Sunday, December 23, 2007

In Which Alex and Sarah Attend the Tale

Saw Sweeney Todd the other night. I thought it was very nice. There were some things cut out from the theater version, but it was stuff that was kind of lame anyway, like "Parlour Songs," which I personally dislike greatly. I had read partial reviews (meaning I didn't read any copy in its entirety) and some were gushing over how amazing it was, and some were more like Entertainment Weekly's, which gave ol' Sween a B+. I agree with EW (which I almost always do). It didn't change my life, but if someone hadn't seen the stage production and wanted to know the story, I wouldn't think they were a douche if they watched this movie.
One thing of note, though. Oh, and uh, spoiler alert or whatever. I personally don't care about spoilers, nor do I think this is one, but once I told my friend Lorne (accidentally!) that Buster lost his hand on Arrested Development, and I have not lived it down since. Sorry if you didn't know about Buster's hand. To be fair, when I said spoiler alert, I meant about everything.

Now that that's taken care of, let's get to business. On the way to the theater, I'm talking to my homeslice Alexander about the plot, etc (I have seen the show, he has not). Okay, so we're in the car and I'm all jazzed so I'm making us listen to the soundtrack and a bunch of other gay stuff, and I mention Toby, the man-boy, or so I thought. I'm going on about how Toby is like, kind of retarded. BUT, in the movie, he's a frakking kid. Was I missing something? Have the actors I have seen portray Toby been behaving like children when I thought they were just acting kind of autistic? Seriously, does this look like a child to you?Don't make a Dougie Howser joke, because this is serious. But this picture isn't! (ZING!) I say this because Senor Sondheim said that Neil Patrick Harris was the quintessential Toby, and that's enough to convince me that I'm at least right about something - that Toby is, at the youngest, a teenager. At least he is in every production, um, ever. Plus, it's not like there aren't entire troops of queerball musical theatre kids out there who would love to be in a "real" production. Ever heard of Interlochen?
Yeah. I win.

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