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Music (in order)
Cody Francis - Feel So Lucky
Erasmus Talbot - Cuckolds All In A Row
Auxjack - Startup
Howard Harper-Barnes - A Place For Us
Smartface - Bear Hats
Tape Machines - Evergreen Fields
Zoë Blade - Walking in the Rain
a proshot of hadestown but james corden is still somehow there. they photoshop him in
Wait for Him I guess (Also the nightmares that will induce oof 🤧)
@@SearchedForTheTruth any way the wind blows, it blows him in. all I’ve ever known is james corden
@@alisondices this made me laugh way harder then it should probably 🤣
WHY WIULD U SAY THIS UR GONNA SUMMON HIM
@@sverenagain CordenTown coming to a theatre near ya
Since you brought up the Wicked movie. My hot take is that the movie should be animated. I feel animation is better able to capture the feeling and spectacle of the original stageplay than live action ever could. But of course the Wicked movie would never be animated since Hollywood hates animation.
Yup, also voice actors and always work on “This project needs a big name!” And that’s how Chris Pratt ends up as Mario.
could work in live-action with wizard of oz tier production. ie shot in a super-wide picture format, graded so its the same technicolour shades as the original, focus on set design/handmade "feel" for overall coherence. ofc this is a lot of work and money for what could sort of be achieved at half the price with overseas vfx , so this probably won't happen.
Yes! OH YES!!! I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thought of this! An animated Wicked movie would be perfect! Imagine what they could make the ‘Defying gravity’ sequence look like!?
@@katherinealvarez9216 While I agree, Chris Pratt is perfect for that most likely fever dream of a movie, he is either going to be on point or way off mark no in between. And I dont know which will be funnier
Minkyu Lee, a disney animator has a series of character concept art for an animated Wicked. I loved them years ago and i still love them today and would be ecstatic to see an animation in similar vein.
It occurs to me how much "Accidentally let the family believe that you knew a kid who killed himself, so you could have sex with the dead kid's sister" sounds like an Always Sunny episode idea.
Very Dennis behavior
@@otakucouture to me it feels like Mac or Charlie, since it was an accident at first. Dennis would coach them through all the lying though
@@matthewburdick4966 LOL that reminds me of the scene where Dennis is like, "she wouldn't say no because of the IMPLICATION."
"The Gang Goes Broadway" would be an amazing "very special episode" like the Christmas one where Charlie asks if Santa is fucking his mother or the one where Mac comes out as gay and dances on stage in front of Frank.
It sounds like an always sunny episode that was ripped by someone who didn’t get the joke
Jenny Nicholson: *eviscerates Dear Evan Hansen for over an hour* Sara Z: "It's not dead yet. Keep firing."
🤣
Stake it in the heart ant chop off its head just to be safe.
"Blow that piece of junk OUT OF THE SKY!!"
Oh no not Jenny
@@highdefinition450 why not
I work in a library and we have a permanent LGBTQ+ shelf in the teen section for displays. This morning I was helping a teen look for "We Are Totally Normal" and ended up finding the novelization of DEH and both of us were like "oh boy someone still didn't get the memo that it's not about a gay kid."
I think Conner is actually gay in that one
@@cakepop918 I feel like that kinda makes it worse. At least in context for the teen shelf in the library. "Here, burgeoning teen reader figuring yourself out - the one gay character in this one takes his own life right at the beginning!"
@@TheSaltyLibrarian Yeah it totally does
i own that book, and yes, connor is actually gay/queer! i think the book is much better than both the musical and movie, story-wise, because it actually tells connor's story in between the evan parts (the book cuts between their perspectives/plotlines) and you learn a lot about connor's life, something that doesn't happen in either of the other iterations of the story. he has a romance with a guy named miguel that iirc is part of what contributes to his s*icide. it has connor, as a ghost, viewing the events of the "evan plotline" (in which he lies about being connor's friend) and being really confused by the whole thing. miguel also meets evan at the end of the book. honestly i really wish they had adapted the book to screen instead of the musical, its just a much much better and more interesting story (note that it's been like 4 years since i read the book so my recollection of its quality might not be super accurate) tldr: yeah, the DEH book should be shelved in lgbtq books
@@cakepop918 yeah Connor is bisexual, however since he's just sorta used a plot device it's still shitty to have that there.
can't wait for the version of Dear Evan Hansen where Dear, Evan, and Hansen are 3 triplets pretending to be one depressed teenager trying to scam a rich family into giving them all their money
I would watch this
Now, that, that I would watch
That sounds hilarious I want it
I'm gonna go write that fic I think
a fic in which three brothers (dear, evan, and hansen) are sold to one direction because their parents can’t pay the bills that month
Everyone keeps talking about what Dear Evan Hansen did wrong, but no one talks about the one thing they did right. - I didn't see James Corden on the screen. Not even once.
