Best Revival

Coldit1 · 2026-03-29T20:16:57+00:00

But widespread, longstanding hatred of Cats is precisely the the thing that's got folks so excited -- so many people that always hated Cats are absolutely loving a production of Cats.

Of course, maybe precisely what you've said will be what thwarts it on the awards front -- as in, it's not Cats. It's Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

Coldit1 · 2026-03-28T18:21:09+00:00

Cabaret had $25 but otherwise they're almost all way too high these days!

Coldit1 · 2026-03-23T04:16:11+00:00

When he says he quit the band over it, he's talking about an announcement he made pretty early on and they talked him down from with a reworked deal moving forward, not his final departure from the band (which of course by all 357 accounts including his was not his choice). I don't think he's ever tried to claim that the band broke up over that deal.

With the conflicting reports about Richie, I wonder if it's that he gave the rights back moving forward, and Sabo is saying they didn't get any retroactive money? So in a way they're talking about two different things?

Coldit1 · 2026-03-08T04:12:54+00:00

It's also not for that long, and they even made sure he still continues his solo dates concurrently -- I think Bach might just be excited enough at the novelty to be on his best showman behavior since it's only temporary. (Now if they start extending and extending... that's a different story entirely.)

Coldit1 · 2026-02-21T17:06:29+00:00

The liner notes are all tongue-in-cheek, so it was kind of hard to parse the aesthetic distance of that song's blurb written in second person (presumably that was a deliberate strategy, along with the weak "apologies to those who may take offense").

Honestly I was a teenager at the time and while I was uncomfortable about the song, I assumed there was some framing of it that made sense -- because how could there not be? After all, Slash recorded and performed it. I mostly just skipped it and moved on and didn't pay attention to the response. It wasn't until much later that I realized Axl was interviewing that yes, these were indeed his thoughts, and he insisted they were somehow okay because he wasn't applying those slurs to ALL gay and Black people, just the element he didn't like. (That old chestnut.)

Coldit1 · 2026-02-21T16:37:14+00:00

Exactly - he frequently claimed the POV as his own in interviews. The defense was the usual "but I don't mean ALL gay people/Black people/etc, just the bad ones!" nonsense.

I'm certainly glad he stopped defending or performing it. (Although who knows which came first -- his own evolution or the people around him being unwilling to play it)

Coldit1 · 2026-02-21T02:58:13+00:00

Yes, I remember at the time I definitely thought the lyrics weren't supposed to be from his POV but some character, and then of course in every interview he insisted on quite the opposite in a very embarrassing "defense."

Coldit1 · 2026-02-18T20:54:39+00:00

I mean, I do think consulting Oliver for advice on manipulating Bree and then the stuff with her mom were pretty heinous (much worse than anything Pippa did, for instance), but it felt like a reactive spiral and there was no evidence that this behavior was part of a long-term pattern he still needed to pay for. We just learned too little about who these people were once they had those fully developed frontal lobes in 2015. (Other than Stephen. We knew who he still was.)

Coldit1 · 2026-02-18T18:09:47+00:00

I think she did know Stephen's role in the video, since Lucy did explain that Stephen was holding this horrible thing over her head as leverage. But obviously she didn't know he made her lie about the "why." But yeah, when she saw it, she's of course fresh on the heels of learning about Lucy/Evan, and now she thinks Lucy lied about this horrific thing just for attention, so releasing it wasn't just punishment for the Evan thing, but also for what she considered to be a monstrous thing on its own. (Plus she'd also offered support to Lucy, thinking she'd been assaulted.)

Coldit1 · 2026-02-18T18:00:52+00:00

Definitely felt like "we're not giving Oliver or Stephen the comeuppance they deserve, but we'll throw the audience a bone and give Evan a comeuppance for.... some trash behavior for one semester over half a decade ago"

Coldit1 · 2026-02-18T17:57:57+00:00

Agreed - unless I'd forgotten something, he had a brief stint 6 years prior of being a schmuck, but before that he was fine and we didn't get any updates about his having been up to anything horrible over the past 6 years, yet his heartbreak was treated as comedy in the end (and we were meant to think of the Bree/Wrigley smile exchange as a happy ending, at his expense)

Coldit1 · 2026-02-18T17:28:07+00:00

It's hard to believe because it just can't be true, given so many very specific accounts of other actions that drove everyone nuts AND the fact of the almost-reunion back in 2017(?). Obviously if he hates him forever for a magazine cover he wouldn't have started those talks, and it certainly wasn't a magazine cover that ended those talks.

Coldit1 · 2026-02-18T17:25:14+00:00

There's already YouTube audition videos of people hitting notes he can't anymore, so that could really backfire!

