Was it the full Rocky Horror? I know they make kidz bop versions of musicals for different ages.
Oh, that's a good point. Surely it was the semi-neutered version.
Hawaii put on Addams Family last year, and it was hysterical, and then I watched a couple clips of the musical online, and it was even raunchier and more hysterical.
My son's school did Chicago. I didn't see it though. I did see them do Pippin, which is a really weird 70s thing.
Looks like the kidz bop version played a role in the Oklahoma controversey:
Sensing that the district was losing ground on its fight, the district then modified the policy to state that playing different genders was acceptable, but that they would be switching the script to a 1-hour long version of Oklahoma! meant for kids. The new script specifically states that is for "pre-high school students" with "younger attention spans." This move seemingly alienated as many people as the first decision, leading to the community to come together and demand a full restoration of the play and Max's role in a tense school board meeting.
Later they restored the original version, after that blew up too.
The farmer and the Taliban should be friends.
Greg Abbott literally flew to Israel to hug Bibi, a week or two ago.
Maybe he can smoke when he stays with Bibi?
Or perform raunchy scenes from musicals?
My high school did Pippin which is a little hard to adapt when the lead goes to the kid of the evangelical pastor.
I saw an article about the Texas high school "Oklahoma!" production fooferaw and my first reaction was, "Wow, a Texas high school is putting on a production of Oklahoma!
I can't imagine a high school around here putting on a production of a musical called 'Michigan!' and it's not just because that musical doesn't exist"
Maybe pearl-clutching transphobes shouldn't be empowered to make casting decisions about high school plays.
I think a high school should do Grease and find a 30- year-old to play Rizzo.
I'm going to assume this "Pippin" culminates in a brutal tonsuring scene.
I think he gets married to the most maternal-looking 17-year old who can carry a tune.
Annoyingly, "you're the one that I want" works too well with "hello my baby" for it to displace the earworm 10 inadvertently gave me. It's just a dancing mash up in my brain right now.
11: It's Texas, Spike. I'm pretty sure the transphobes there are clutching guns
a new Sherman ISD rule allowing theater students to only be cast in roles matching their birth gender has cost about 20 students their parts.
I am a bit startled by this on purely statistical grounds. There were, in the cast of this school musical, twenty trans students? How big was the cast???
I don't think you're interpreting that correctly, no.
Ah, OK. Neither of the links are working for me so can't see the details. Did they just not have enough boys to sing the male parts and have to cast girls, or something?
Yes, except for one kid who was transsexual.
The stupid thing among stupid things is that cross-gender casting is really common in high school. Many more girls than boys take dance, so big dance scenes either will wind up recasting the dancing characters as women (e.g. "America" in West Side Story has 50 girls and seven boys) or some of the girls wear pants and dance the boys' parts (all of Oliver, if memory serves*), because the one or two boys that sing and dance are the leads.
This is a completely predictable problem even setting aside the gratuitous cruelty to the trans theater kid.
*Pit orchestra for life
Speaking of difficulties casting, when I was in grade school, the high school did "The King and I." Every kid in the school who was not actually blonde was cast as part of the royal family.
Did they shave one kids head to play Yul Brynner?
Not really on topic, but passable b/c high school. Here is a FB status of someone in my town:
Another day in the life at [Nearby] High School. A guy in my ISS class said he was dropping out of school and joining the Army. I asked him to think about it for a couple of hours. I called the Army recruiters in Austin and told them a 16 year old want to drop out and join the Army.
They came out with enlistment papers. I told him ok if he is serious about joining the Army they are here. I said he cal drop out of [high school], but once he sign those enlistment papers, he cannot drop out of the Army. He signed the enlistment papers. I said you are in the Army now. There is no going back. The recruiters made him take tge oath of office right tgere in tge class room.
The recruiters told him he will be reporting to Fort Benning, Georgia for 10 weeks of training in 3 weeks. The recruiters said they will help him get his GED. They said the Army is way behind in their recruiting goals.
I wished this young man good luck. I hope he will do well. The Army will teach him discipline, respect and leadership. This may be a good move for him.
What the FUCK did that teacher DO?!!!!
I'm pretty sure you need parental consent to join before age 18. Facebook is full of shit.
Maybe they joined the Israeli army?
The stupid thing among stupid things is that cross-gender casting is really common in high school.
As well as in, like, the entire history of theater for thousands of years.
