew how it got there because it had been so carefully controlled and so you know tightly monitored turns out that there was a uh brazilian captain whose name is and i'm not gonna say this right uh joao rodriguez paljeta he disguised himself as a diplomat sneaked his way into french guiana uh allegedly seduced the wife of the governor oh and managed to come back with 1 000 coffee beans and four seedlings okay that's is that in the the is that with the book the the king of mocha or whatever no that one's all about uh brazil i mean about yemen okay this one um is there a book about this person there needs to be like i i was sent an article uh by a guy named felipe bueno thank you very much uh the article was entirely in portuguese so i did not read it but i have done other research um but yeah this is the cool story the guy who sneaked across the border in disguise seduced the lady stole some coffee and then changed the entire history of uh you know world coffee imports and exports so there's our historical food heist for today you can feel very elevated listen to this podcast now because rather than it just being trivia it's now history it's historical yes and so trivia that happened like 200 years ago yeah uh counts as academia so but anyway yeah nobody knew anything about um this guy or what he had done until the 1920s when some historians finally uncovered how did brazil get all this coffee they had kept it secret for 200 years someone should write a musical about him yes there you go i love it and a musical about the brazilian coffee heist in that was to get us back to get us back into musicals right right back yeah we're right back in and we're talking about musicals um all right well then i have to ask uh do you have a favorite musical or a favorite um musical creator so i um can point to two that i just really really liked okay uh one was les mis as i mentioned before um i've now seen it many times i still just absolutely love it les miserables no it led me to read les miserables which became one of my favorite books um yeah i i read the book after watching the show now i do want to ask you though uh you said you saw a touring company yes do it um my experience with finally after years of loving the soundtrack seeing les mis live was oh that's it like i had already seen les mis in concert on pbs and all of that kind of stuff where they just kind of stand there and sing and i was so excited to go to a theater where they would be moving around and singing and they didn't maybe it was just the traveling company that came to salt lake city but that's pretty much just kind of stood there and saying it was like watching the concert version on pbs except there was a set in the background i mean the big thing about les mis and this when i saw it this is what drew all the attention it's this blockbuster thing it really kind of dovetails into what we're talking about is um i'm sure it wasn't the first but it was the first big popular musical that used the spinning stage yeah where you're walking on the stage and new scenery is coming to the character as they're moving on the scene the big barricade and then the barricades the transforming barricade um and those sorts of things weren't really done in the pre-phantom era obviously phantom had done things like this before we were used to the pirates of penzance or fiddler on the roof where you would do setting but the setting was not nearly the production the extravaganza yeah um and i saw les mis again a couple years ago in london and i did notice i'm like now that i've spent the last 25 years or whatever saying big budget broadway productions it no longer wows then the moving uh stage and things like this it now feels a little quaint yeah but that i think is the uh the sort of what do you call it um the john carter of mars syndrome where the first thing that does something and then gets copied a whole bunch of times if you go see the first thing if it's your you know yeah you go back to you're like what's what's the big deal well everybody copied this but he copied it so it's not cool anymore yeah uh we do need to give credit to cameron mcintosh he is a british producer who was the primary producer of phantom and les mis and he kind of kicked off this whole big sensational thing that you're talking about uh all of those early shows that did that and set the pattern were macintosh shows well it it was spectacular when i saw it as a teenager and then the other one is not based on the um the set at all it's joseph and the amazing technical or dream code i just love that musical for reasons that it's hard to elucidate um i like the musical variety to it i like the sincere songs i think are really pretty um i like that it has the religious uh undertone to it um but it's picking a story that you can also make fun of at the same time without being too terribly blasphemous so it feels a little transgressive at the same time uh all of that together um made me really just love joseph and i'll see joseph anytime that i have an opportunity to do so that's cool uh well and now this is the part where i have to ask uh because i have done personally a ton of theater including yes i've been in three productions of joseph have you ever been in a musical never been in the pit for a musical nope i would find that miserable because i know you don't like singing in choirs either um for yeah we talked about this doing the same thing over and over again and not leaving my mind free to explore stories yeah is just pure misery to me um even being in a band was kind of hard on me for that that reason uh and so going and say doing the same performance every night over and over again would be torture um that's my personal hell if you lock me in hell you're gonna put me into play and i have to do the same thing over and over again