All movie musicals will get bonus points for not including James Corden, no matter how shit.
Okay I can't believe Sarah actually made the same joke in the video jfldjfkfl
Cinderella should have taken notes.
@@karinmaria6455 I haven't seen the video when I commented lol 🙈🙈
It's funny because when he co-wrote and starred in Gavin and Stacey, his comedic style was very down-to-earth and didn't feel like it was mugging for attention all the time; don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be shocked if people don't like his older stuff, he also did Horne and Corden with Matthew Horne, which, just from the awful memory, is frankly the worst sketch show I've ever seen in my life. But after he did his first ever Carpool Karaoke sketch in 2011 for Comic Relief, a British comedy event for charity for those who don't know, something happened, it pretty much became his schtick and it's gotten more divisive with each passing year and it seems to have tipped over into people just outright despising his schtick.
as a gay person “the only man that I love is my dad” is a hilarious line. like, I want to laugh at it every time I hear it. If I ever write a musical about two gay high school boys who are friends and trying to wingman for each other but neither has been in love before I’m going to blatantly plagiarize that line.
Yeah, it deserves to be in a better musical
I really want this to be a thing actually
"The only woman I love is my mom?"
How specific
'hilarious'? yeah, that's one way of putting it. it's also reinforcing homophobia. this piece is taught in school and without criticizing this line only one message gets through. plus it reveals the central theme of _all you need to do is just believe you can be who you wanna be_ as fake as the friendship between Connor and Evan
Actually they weren’t on Zoeys bed in “if I could tell her” It was conners bed Which makes it So much worse
Oh god that makes it more worse
Rewatched this video a few times and every time I scroll past this comment I hear "yOu tRieD tO kiSS zOE mUrPHy,, oN hER brOTher'S bEd,, aFteR hE dIED??" ring through my brain. jared didn't make good points very often in this show but I'll give him that one
WHAT
@@alim.9801yeah… I’m not even going to lie I’m love this musical but omg Evan makes some really awful decisions
Convinced at this point Emily’s full legal name is “My co-writer Emily”
Na, it's actually Mai 'Co-writer' Emily. You can replace 'co-writer' with other appropriate terms for the conversation!
Mike O’Writer-Emmileigh
It is
@@oldvlognewtricks pff
Her full name is actually "Lady Emily".
Evan Hansen is the Greg Heffley of depressed people.
bold of you to assume that greg heffley isn’t, himself, depressed.
@@topaz_no_life9440 Oh my god.
At least Greg was like a middle schooler so most of his actions can be excused with "Kids are twats".
@@justas423 Rowley we arent kids anymore we're Tweens
I hate how absolutely accurate this is.
The idea that releasing pro shots of musicals would negatively affect ticket sales is honestly pretty silly to me. Like people still go to concerts even though you can easily look up live performances on youtube. The energy is different when you get to experience it live and Hamilton just proves that watching a recording of it can make people want to see it live even MORE.
Unfortunately, Broadway is about clout and status, not accessibility. They use the theoretical lost ticket sales as an excuse.
SO much agree. i have a season pass to a theme park, and i love seeing their shows live. but the ones i really like, i find on youtube to rewatch. its not as good as in person but it makes it accessible to others which i think is AMAZING. and i would still pay to go see the shows in person, and i do lol.