People are asking him about that in the comments, and his answer is "Once he drops out and will be 17 soon yes they can."
I don't know. But that guys sounds fucking deranged.
Also 17 appears to be the minimum age even with parental consent.
Arguing with ill-informed people on Facebook sounds fun.
I mean... is the whole thing fabricated by a high school teacher? did a recruiter not actually come out? If any part of it is true, he's at least meddling severely in things that aren't really his place to do so.
Sure seems like the kind of thing that gets you serotonin in the form of emotional responses from all over. Especially if it was a public FB post.
My daughter, in high school, was in a theater group that wasn't affiliated with the school. They'd write plays that were takeoffs on fables - Cinderella or whatever. But the prince was a princess. And casting didn't involve assigning people according to any particular gender -- so Cinderella's stepmother could be played by a boy.
They'd perform in a nearby park. It was all pretty adorable.
33: Do you know that this person is really a high school teacher?
I just realized why The Simpsons was such a bad influence on kids. Bart Simpson was voiced by a woman! Imagine the effect on kids when they found this out!
I would bet that it is trolling and after everyone says that 16 is too young for that kind of commitment, he says he's talking about transsexuals. You're still on topic.
37: no, but I have a friend who teaches dual credit at that school, and I asked him if he knew the guy. So we'll see.
38: Wait, I guess I used the wrong tense -- the Simpson is still going and still infecting our children with anti-gender ideology!
I'm so out of touch I had to google to find out what subject "ISS class" covered. For those who may be equally ignorant, "ISS" stands for "in school suspension".
29: I learned today that in Shakespeare's England women couldn't act professionally. Until 1661. So all the female parts were, yanno, played by men. Of course, I got the first inkling of this from _Upstart Crow_ (a lovely David Mitchell-led comedy about Shakespeare).
43: yes! Hence why Shakespeare was so fond of plots jnvolving men dressing up as women or vice versa. In Twelfth Night, you have Viola (a woman, but played in Shakespeare's time by a man) disguised as Cesario (a man) pretending to be Olivia (a woman).
42: Actually I hadn't made that connection. I thought it was some Info-Systems Something.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50425/sonnet-20-a-womans-face-with-natures-own-hand-painted
And transgender Bart is like 42 but still looks like a 10 year old so puberty blockers are clearly too powerful for most people.
It goes the other way too. Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Powell both played Hamlet in the eighteenth century. It was treated as a novelty, but not, like, dangerous.
Women couldn't get their hands on ear poison back then.
It was the Restoration when actresses started to be allowed again, right? Not sure if it was the laws changing or enforcement changing. At any rate, hurrah for the degenerate Cavaliers!
The Puritans banned the theater entirely, I think. It makes sense that bringing it back would have involved some changes from before.
Women couldn't get their hands on ear poison back then.
Is this why earworms were invented?
|| China's leader, Xi Jinping, said his country may keep sending giant pandas to the U.S.
Finally, somebody doing something that could get Biden reelected ||
God, this generation is so wasteful, sending individual pandas one at a time, instead of just getting pandas from the tap.
Contrast this with California
OTOH, not that far from LA, a school district recently put a drama teacher on leave after one of his students performed a monologue from "Angels in America," because this somehow constituted exposing children to pornography. In general, the state-level government is pretty sane on these issues (and gender inclusivity in public schools is written into state statute), but it's a big state and there are lots of communities where crazy people make up the majority.
55: At least the right-wing culture warriors aren't gaining more seats, and the state's passed a lot of laws on book bans, gender-based treatment, etc., with the AG keeping a close watch. One of the things the wingers have been doing that the state hasn't cracked down on yet is to effectively ban Pride flags without referencing them by name. Even in the Bay (Sunol, a tiny place in the hills with a school district but no city), but also the very Trumpy Huntington Beach.
Also, Oklahoma! is such a stupid musical. Actually all R&H musicals are pretty terrible. (I harbor a soft spot for The Sound of Music, but it's so dumb.)
What's interesting to me is that it's not just that Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics are so bad (and they are so bad!), but Richard Rogers' music changed so much after Lorenz Hart's death. Hart's lyrics are funny and sly and smart, but he's only half of what makes R&H so wonderful - Rogers' music was so light and tricky and fun when he was with Hart, and became so dumb and treacly when he was with Hammerstein.
Heck, we passed a law requiring schools let students participate in sex-segregated programs or use such facilities based on their gender identity over 10 years ago!