that would be great give you like two lines yeah no more than a no you don't have enough lines that you can't yeah i have to check it out in the chorus be in the background yeah um i have to be always on a queue thinking about my next thing you've gotta you can't let my brain be free to work on something fun uh i totally respect theater folks but i do not understand you at all you you baffle me you're strange creatures that's funny now you studied theater in school you said yes i did i actually did again going back to my sondheim uh fascination uh both for my big capstone project of my uh college credit program in high school and then again uh in college studied sondheim specifically uh academically and so i'm a big not only am i a nerd for the indie musicals but i can say that i've studied it at a collegiate level so i'm a like an obnoxious nerd about it but yes so what are your favorites my favorites um i like to say that uh sunday in the park with george okay is my favorite but really my favorite is company okay uh company is one of is is i think his very first broadway production in which he got to do music and lyrics both um he did lyrics only for west side story and for gypsy gypsy is one of my other favorites i will put gypsy up against any other show for in my opinion just the single best broadway score that's ever been written and that was not sometime that was julie stein uh but absolutely loved that uh i was in that one too i've been in a lot of shows uh but yeah uh i'm gonna say i love gypsy i love company um i did think did i ever make you watch sweeney todd uh well you didn't make me but i had never seen it and you and ben were aghast by this and so you guys showed me the angela lansbury uh sweeney todd it was my favorite george hearn sweetie yeah yeah uh which i still will try to pull out every halloween and make my kids watch because you are a strange morbid person yes yeah i like sweeney todd but it is not my kind of show um i prefer into the woods um just because the narrative twists that into the woods pulls uh work better for me and the morbidity works better for me if that makes sense no that does and uh you know i said earlier that very few of sondheim's shows actually ever made money on their first run uh the two that did were a little night music and into the woods uh which is incredibly broadly accessible and everybody loves it and i like it a lot i even like the uh movie of it uh which i did not expect to because they changed a lot and they took out my favorite character and they wiggled all kinds of things around but in the end i think they did a pretty good job so hooray for that yes um be careful uh googling um images of original productions of into the woods the wolf in particular oh the wolf they have an anatomically correct wolf yes they do yeah uh i should say another show that i love a lot and that i actually was also in in a college production if i'm gonna pick my three favorite musicals yes it's gonna be gypsy company and little shop of horrors okay i could have guessed that i do like little shop of horrors a lot yeah um it is great uh not just be you know my fondness is increased by our mutual friend mary robinette being a puppeteer and talking about doing little shop of horrors yeah and she has she has uh puppeteered audrey too in at least two different productions that i'm aware of hurt her hand really badly in one of them um but uh yeah uh but i i experienced that through the movie first the the one with steve martin yes dentist but then got to see it live and it's even more charming live yeah very different well and it has the the original ending usually when they do it live uh every year on the writing excuses cruise uh which we talked about before we're doing that this year in september and you can sign up for it uh we always do a karaoke night uh and mary robinette and i have talked in the past about trying to do like the feed me duet or something like that right um but uh my wife and i our go-to song whenever we need to perform is uh suddenly seymour okay i uh basically have never done karaoke yeah well that does not surprise me in the least tiny bit they did force me my wife under pressure to go up and um one time at jordan con and they recorded this i don't know why i am awful at this but to do the the chant from uh ander sandman man yeah so i did only the chant i don't know if you familiar with metallica's enter sandman but yeah yeah that's that's awesome um but yeah so what was the first one that you can remember like going to the first musical first musical that i saw in person in person boy that is hard to say it i probably am gonna save charlie brown you're a good man charlie brown okay uh just because my ward our church did a little production of it and my dad was linus okay uh but both my parents are very musical people and so we saw a lot of shows as kids i remember seeing music man and fiddler on the roof in little community productions i remember going to uh music man is my first uh that i can remember saying uh community production i remember sitting outside on a hill in idaho over the summer because i was visiting uh my grandparents and watching music man and i don't even know where it was but i remember being some outdoor amphitheater somewhere and i remembered it because uh in grade school we had music class where we basically singing time right uh for second graders i don't know if they do that anymore i think so and most of what we did was show tunes um and so i knew the music to music man not knowing really it was from a play that it was from a show and then the show and i'm like hey i actually know these songs that's awesome and that was part of what made me remember it so i'm i'm fond of music man to this day in fact uh we're gonna try to go see hugh jackman uh he's oh yeah he's uh