Watched the musical 'Wicked'. Had gone brainwashed with sky-high expectations and spectacular reviews. Wicked matched every expectation, except for those that it surpassed. When Elphaba soars up the stage with her transformation complete as the Wicked Witch of the West...there was magic then. When Glinda comments frothily about the Emerald Island: "It's so Ozmopolitan", there was magic there. The choreography, the music, the message of that musical...it was all magic, magic, magic! There's this proximity to brilliance within touching distance that a stage show brings that a movie - with all its 3-D effects and whatever else - will never compare with. When you watch something great on stage, you know that it hasn't been 'managed' or 'edited' or 'crafted'. You know that it has been brought forth that moment only for you. As an audience of a good film, I feel happy. As an audience of a good stage show, though, I feel privileged. As for Wicked...it was most certainly an honour.
I love courtroom dramas. I love non-linear storytelling. I love thrillers. I love tender love stories that embellish such series of grit, grime, and blood. This series delivers on all counts, dips somewhat after a couple of seasons, gets uneven and predictable (when it is less courtroom and more drama) and then finishes strong. The series centers around Annalise Keating who is a fierce, black criminal lawyer who also teaches a class in criminal law (which she calls 'How to Get Away with Murder'). As a teaching methodology, she gets her class to weigh in on her live cases. Part of her strategy also involves picking a handful of promising students and have them work in her 'lab' where they get to help her in strenuous arguments and civil suits, etc. The plot thickens, a murder happens, people get involved, incriminated, incarcerated, and dead. I found a couple of characters in this cast to be really unlikeable - Michaela, Laurel, and Bonnie. After the first couple of se
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