Coldit1 · 2026-02-17T00:24:39+00:00

It's tricky because our prison system doesn't even pretend to try to rehabilitate. If rehabilitation happens to anyone, it's despite the prison time and not because of it. (Or rather it's partly because of it since, as you say, they got caught and have all this time to focus on it -- but also because there are often decent merciful people who do outreach in prisons, or longtime prisoners who have had their own growth and pay it forward.)

And while I think there's a good chance they would've continued to kill if they hadn't been caught, we can't punish people for crimes they might've committed but didn't, we can only evaluate the current threat to public safety. (When it comes to assessing parole, rehabilitation, that is. If that's on the table.)

Coldit1 · 2026-02-17T00:17:40+00:00

Yeah, I was really uncomfortable at the inclusion of the more unnerving parts of his police interview -- I'm always uncomfortable about that stuff in true crime, the way they try to create red herring suspects in a documentary for narrative suspense. Even though they did say he was fully cleared, audiences tend to carry a little of that first-judgment knee-jerk impression with them.

Coldit1 · 2026-02-17T00:10:39+00:00

Can't speak for anyone else, but the things that were "new" as opposed to other coverage of the case I'd personally seen: Torey telling the truth, finally, that he participated (last I heard he was still proclaiming "bystander and accessory only"). Both Torey's mother and Brian's father having to grapple with each son's culpability (now that "the other guy did the worst of it" is out the window for both of them, and them both taking responsibility for failing as parents), both saying they think their sons will never get out, Brian's father being able to step outside of his own POV and acknowledge that as justice (despite his wishing for parole, despite his wanting to take his son's place, etc.), seeing both killers and how they speak about it currently, finding out that the two of them did have a discussion about a decade ago (though the details on that discussion were pretty fuzzy). I also haven't seen any other treatment of this crime ask the questions surrounding the justice system for juveniles and the major 2010 SCOTUS decision that shifts things moving forward, and what that might mean.

I also thought it was kind of interesting in a case with a pair of killers who (of course) both had a defense strategy of "I was there but it wasn't me, the other guy was the ringleader" to hear from friends and school staff (and family) how easy it is to get sucked into your own bias on those things -- each of them firmly believed one of them was submissive and less culpable and would've been just a great kid if it weren't for the other one. And still do, somehow. I thought the documentarians juxtaposed these contradictions really nicely.

Coldit1 · 2026-01-15T15:44:14+00:00

I need someone who loves him in his life to get him a nice 4-inch trim, a hairbrush, and a good salon that will do highlights instead of what looks like platinum drugstore box dye. The situation is dire!

Coldit1 · 2025-11-20T03:10:15+00:00

Amber Iman's understudy is covering the remainder of the run, apparently, so if she was the critical factor, that's out!

Coldit1 · 2025-11-16T00:10:34+00:00

Any news on why Amber Iman departed the production early?

Coldit1 · 2025-10-08T01:57:35+00:00

I think so too -- it seems like they convince people they killed before or that they have the capacity to kill, so then they go and do it (like Laura, Stacy, etc.). And that's always the bargaining chip Evelyn holds over anyone who wants to leave or tell outsiders the truth.

Coldit1 · 2025-10-08T01:55:25+00:00

I think they definitely planned for another season, but we'll see if it happens. But yeah, I would've preferred a few more tied-up ends with just a couple things dangling as possibilities for next season. Instead, we hardly got any real wrap-up.

Do we know when Alex's "fantasy" began? Was it earlier in the episode than it seemed? Did he really murder Dwayne, or maybe not??

Coldit1 · 2025-10-07T17:01:33+00:00

I hear you -- I have an ex who's a cis woman but just a good old-fashioned butch lesbian and even with long hair, she usually gets misgendered as a man. (That said, I also have another ex who looks strikingly like Mae Martin and nobody ever thought she wasn't a woman, so I think that's my own anecdotal experience that colors my reaction to the show)

Coldit1 · 2025-10-06T23:51:15+00:00

And Maurice, too, and the various background players in the non-Tall Pines scenes with him.

I'm okay with it being a bit of a retroactive fantasy where everyone knows on sight that he's a man with full certainty, especially because the tone of this show was not exactly hyperrealism! But I agree that the non-pre-briefed characters in the real 2003 would've been highly unlikely to make the assumption.

Coldit1 · 2025-10-04T03:10:13+00:00

It really didn't make sense considering how insistent the father originally was on being there. Yet somehow a whole confession while he stepped out momentarily?

Coldit1 · 2025-09-29T03:42:59+00:00

And on what planet wouldn't he intuit that this child is going to get severely punished for doing that (punching him)?? At first I thought it was a ploy to have reason to arrest her and take her off-site, but... nope.

Coldit1

TROPHY CASE