he's gonna be good he's doing music man on in on broadway right now and so see if i can sneak out there and see his the hugh jackman oklahoma is so good i didn't see oklahoma until like two or three years ago that is a terrible dumb show will did you see the hugh jackman i didn't see the hugh jackman one because when you see it this is what i talked about as like the classic feel-good category of shows right feel good they they don't they bully a person into committing suicide yes they do but that's because the show was always presented as this very like let's have a hoedown kind of a show yeah and then when hugh jackman did his they drew out all the super dark themes of it and the song poor judd is dead and things like that where he tries to convince him to kill himself like he went full dark on it okay and it was really really cool well that that's i actually had never seen oklahoma and i'm like oh it's one of these classics like fiddler on the roof and when i saw fiddler on the roof for the first time i was blown away yeah i'd always heard the music now i watch the play and i'm like this is touching and poignant and well-written and interesting and i was expecting oklahoma and instead i got something kind of weird and kind of dumb uh sorry for those who love oklahoma i did not like okay you know i don't think a lot of people truly in their hearts love oklahoma um my favorite rogers and hammerstein is carousel okay uh which is very similar but again goes very dark it's based on a uh i want to say a hungarian play it's called lillium uh it's very dark the ending of it is uh often changed in modern productions because it kind of excuses domestic abuse yeah there's a whole bunch of that stuff like yeah i hadn't seen guys and dolls for a while and then i saw that i'm like okay i don't hate it but but what about this but let's go back to fiddler yeah fiddler on the roof is i think one of the all-time pillars of of broadway musicals my favorite story about fiddler on the roof uh comes there was there's a documentary about this that i can't remember if it was on netflix or on amazon but anyway you can go watch this and they were talking about how uh the show's incredibly popular in japan and the one of the original creators went to go see this japanese production and they you know of course the director was hosting him and everything and and uh somebody came up to him and i can't remember if it was one of the stars or one of the directors or what and said so you do this show in america and he's like yeah we do why he said they understand it he's like of course they understand it he said why it's so japanese and the themes of being bound by tradition and being forced into these uh patterns and the the conflict between tradition and family and love and freedom were you know came out of these jewish communities but also resonated so strongly with japanese that they consider it a japanese show which i think is delightful and that's awesome such a great sign of how art can reach across cultures that way do you know who made fiddler on the roof i'm not even like is this a one-hit wonder playwright um i cannot remember the names uh it was you know people who had been around in theater for a while they never had another hit that big mm-hmm um but yeah it was it was i i so i guess you could call it a one-hit wonder but that kind of that's a dismissive term that is not they they absolutely had long careers doing other things and working in theater uh but never with the kind of breakout cultural touchstone that that was fiddler on the roof um so you mentioned earlier several times rodgers and hammerstein um my first date with emily was to um go see hms pinafore oh which is which is not right oh no that's that's gilbert never mind uh the light operas from london okay which i also love and so gilbert and sullivan is also pirates then pirates of penzance hms pinafore the mikado okay that sort of thing so that was my so what what do you think of gilbert and sullivan then uh i am a big fan of gilbert and sullivan um the they they i i don't know if you can actually point to it like evolutionarily but they definitely were one of the first to kind of cross the line from pure dance or pure play or pure opera into this modern musical theater thing yeah um what they were doing they call it light opera or operetta um and i i really love them i grew up watching um you know the mikado and things like that i wish that it were possible to do the mikado without being horribly racially insensitive i have no idea what the mekado is the mikado is them and in in my opinion it is their best work but it is so hard to watch today because it is a story about uh japanese culture from two people who knew essentially nothing about japanese culture okay and so the story they are telling is kind of terrible and often very offensive uh but the music and the lyrics that they use to tell it is you know a a musician a composer a librettist at the absolute height of their skill pointing all of that power in an absolutely appropriative direction is it uh so i've seen i'm not sure if i've seen any other gilbert shoveling because i've seen those two hms been four and pirates of brunswick both of which are partially comedies like they they all of their stuff is very comedic but not just comedic it's making fun of itself like hms pinafore seems like it's a parody almost of a genre that i haven't seen and then pirates is a parody of hms pinafore or vice versa or something like that uh and that is that's a very accurate reading of them really what they were doing is they were doing satires of their own culture hms pinafore and to lesser extent pirates are direct satires against the peerage system that they all were living under and mocking and i you could kind of point to mikado as mocking the same