I watched a Waitress bootleg when Sara Bareilles starred and still went to see it on broadway after - these excuses are feeble
also like. those of us who are abroad aren't gonna go watch it live anyway, and it's not because of a proshot... it's because most of us simply can't fly out to another country just to see a musical lol. i'd love to be able to do that but i'd say that's like the 1% of international fans. to not release a pro shot is to intentionally exclude everyone who is literally in every other country but the us/uk sometimes, which is... At Least Iffy
Literally… and ppl get so angry abt bootlegs being filmed/spread which like, yes it’s technically not allowed, i personally don’t think it really hurts the show. i rly agree on the point you mention about how seeing it in a video makes you wanna see it even more - for me i especially agree as i get so excited seeing staging/how the show moves. ALSO, for shows that aren’t all told in singing so the opposite of the hamilton-type, it would take me a while to understand the story through the songs (maybe it’s just a me problem idk) so seeing the dialogue was super helpful for me to appreciate the show
I thought this show was about a bullied, depressed, and probably-gay kid named Evan Hanson going missing (with a very very strong implication that he killed himself) and the rest of his classmates trying to find him and/or come to terms with how they screwed up so badly that they allowed him to end up where he did... evidently I was even more wrong about the plot than most other people, lol
I'd rather watch your musical instead lol sounds cool
@@rockifythis Haha, thanks! Looking back on this with some newly-gained slight knowledge of the actual musical, I guess I must’ve heard a few seconds of the “you will be found” song, combined that with what the poster looked like (Evan without his face being shown -> a play centered on a character who’s never actually seen?), and sort of... drew conclusions from there
great now make a musical or a book or something i need the rest of the story 😫
Your musical sounds like the plot of 13 Reasons Why if it was actually nuanced. Like the characters are the ones who reflect on how they may have contributed to a person's declining mental state and suicide, seeing how it changes their relationships and perspectives, rather than the girl turning their suicide into some sort of revenge plot (you know, the one way you should never portray suicide because it unintentionally glorifies it). Congratulations, you just fixed two stories and also made me realise that popular media really can't handle the topic of suicide well.
@@AllyGatorAnimator never seen 13 Reasons Why but oh lord, it sounds like a hot mess 😬
the movie having him confess his lie on the internet as a good ending is a big "tell me you're not online much without telling me you're not online much" move. That kid's life is now over. There's going to be youtube communities dedicated to calling any prospective employees and tell them about the terrible thing evan hansen did when he was a teen.
I agree, but at least he said something... even if he's cancelled forever, putting an apology out online is better than just trying to make people forget it ever happened imo
yeah that guy is done
@@alexawatchingyoutube honestly i'm not sure. I feel like that would detract from the actual subject, which should be connor. it's not really getting justice for connor at that point is it? why is this kid who's dead now's life any business of anyone else? I feel like yeah it's good to make up for your mistakes but I don't think confessing them on a soapbox should be the norm. It makes sense in some circumstances but i think it's really messed up how much of peoples private lives and struggles we feel morally obligated to make public. it's hard to convey the complexity of a situation online when everyone is speaking so much and so fast. it's not like any actual good would come from a confession of sins. what would be better is making sure that connors family gets privacy and room to mourn. the only thing i would encourage Evan to do is to defend connors parents in that situation. and even then, it might be better for them to be able to greive by immediatly putting out zero information and cutting yourself off from that story. I just don't like how normal it is to publicly sort out your baggage, especially now with how fast and how much communication there is from all over the world. not everyone needs to know everyone elses business and it can be really damaging to a psyche to think that if you fuck up at all online, because it's so much a part of everyones lives now, that you have to unload every lesson and apology you've ever learned for a cast of millions.
@@alexawatchingyoutube tbh i'm not even thinking about morality, just writing? if that makes any sense, but i assume we're supposed to like evan to some degree and wish him to do well, become a bettr person etc. in the show, he lost the family and his girlfriend, and has to realise that he really hurt people, including his mom. putting the apology video online really escalates things to a point where i can't buy into the 'Evan had some growing up to do but he'll be fine' ending. If he's unlucky, he'll be unable to go anywhere from here without being hounded by people demanding 'justice'. And they did fundraising based on a lie, he might be in actual legal trouble? it's less of an ending and more the opener to a legal drama movie.
It's even more ironic considering a cut song from the original stsge musical called "going viral" is exactly about how you can never escape what you once uploaded
the moment where evan drops his cards during his speech is also in the stage production. it works so well on stage because when i saw it live, people in the audience laughed at him as he fumbled the cards. he looked so viciously sad afterward i remember the moment still, even though i saw the show years ago. it makes you complicit in tearing this kid down, it makes *you* the crowd he’s giving the speech to, which i think also deepens the impact of the “speech.” totally bungled in the film lol
Bruh that's messed up wtf
@@highdefinition450 lmao to be fair i’m gonna assume that the character picked the cards up in a silly/weird way. if not, that’s a messed up audience 😭
@@horizonkyun7203 Yeap! When I saw this live the actor made it looks extra clumsy, almost in a comedic fashion. There wasn't any loud laughter but chuckles here and there, until we saw him on the floor looking terrified whilst crawling backwards. Honestly I really didn't like the musical but that part I have to give kudos to!