I actually haven't seen most musicals.
53, 54. I support American industry and fight climate change by patronizing my locally-grown obese raccoons.
This is a great point. OUR pandas like to fuck and with their short lifespans it shouldn't take too long to breed them to be giants.
I can't be the only one to read Jinping's statement as a threat.
An electric car in every driveway, a panda in every pot. Biden can def win on that program.
57.1 We've all read this a bunch of times. How about one more? https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-regret-to-inform-you-that-my-wedding-to-captain-von-trapp-has-been-canceled
That's my favorite McSweeney's thing.
When China sends its pandas they're not sending their best.
To be fair, we send them literal garbage.
BTW post title could have been High School Musical
Pandas are the worst because the American zoo never owns them so even if they die of natural causes, you can't cook them and serve them to donors for a fundraiser.
They opened up a panda zoo here in Arrakis in the north. I haven't been yet and find the very idea absurd.
This is reminding me that I got roped into going to a cow-orker's daughter's high school musical because said cow-orker popped into my office one day and asked if I liked musicals to which I stupidly replied yes.
70: good lord. The US Army seems to be becoming confused between "wrote a bestseller" and "was actually any good as a commander". Moore was a disaster. Not that Benning was much better. What next, Fort Fredendall? Fort Custer?
Ithink not committing treason is the benchmark. Low standard, true, but if you're the US honestly that's all you really need.
But the US actually has quite a lot of soldiers who were, unlike Moore, pretty good at their jobs!
Moore fought one notable battle, Ia Drang, which destroyed half his command and was, at best, a draw; he was actually compared by his own soldiers to General Custer (who got his entire command wiped out); and the co-author of his own book about Ia Drang describes it as "the battle that convinced Ho Chi Minh he could win". He never commanded troops in combat again. He had commanded infantry in combat once before in Korea, only because he had to fulfil a minimum amount of infantry command time in order to get promotion to major.
So, basically, his single contribution to history seems to have been persuading the enemy to believe, correctly, that the US armed forces were crap.
He seems to have done great work on the personnel and morale side, but, still.
He is, I suppose, a worthy successor to Benning, who apparently managed to get his entire brigade destroyed.
I suppose the choice is a bit limited. You can't call them after Confederate generals, that's the whole point of the exercise. You can't really call them after US Civil War generals because the confederate sympathisers will get angry, plus most of them were also Indian Wars generals and they are a bit questionable too these days. The US wasn't really in WW1 long enough to build up a big stock of worthy honorees, and Pershing's already been used (missile, tank). Same for WW2 - Patton, Bradley, MacArthur, Eisenhower all already used for weapons and/or installations.
They could troll their enemies by calling them after air force generals - it was the US Army Air Force after all.
The First Gulf War, maybe? Fort Pagonis.
Must they have been generals though? How about a Fort Murphy, for ex
78: no, they absolutely don't have to be generals, and in fact Fort Moore is also named after Mrs Moore whose uniformed service extended no further than the Girl Scouts of America.
There is no Fort Murphy, but it's a good idea - there was apparently a Camp Murphy, but it wasn't named after Audie. And he was also a celebrity and wrote a bestseller, so that would tick that box.
Fort Fredendall could have the opposite motto to the Joint Security Area Panmungmon: Far Behind Them All!
Thinking of some British ones: the Lord North Memorial Centre for Strategic Studies.
"Don't name things after people" is just a good idea in general. There's no danger of someone discovering that the word "audacious" was involved in the Atlantic slave trade, or that the entire town of Aldershot is a ghastly hellhole opposed to everything that Britain stands for (more than we know it is already, obvs). We dodged a bullet already by only having two CVF hulls, because the third one, judging by naming traditions, would probably have been HMS Duke of York, which, ouch.
This is why the traditional carrier names are safer. Formidable, Illustrious, Victorious, Eagle, Invincible...usually OK right up until it demonstrates the opposite of that quality. And nobody knows what the hell an Ark Royal even is, just that it's usually an aircraft carrier.
Personally I think they should have gone for names that simultaneously paid tribute to our closest allies and deniably took the piss out of them. HMS Temeraire and HMS President.
29: of course! But most high schools aren't casting Shakespeare traditionally or even trying gender-neutral casting; they're just filling the background roles with girls who can dance because they don't have enough theater boys. The toy soldiers in the Nutcracker are often girls, too, as the boys who can dance are going to be Party Boys first.