thing they they were basically making fun of all of the hoity-toity rich london people who came to see their shows without them necessarily knowing that that's what was going on but yeah so andrew lloyd webber and we haven't gotten an opinion from you okay you've mentioned uh several several plays but no discussion of what you think um andrew lloyd webber like i said i've been in joseph three times um i have been peripherally involved with some other uh weber productions i'm not a huge fan uh he is as i said in the beginning i group him into the tired businessman shows that are spectacle over substance and i don't really love his phantom of the opera i don't really love cats um there are a couple songs from every show like i put together in high school my little mixtape that was here's all the weber songs that i actually really like and it had starlight express and it had all these weird goofy things on it and you know a couple from phantom and a couple from cats but um see i'm going to argue against the fact that you could do that i find most musicals don't have one and i find that andrew lloyd webber musicals often have several and joseph it's like the whole soundtrack yeah um and so i would argue that that this is maybe a little bit of um of hipsterism um because every one of his plays that i know has at least one great song and several good songs without a doubt and you know name me great songs we'll we could go down the list of the tony and i could name off a bunch of musicals where you can't name one great song i'm gonna bet um i i would be interested uh to take that test um yes i'm absolutely being kind of snobby about andrew lloyd webber and i recognize that and i admit to it um i do think that he is a better musician than he is a storyteller which is why i often tend to consume him in mixtapes and playlists rather than entire shows together i would not dispute that comment okay uh that said my absolute favorite uh weber and one of my very favorite musicals is evita that is one that i will watch um all the way through i absolutely adore the antonio banderas madonna movie that was made i consider it one of the all-time great movie musicals see how many how many people who write music for musicals can you point to and say they made one of the all-time greats they made one of the all-time greats very few very few um i will and and you know you said that your first date with emily was uh pinafore yes i actually proposed to my wife after watching evita oh nice so um while we're we're talking about movie musicals uh let's break into those a little bit okay yeah uh because there's a lot of really obvious ones like well they made a movie out of fiddler on the roof or out of evita things like that uh but there's also a lot of hollywood native stuff like singing in the ring yeah uh which i i would pick that one as the greatest movie musical yeah uh and i i don't know i don't know little shop of horrors is pretty right up there um i don't think any of the les mises i've seen have have managed um and the tom hooper one i don't really like um that much is that the hugh jackman anne hathaway mm-hmm yeah his we could talk about we could talk at length about all of the things we're going to we're going to because have you seen the cats movie i have not seen his i saw his cats last week and i warned dan my word i want we're we're gonna i've told dan i'm gonna make him do an entire episode on cats yeah uh but i said let's talk about musicals before so you can anticipate i have thoughts cats was amazing cats was amazing amazing amazing okay um we're gonna i'm not gonna say anything more about that i'm just gonna say it was amazing i will say i am excited to talk about all the ways in which hooper does not know how to direct musicals uh but oh cats is so amazing and i don't even know if you're trolling or not i'm not trolling cats is amazing cats is amazing cats is okay mesmerizing here first folks is one of the best movie-going experiences i have had in years gosh this is what happens when we let a person who loves speed racer see more movies yeah cats is i can't even think of a movie more widely despised than cats that's because people are just not going to people for the right reasons not going for the right reasons okay we have to we have to sideboard that okay so we'll cyber that we'll go back to cats let's go back to movie musicals um one that a lot of people don't consider to be a musical but i think checks every single box and hits it out of the park is oh brother where are thou not a musical in the way that oh singing in the rain is amazing you're letting thing so i thought you were saying we have to talk about we should do an entire separate episode on this i thought you were talking about stage two movie no that's what i thought you were well that's why i said uh there's there's hollywood native stuff hollywood nation the fred astaire and the gene kelly yeah and the danny k and i don't know didn't know singing in the rain was not a play first because i saw it as a play before i saw the movie yeah uh no it was it was a movie in fact uh one of the things that they did a lot during this period is they would just take somebody like irving berlin and collect a bunch of their songs and string them together and form a story around them so they were songs that everybody already knew uh in part jukebox musicals very jukebox musical um the way that uh they turned mamma mia into musicals and movies and things like that we are gonna we're gonna sidebar that because we are out of time okay uh do we wanna take it talk about cats next time let's absolutely talk about cats cats next time how's that ben you

Channel: Brandon Sanderson

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Id: DY5yDPRomEI

Length: 38min 42sec (2322 seconds)

Published: Wed May 25 2022