Take the cilantro, leave the zamboni

So there's a musical version of Legally Blonde. I saw it last night. jadefu had recorded it when they showed it on MTV last month.

Whoa.

Good adaptation, really interesting choices about what to expand upon. And sometimes, they went for the best possible jokes. There are multiple "I can't believe they did that" moments, particularly the ones in the courtroom....

And finally, they changed one detail about the ending, an ending that was already making me sniffle cuz it was the graduation scene, and this change... well, I've never cried over a musical like that before. Cried all the way home, too! (This was a very me-specific thing, it probably won't get to most people the way it got to me.)

That was the most fun I've ever had watching a musical, tears at the end or not. They played up the class issues, too! And it has plenty of female roles; I can see it being performed a lot at high schools, because it's pretty but not too hard to stage. The pro performance had a lot of fast set changes with hydraulics, but the sets themselves were pretty minimal.

I have never had so much fun watching a musical.

Reading the NYTimes coverage of Anna Netrebko is amusing.

I just came to a dead stop when they mentioned that an opera blogger criticized her Italian diction, comparing it to "some thick, gooey kvass."

Man, I need to hang out with opera geeks, because not only is that a damn fine insult, it's rather esoteric, I mean how many of you people know what kvass is?

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