Watch with Father: Julie's Greenroom

Sometimes, a series comes along that is pretty much just what you want your child to be watching, and then sometimes a series comes along that is what you never knew you needed your child to be watching. If you'd asked me what I wanted Arya to be watching a month ago, I probably wouldn't have shot for a diverse group of Muppet children and a duck attending an all-star series of performing arts workshops led by Julie Andrews(1), and yet here comes Julie's Greenroom, and it is glorious.

Ms Julie and her stage manager, Gus, run a performing arts centre with a prestigious youth 'Greenroom' workshop. When a burst pipe destroys the prop collection, the latest workshop group set out to create their own original musical using what they learn in a series of masterclasses given by the Greenroom's alumni. The latter group includes Idina Menzel, Glee! alumnus and author Chris Colfer, baritone Josh Groban(2), Alec Baldwin, ballet dancers Robert Fairchild and Tyler Peck(3), Sara Bareilles, Ellie Kemper and Tituss Burgess, violinist Joshua Bell, and David Hyde Pierce. There are also appearances from Stomp, Cirque de Soleil and a visit to the set of Wicked.

The 'Greenies' are performed by veteran Henson puppeteers, including Stephanie D'Abruzzo, John Tartaglia and Jennifer Barnhart, three of the four Sesame Street performers who originated the puppet roles in Avenue Q(4). The characters are diverse in many ways, including: Hank, a paraplegic pianist and sports fan; Peri, a theatre buff and drama queen from a rich family; Fizz, a young Hispanic girl; Spike, an African-American linguaphile; and technophile Riley. Riley is most interesting for what she isn't quite. She is identified, when unavoidable, as female, but lacks any distinctive gender coding. With production crew suggesting that Riley is likely to self-identify as non-binary at some point, I'm not sure why they didn't just go for it.

There's also Hugo. He's a duck.

Through their workshops, the Greenies learn about various aspects of the performing arts, including technical skills like costume design and harmony singing, as well as more personal lessons, such as the importance of practice, or that ballet isn't just for girls and waterfowl. In episode 2, when Spike feels unequal to the task of being a writer because he's never seen a writer who looks like him, everyone sings a song about the importance of diverse voices. Peri learns that being cast as the ogre instead of the princess isn't a slight, and Fizz learns the importance of practice. Hank learns to dance, and Riley learns that the technical and creative are not mutually exclusive.

You know what it is? It's like if Julie Andrews took over the Muppet theatre and ran a class for Sesame Street characters, and exactly as awesome as that sounds. The only problem is that there are only thirteen half-hour episodes and no sign of a season 2, alas.

(1) Who is also credited as creator of the show. I also imagine it didn't hurt when it came to attracting guest stars. "You've had an offer to do a show with Julie Andrews and Muppets," probably isn't a tough sell.

(2) I may have to forgive him for his butchering of 'Evermore' in the end credits of Beauty and the Beast.

(3) They make a lot of their 'fairytale marriage', so I imagine a lot of parents may end up having tricky conversations about how they separated a few months after the show came out.

(4) A poster for which appears in the greenroom itself.

Start to Finish - Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

With The Companion Chronicles all relistened to and reviewed for now, I'm going to take a crack at one of the weirder offshoots of Big Finish's audio empire: Doctor Who: The Stageplays, audio adaptations of the three attempts to bring the Doctor to the stage, beginning with the biggest and glitziest of them all, 1989's Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure.

As the Daleks, allied with the Cybermen and a force of space mercenaries(1) plot the destruction of the Earth, the Doctor and his companion Jason are summoned by the British PM, Mrs T, to protect a vital peace conference by safeguarding an American envoy on his visit to a nightclub. It is a mission that will take them and their new travelling companion Crystal across time and space, into and out of deadly danger, in the course of which they will face flying insect people, volcanos, lasers, romances, and songs!

Yes, songs. Buckle up, kids; it's Doctor Who! The Musical.

The Ultimate Adventure and its companions are in many ways a textbook example of why it's not a good idea to directly adapt a stage play to audio, and it's odd that a company so deeply steeped in the medium would include so many clunky 'look at that' lines as they do here. On the other hand, this was a play that was written with an eye to visual spectacle, and too great a concession to the transfer might have robbed it of some of its own charms, and for all its cheesy madness, it is very charming. The plot is bonkers: The Daleks' master plan (not to be confused of course with 'The Daleks' Master Plan',) is fundamentally broken and ultimately fails because the Emperor Dalek couldn't help gloating, and despite the attempts to make their mission feel time critical the whole thing takes a back seat for much of the second act while the story meanders through a series of set-pieces included to please the producer. The performances are mostly sound, although the American envoy couldn't sound less American if he were trying(3) and Noel Sullivan of Hear'Say is about as convincingly French as the cast of Allo Allo.

The original (apart from Colin Baker) stage cast, including Zog the Denebian.