It works better on stage because of the literal stage. The actor looks so small on the massive stage and it shows just how small that moment feels.
“Viciously sad” is such a good way to put that. I saw Michael Lee Brown play Evan and this moment was like a punch in the gut. It makes you empathize with Evan even if you rightfully view him as someone who’s doing a lot of really fucked-up things
When I was in high school one of my best friends was diagnosed with a serious form of cancer. She died a year after high school and so many people started claiming how close they were with her. Our friend group was always together at school and would hang out regularly only with each other, so we knew who was super close with who. One guy wormed his way into her family by constantly claiming how they basically were inseparable and making big facebook posts about it. Some of us liked to grieve more privately so we started to be viewed as not as close to her. Eventually, the rest of us in this friend group (except one person) stopped being invited to her celebrations of life events with her family, but he was. This musical reminds me so much of that pain. Of losing all ties to this person you loved and adored because someone decided they wanted to falsify their closeness with her. It hurts to this day.
I am so sorry
Holy shit that’s just disgusting
May they rest in peace, may that monster get what’s coming
I hope he has been outed as a fraud by now.
I'm so sorry for your loss and that that shitty guy did that
I think Jenny's take on making Jared gay was right: simply so that they could recontextualise his more homophobic lines.
lbr most of his lines were homophobic lmao
@@rowannagy3033 I get this. Making a character gay while having that character constantly make homophobic jokes would just make it seem like the writers wanted a way to tell homophobic jokes, but then use the fact that the character is gay as an excuse.
@@cloudstrife4534 exactly! I actually like the gay jokes in the show and didn’t find them homophobic but I get the decision they made ig. Can’t have people being mad about another thing abt this movie yk 🥴
@@Rachel-xu7jj It's like, I'm not offended by a 16 year old character making homophobic jokes if the production understands that it's immature and not an overall good. But the rewrites don't trust us to see a kid being immature, even as they're trying to sell us a whole other 2 hours of kids being immature!!
@@QuikVidGuy aggghhh this
"We can't do that to Ben Platt!" That one sentence explains, so much, in a really ironic way...
+
But Ben Platt ended up doing them...
"... because his father is a really powerful producer who could ruin our careers" is the part they usually leave out.
@@4203105 if I were Ben Platt I’d be an adult and tell my dad to knock off that shit bc it babies me and it’s fucked up to threaten people because you what dad think I need extra help But I feel like he ain’t gonna do that
@@Lucifersfursona babies with 💵 💵 💵 a sense of self-actualization is only worth so much - plus you can just pretend you earned it through merit and get best of both worlds
In my opinion, there is one incredibly easy change to have Evan face the consequences for what he did: have Zoe refuse to speak to him at the end. Show that that bridge is burned. Heck, it would make the finale even more meaningful, because Evan would end the play telling himself he's just himself and that's okay despite knowing Zoe doesn't want anything to do with him--that he accepts that he did something horrible to her and her family but he's not defined by it and he's trying to be a better version of himself day by day. The Murphy's don't owe these sketched out details of their son's life to a bunch of random strangers--it's certainly not going to make anything better. You can't unfuck what Evan did, you can only move forward.
Waaaaaait... So she DIDN"T cut him off at the end???? I always thought she did????? It'd make no sense for her to keep in contact with him at this point WHY did they do that?????
@@Alex-rj9sg I'm pretty sure she cut him off--I meant that at the orchard during the final scene, they have a conversation and she admits that the orchard is really nice and has become a place her family visits to remember Connor, which gives a definite tone of forgiveness and that things kind of workers out. Having her refuse to talk to him THERE is what I'm talking about.
