Chicago, when done well, can be one of the most thrilling nights of theatre you can do. However, it's easy to reduce chicago to "ooh, sex" sometimes

I feel like I bring up Smash a lot in this discussion forum, but when talking about Glee there is an apt comparison: Smash may be a wonderfully terrible show, but it was kind of legitimately good at making living, breathing gay characters (even an interracial gay couple) that were neither defined by their sexuality…

thank you for leading me to this brilliant essay!

I get that. I study digital media and work with a lot of programmers on game projects, yet I hated the first episode with a passion. It gets a bit better as it goes on though, but i'd hardly give it hosannas in terms of rating it.

agreed! I'm pretty damn liberal but I wanted to throw a shoe at my tv when I tried to sit through "the newsroom". Most of those characters should have been fired at some point, the preachiness is heinous, and the casual sexism pisses me off.

What are your thoughts on more diagetic musicals, like Cabaret or Chicago or Follies, where the music is often deployed as a commentary on the plot rather than as an advance on the plot?

that one just gets my respect because I am an avid Sondheim fan, and that kind of patter while still maintaining good tone and pitch is really fucking hard, so kudos to her

the only musical theatre number that was passable was "getting married today", which is surprising because that is one of Sondheim's hardest songs

plus what also annoys me is that it has these airs of being so progressive when it actually relies on stereotypes and promotes the myth that male bisexuality doesn't exist.

Smash. As a Broadway devotee I should HATE this show, but it is so goddam campy that I can't help but love it.

he won me over with his julia roberts obstacle course

Well there can be great absurdism (ie, "Rhinocerous", "Bald Soprano", etc), but as somebody who was a theatre kid in high school, I knew way too many "weird for the sake of being weird" kids and that mentality annoys the shit out of me. It's the same kind of forced quirkiness that keeps me from liking things like "a…

see I was one who thought that the kings speech was vastly overrated. It was well acted and such, but as a movie I just thought it wasn't anything we hadnt seen before. Granted, Idk if I'd have picked social network for the oscar either, but I digress

This isn't exactly a hugely beloved property here, but mine has to be "Glee". I say this because I am an openly gay young male who LOVES musical theatre, and I was still in HS when it premiered, so I should have been pretty much the entire target audience. However, I simply cannot stomach that show. It butchers the…

Eh, I guess I see Jinkx more as being straight up vaudeville rather than high drag (or at least, that is how she presented herself in the competition). Like, outside of Bianca, I consider Latrice Royale to be a great example of "classic" drag.

On the eleventh day of drag-mas, my RuPaul gave to me,

I agree with you on all point except the lip syncs, in that I prefer "natural woman" to "this will be" by a VERY small margin (though my favorite lip sync of all time has to be "dancing on my own") and was never a fan of Milan's lip sync style. She pretty much ruined wig reveals, and it took Roxxxy Andrews to make…

To be fair, my ranking season 2 so low is because I watched it way after the fact, so it was tinged by my bitterness that Tyra won/that neither Pandora nor Jujubee won a main challenge.

Over at Indiewire, they even dethroned Venus D-Lite as the worst competitor of Drag Race Herstory to give the spot to Magnolia

I think somebody else hit the nail on the head when they said that Courtney's energy comes across as talk-show host (which is why she excelled in that challenge) moreso than somebody you'd have lunch with. She just seemed kind of "on" most of the time, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just differed from the…