The script was produced in a very short window by Terrance Dicks after then wunderkinds of the TV series Cartmel and Aaronovich turned in an offering that was possibly unfilmable and certainly unstageable. The Doctor was replaced part-way through the brief run due to Jon Pertwee's failing health, with Colin Baker stepping into a role heavier on action and gallantry than his usual metier. Baker reprises that performance here, committing to record a rare encounter with the sonic screwdriver between The Visitation and The TV Movie. As is the case with much of his audio work, he gets a much better crack of the whip than in his TV days.

The companions are a pretty weak pair, with Jason often reduced to comic relief, Crystal to strident fauxmenism (having your female supporting character attack the chauvinist assumptions of the male supporting character is all well and good, but less effective if the female character has been portrayed as entirely superficial, up to and including prioritising her singing career over the actual dead bodies in the room with her.) Both of them also spend a lot of time remarking in clear and specific terms about what everyone can see. The villains are a bit better, with the Daleks and the Cybermen butting heads and a couple of fun mercenary leaders in the gruff Carl and slinky Madame Delilah(4).

There are three songs in the show, of variable quality. Top of the pack is 'Business is Business', Madame Delilah's patter song, if for no other reason than the line 'we always maim to please.' Next is Crystal's nightclub number, 'Strange Attractor'. The first song in the show, it's got a catchy tune but the lyrics are terrible, a salutary warning of the perils of trying to adapt a scientific principle into a 1980s love song based only on its name. Finally, 'Sky High' is notable for being the only one not sung entirely diegetically, and is an eminently disposable not-in-love song about getting snuggly while high on lack of oxygen (I think.)

The Ultimate Adventure is a bizarre gem. I remain unsure if it's any good or not, but I've listened to it many times and it never fails to make me smile. It also comes bundled with a truly fascinating hour of behind the scenes documentaries.

(1) Spercenaries for short(2).
(2) Not really.
(3) He'll probably turn out to be a native Chicano whose accent was garbled through living in New England and France, but he doesn't sound convincing.
(4) A couple of fine, alien-sounding names there.

Beat Bugs

I find myself wondering which of them will be known to history as 'the fifth
Beat Bug.'

In an ordinary garden - well, ordinary apart from its terrifying, tentacle flailing purple octopus sprinkler of death - live five invertebrate chums. Rainbow Dash expy Jay, inventor and engineer Crick, eager young Buzz, optimistic slug Walter Walrus, and Kumi, who is kind of the normal one, although she does sometimes design things for Crick to build. Each episode, these alleged insects (and a slug) face the kinds of rudimentary friendship problems that microequines would scoff at, but then the dilemmas of life are really just vehicles in this series, the central purpose of which is simply and solely to introduce young children to the music of The Beatles.

I am not even joking.

Each episode features a particular song reinterpreted by the cast, and the plot is mostly built around the lyrics. So in 'Help!' Jay acts all cool and independent, then gets stuck in a jam jar and finds that he does need help, while in 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' Buzz is so scared by a story Zumi tells that they have to call on the assistance of a dragonfly sleep therapist named Lucy, who has kaleidoscope eyes and a really unhelpful visiting address. And is voiced by P!nk.

Perhaps the oddest thing is the way that the lyrics have been trimmed to a) fit the plot, b) be less about drugs and getting old, and c) not require parents to try to explain what 'pornographic priestess' means; at least until they play them the original tracks. On that front, it definitely seems to be doing its job, and Arya is delighted to listen to and sing along with The Beatles in the car now, so props to creator Josh Wakely for following through on his vision, getting the rights to so much of the catalogue and achieving his goal. Hell, it's introducing us to Beatles songs we don't know.

Melody

Melody (Angharad Rhodes), Mum (Laura Bacon) and Fudge

Children's TV can be pretty hit and miss. A recent hit with Arya and with us as parents is Cbeebies Melody, in which the title character - a partially sighted girl - is given music to listen to by her mother and describes what it makes her imagine. Sometimes this links directly to the theme of the music ('The Flight of the Bumblebee' accompanies a story about a bee,) but plenty have little relation to anything but the musical effect of the piece (for example, 'Danse Macabre' evokes the story of Little Red Riding Hood.)

The animated Melody.

The imagined adventures are depicted via simple animation, usually featuring an animated Melody and her cat, Fudge; a stuffed toy in life but animate in her imagination, of course. The music chosen is a pretty eclectic grab bag, ranging from baroque to modern. The series thus introduces children to a wide array of music, as well as gently prompting their understanding of disability.

Into the Woods

That tagline is oddly apt for any adaptation.

Once upon a time...

Fan: I wish!

...in a far off kingdom...

Fan: More than anything!

...there lived a young fan...

Fan: More than life!

...a mighty studio...

Fan: More than jewels!
Disney: I wish!

...and a movieless musical.

Disney: More than life!
Fan, Into the Woods: I wish to go to the cinema!

Okay, I broke the meter there a bit, but seriously; writing Sondheim filk is really hard.