@@sbondiw7943 Personally i'd like a mix of both. A "this is the last time i will ever interact with you, and i just want these thoughts off my chest" sorta thing, y'know? I feel that it should say that "yeah what you did was fucked up, extremely, but i see why it happened and atleast something good came from it", as it fits more with the tone but still gives that same depth. Maybe that's just me, however
@@sbondiw7943 workers out
Personally, I think it makes some sense, at least for Zoe. Remember, while Larry and Cynthia genuinely loved Connor and only felt disconnected from him, Zoe’s relationship with Connor was far more antagonistic, so she would be the one to most likely move forward with it and reconcile with Evan to an extent. Not to mention that, even though Evan tried to kiss her, SHE was the one who initiated their relationship. The ending doesn’t show a mending of their relationship, just a mutual understanding, and implies that both of them are going their separate ways but don’t have bad blood between them.
"His best friend died... you won't believe what he did next!" I thought this was a joke Jenny Nicholson made. I am a little taken aback that this was the real title and played totally straight. I do really appreciate your different takes though! Good stuff!
I’m assuming (???) it’s a nod to how artificial and hollow the public concern for Connor and Evan was which is shown a bit more in the play, but of course the movie does nothing with it so
@@akorn9943 yeah it's definitely meant to be that way, but I think it's just so over the top and ridiculous that the message falls flat
The problem I have with it is that like a lot of social media references, it dates the movie. Viral videos just aren't titled like that anymore, and they haven't been for years! Even the phrase "viral video" feels kinda off
when I saw that in theatres I nearly pissed myself silent scream laughing, got some dirty boomer side eye for it.
One girl literally goes "oh my god" with an odd chuckle while watching that speech. Like the hell did he say to make someone react that way???
if riverdale did a dear evan hansen musical episode at least the adults hired to play teenagers would be attractive
I feel like I've just witnessed a murder
This undid my last therapy session
I had to unheart this because it felt too mean but LMFAO
id report this as a crime but honestly, its a public service
this is so mean but i love it
Ru Paul calling Evan Hanson "Dear" is the funniest thing in the entire world. Sometimes if I'm having a bad day I just load up that clip. It clears up MY depression.
Same energy as “trains pride flag” honestly
I wonder if he was confused when people kept calling Dear Hansen by his middle name of Evan?
anxiety meds: expensive, has side effects, difficult to remember, not instantaneous ru paul calling evan hanson "dear": free, only side effect is thinking about the clip in class, easy to remember, immediate effect
"And uh Ben Platt, who plays Dear, he gave everything."
ABSOLUTELY
Alana should've had a really upbeat, high energy song that mirrored her way of dealing with depression was being involved in everything so she didn't have time to stop and think about how scared she is of her own thoughts. I love those songs that give the feeling of running down a hill and you can feel yourself losing control of your momentum but have no way to stop. THAT would've been unique
dude now i want this real bad
Somebody please make this
Oh that's really interesting (and relatable haha). May I ask for suggestions of songs like that? That sounds really cool. I've only recently gotten into musicals and the only song like that that I can think of is Voules Vous in Mamma Mia.
@@Art-zp1qg I think that something like a ballad that goes into a patter song like Not Getting Married Today?
sort of the same energy level as Play Rehearsal in Be More Chill?
I was one of the people who thought this musical was about a gay kid. I thought that he had a secret relationship with Conor, and when Conor ends his life. Evan has to pick up the pieces and pretend that they were only best friends. So waving through a window hit me harder when I first heard it, versus now with me knowing the plot. I wish it was about a gay kid, maybe ill write something like that one day.
That actually sounds like a great story
Please do write something like this, it is a great idea.
@@moonbeamsun9066 ive grown up as a closeted Bisexual in a Mormon community. I honestly would love to be an author so once I do I'll write back on this comment.
@@j.r.341 thanks I'll probably try using it!
please write this
Honestly, it’s kinda darkly funny how so many people thought it was a coming out story given how homophobic so many of the jokes in the show are.
Also the fact that I thought it was this feel-good show but it was actually super depressing
Well technically there is something called internalized homophobia and how some gay people on a coming out journey can and do sometimes suffer from that mindset
I thought it was related to the Love Simon cinematic universe
At this point I feel like people don't actually understand lyrics and just see what they want to. Other examples include Trump supporters dancing to RAtM (not that Dear Evan Hansen fans are like Trump supporters of course).
@@ashikjaman1940 RAtM?
What hurts about stage musicals is the inaccessibility to regular people, we need proshots! Great job broadway, you made a compelling story about a lower middle class kid with social anxiety, but who's in the audience? Great job broadway, you made a musical uplifting actors of color and black music, but who's in the audience? The majority of broadway audiences are rich and white, but broadway has stories that everyone deserves to hear, we deserve an actual proshot, not a watered down movie musical while the original is preserved for those who are lucky enough.
YES YES YES!
Broadway needs to just pony up the money and start cutting deals to get these shows more available. There's plenty of shows I WANT to check out, but I don't have the money to just up and travel hundreds of miles to NYC and buy an equally expensive ticket to go to one of them.
Facts!!
I'm not much a musical fan, but I can see the need for more professional recordings. Especially for shows that are crazy popular. You're only restricting supply where there is a demand you could not possibly meet with just showing it on the stage. Also, it'd be a great way to get more people into theater. If you're someone in the middle of the country with just a passing interest in stage shows you're not going to spend your time and money to go to NYC on something you may or may not like. If you lower the barrier to entry you're inevitably going to find some people who later make that trip. It's like streaming new movies now. There's simply going to be a lot more people who will watch a movie if they don't have to go to the cinema. This is also why I think people saying "a bazillion people streamed it" isn't as strong an endorsement as people would like to think. Of course people are going to watch it if it has hype, they don't have to leave home and can play on their phones the whole time, but the more people see it the more dedicated fans you'll make.
And when they stop doing the show, people can still enjoy the performances for years to come through DVDs and streaming.
I will not ever understand why musicals almost never get adapted to ANIMATED films. Disney has proven time and time again that animation is a great medium for musicals - it's so much easier in an animated film to create larger-than-life stories, sets, and atmosphere. You can take huge risks, bend and warp time and space to suit your needs, do so much more with 'physical' space to enhance metaphor and tone. You can emphasize the character designs to absurd degrees. I'd absolutely love a proshot of Hadestown....but I'd also love to see an experimental animated film version.
A lot of studios think that audiences think animation is for kids 🤷♂️
I want to see Cats as done by Laika Studios
It's because Hollywood is prejudiced against animation. This is pretty much also the reason Cats wasn't adapted to animation, even though animation would make more sense for it. While I'm not too familiar firsthand with musical theater it does feel like a medium that would be easier to translate to animation than live action.
Ok hear me out: Heather's done by the same studio that did Hazbin Hotel. COME ON, you KNOW that would fuck so hard
"One single positive thing about the casting in the Dear Evan Hansen film is that James Corden is not in it." I actually yelled. This is the most incredible burn on both sides, well done
Now I want a dark version of Dear Evan Hansen where Connor is haunting Evan Macbeth-style. Connor starts off frustrated but happy that his family is getting closure and he’s being remembered. But then he gets increasingly angry and terrified at seeing how Evan is making up lies about him and using his death for his own gain, essentially replacing Connor.
The climax is Evan killing all the Murphys in hopes that Connor will leave him alone now that he “gets to be with his family again” and tell them the truth. But then they ALL start haunting Evan. It ends ambiguous as to whether or not Evan also commits suicide, unable to handle the torment from the ghosts anymore.
Reminds me of heather chandler haunting Veronica lol
Yes yes yes
"Is this a tiktok which I see before me, the virality extended towards my hand? Come, let me clutch thee."
in the book based on the musical, there are actually some small chapters scattered throughout of connor's "ghost" observing what evan's doing
Not to trauma-dump in this comment section, but as someone who quite literally lost her brother to suicide during high school, I even hated the original musical. I just felt like even with Good for You, Evan was treated way too nicely for what he did. I mean, the thought that someone could have used my and my mother's grief to essentially get into my pants genuinely makes me ill. Plus there is a part of the fanbase that seems to think that Zoe is a bitch for not taking Evan back and like... Yikes.
It is really disgusting how entitled people think they are to others feelings. Just because Evan is a sad boy doesn't mean he's a good boy either. If roles were switched n Zoey was the protagonist, Evan will definitely be the villain n rightfully so
yeah, it's handled very distastefully... I'm sorry for your loss, that must have been really hard to go through.
I also lost my brother in high school and when I first read the summary of the musical I was appalled that anyone would see Evan as a redeemable character.
I am so sorry for your loss. I haven't had that experience, but I remember learning about the musical and listening to the soundtrack and the whole thing grossing me out so much as I imagined what the poor family, and especially Zoe went through. Once a friend of my sister lied to her about something really serious (pretending to have cancer), and it emotionally destroyed her when she found out, and I just imagine the pain Zoe must have felt to have also been lied to.