Let me relapse into prose. Once upon a time there was a musical called Into the Woods. It wasn't a huge musical like Cats or Oliver, but it was clever and witty and did solid business and was much loved from the time of its first release. Naturally, with the boom in big-budget adapted musicals running on from Chicago to Les Miserables and all, there came a time when the clever little musical met a big, important movie producer, and they planned to go into business together.

Now, in a lot of cautionary tales, this is the point where we tell how our hero was jacked by the movie studio and forced to become nice and clean and decent and dull, but actually, that isn't what happened. Maybe because James Lapine, the original lyricist, was still alive to write the screenplay, or maybe because the composer, the mighty Stephen Sondheim, was still alive to glower at Disney with the force only another icon of American culture could muster against the House of Mouse if they got it wrong, but whatever the reason... Disney did good.

I'm not going to say that Disney's big screen adaptation of Into the Woods is perfect, because I'd be lying, but it is good. I'm not going to say that it isn't softened, because it is - you simply can't maintain all of the subtext if you cast actual children as Little Red Ridinghood and Jack - but it's not been completely bowdlerised. Also...

MacKenzie Mauzy as Rapunzel, Billy Magnussen as Rapunzel's Prince, Anna Kendrick as Cinderella, Johnny Depp as the
Wolf, Emily Blunt as the Baker's Wife, Daniel Huttlestone as Jack, Meryl Streep as the Witch, James Corden as the Baker,
Lilla Crawford as Little Red Riding Hood and Chris Pine as Cinderella's Prince

Let's see who we've got in this thing.

In song/introduction order, Cinderella goes to Anna Kendrick, who is pretty much of a big thing and more importantly can both sing and act (I give you Pitch Perfect and 50/50 in evidence), Jack is veteran stage and screen Gavroche Daniel Huttlestone and the Baker and his wife are played by James Corden and Emily Blunt. Of these, Corden is the weakest singer, cast more for his mix of comic timing and big, adorable sad face, but is by no means bad.

Then we have Lilla Crawford, a former stage Annie, as Little Red Riding Hood, Meryl Streep as the Witch - I hear she's been good in stuff before - Johnny Depp in a somewhat flashy cameo as the Wolf,  Mackenzie Mauzy as Rapunzel and Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen as the Princes. Mauzy and Magnussen are the wildcards, but Magnussen and Pine pretty much nail 'Agony' with a histrionic waterfall performance, and that's what your Princes need to do in Into the Woods.

The film sticks pretty solidly to the plot of the stage musical, although for timing purposes it removes a number of songs. The big departure is in terms of pacing. Lacking an intermission, the film omits the first act closer, 'Ever After', and the second prologue 'So Happy'. This requires the removal of the reprise of 'Agony' by compressing the timescale between the two acts, which makes me sad.

This actually casts a more unflattering light on the characters' dissatisfaction with their happy endings than is present in the stage version, which is perhaps why they are never allowed to sit as endings. With no time passing for a natural pregnancy, the Baker's Wife is magically impregnated by the Witch's spell (providing slightly darker overtones to the Baker's refusal to hold 'his' child.) Cinderella has become disenchanted with palace life in a matter of weeks and her Prince makes his move on the Baker's Wife pretty much on his wedding day. Rapunzel's madness and death are slashed from the plot, and instead she rides off with her Prince early in the act.

ETA: Ultimately, the problem that this engenders is that the characters and their problems become superficial in the timescale. 'Oh no, it's been all of three days since I magically popped out a sprog after a five minute pregnancy and my husband still won't bond with the baby.' The opening line of 'so Happy' is 'Once upon a time later' and without ever after becoming that later, there is no context for the dissatisfaction which is the core of the second act. Ultimately, this weakens the second act, rendering it more superficial than the first when it should be more substantial.

In some ways the most glaring and most subtle of the changes is the removal of the Mysterious Man/Narrator, and all the metatextual elements that go with him.

In musical terms, in addition to 'Agony', the director and ensemble make a meal of 'Into the Woods' (although this makes me regret the loss of the later ensemble numbers all the more) and Streep rips it up for 'The Last Midnight' (although the effects volume was a little overwhelming in the scene itself.)  The other showstopper is 'On the Steps of the Palace', performed not as recollection but literally on the steps of the palace, with the world slowing to a stop as Cinderella sings her thoughts. Despite the range of experiences the actors bring to the project, no-one was glaringly off-style and where called on to sing together, the voices complement.

A number of new songs were proposed for the adaptation, written by Sondheim and Lapine, but never made it in. This is far preferable to the glaring Oscar-bait bullshit in the middle of Les Miserables.

This is perhaps not the greatest adaptation of Into the Woods that could be made, but I think in terms of adaptations that were ever going to be made, this is pretty strong. While clearly pitched at a younger audience than the stage show and frankly overselling Depp in the publicity, it retains enough of the darkness and subtext of the original to remain Into the Woods in substance as well as name.

If I were looking to criticise beyond the compressed second act, I would probably pick out that the cast is very, very white, but it's quite possible that in this instance the black talent was all off filming the new version of Annie.

Into the Woods: It's not perfect, but it is pretty damn good.