As someone with depression, anxiety, and Borderline Personality Disorder, I could see myself having the THOUGHT of trying to connect like Evan did, but would never do it Also yes, my name is Evan
They cut Jared so much I don’t know why they even kept him, like if you have to nerf a characters homophobic complements by making them openly gay but remove 70% of their plot probably just make a new character.
What really bugs me about the play and specifically the lack of reveal of Evan’s lie is that, not only is Connor dead, the real Connor is effectively erased from existence. Who he was, what he cared about, what he loved, what he hated is gone and all that’s left is a simplified sketch of a person invented by Evan. An easier and more understandable one that whitewashed the difficulties of Connor’s actual existence. Hell, we don’t even know if he really cared about the orchard by the end - we know he went there as a kid, but everything beyond that is basically random guesswork. This is existentially horrifying if you think about it for like 10 seconds. Also, he fundraises on the basis of his relationship to Connor and Connor’s supposed love of the orchard, which makes the fundraiser sketchy at best and kinda fraudulent at worst.
I know a woman who told me how her nephew committed suicide and the mother was obviously devastated, and her father (the kid’s grandfather) wrote a three page letter TO the family, FROM THE POINT OF VIEW of his deceased grandson. All about how he loved them and what he thought of them in an effort for closure I guess, and as this woman explained this to me, I had a sense of horror at the idea and she asked me, “isn’t that just the sweetest?” Like. NO. This man was pretending to speak for this kid who killed himself- offering a fake POV full of opinions and observations- I just had never thought anyone would find something like that anything less than horrifying honestly.
@@alliewest3657 jfc bro that's rlly sad and creepy.
In an 2 hour musical that is about Evan there is only so much depth they could go into the other characters. This musical is about a kid with severe anxiety disorder that is so bad he would rather go hungry than risk talking to a pizza delivery person. He is so depressed that he jumped from a tree hoping to die. But he didn't die and no one even cared that he was lying there. No one came for him. During For Forever Evan clearly starts believing Connor was his friend. The fantasy of having a best friend took hold. Jared had told him he would devastate Cynthia by telling her the truth. His advice to Evan was to just nod and agree, but Evan being a screwed up kid missed that up. But his intention was just to not hurt the Murphy's. His heart was in the right place, but bad advice and severe mental illness really screwed everything up. Things just escalated from there with the help of Jared and Alanna. Jared was more calculated. Alanna seemed to have good intentions but she definitely helped dig Evan in deeper. For someone with this level of social anxiety, I don't see how he could escape. Perhaps the most unrealistic part was when he told them. His conscience was getting to him and just as he had done in act 1 he blurted out when the Murphy's were arguing.
@@alliewest3657 what the hell ⁉️
@@alliewest3657 that's just insane
The way that Sarah consistently referred to Evan as “dear Evan Hansen “ or “Dear”, thank you
I cannot get over the idea of someone thinking his name is Dear
@@Bjorksbackyard that someone being rupert paul
Jenny Nicholson did the same thing.
Without breaking her expression too, it was expressive.
@@judeconnor-macintyre9874 it never gets old
I think the "Oh my god, Dear Evan Hansen is about WHAT?!" responses make more sense when you consider that everyone talks about the show as a life-affirming, feel good show, when actually it's a miserable drama about teen suicide with a manipulative creep as the protagonist.
Especially if all you know about it is the shipping fandom. Dear lord when I actually learned what this musical was about, the fact people SHIP the manipulative creep and the dead kid is insane.
Except both of those descriptions are wrong.
@@4203105 okay......are you going to volunteer the right description then?
You Will Be Found winds up on a lot of Broadway or inspirational playlists and it sounds really sweet and inspiring out of context. So I think some people hear that song first, find it comforting and then find out that in context it’s kinda grim
It's so weird to me that people liked seeing this show when the character you watch the whole time is such an irredeemably unlikeable guy and even though he's being such an asshole, it's not interesting or nuanced enough to make for anything else... Almost every aspect of the musical itself is underwhelming and not even worth fixing. I hope the movie will just kill it already and i hope nobody believes it says anything about mental health or social media... God it annoys me so much, it's only something you can believe if you don't have any understanding of it. It makes me think about the charlie bit my finger references... that seems like it should have been kept, it reflects that the people who wrote this don't know anything about the internet, actually
Funny story: When this movie came out, I was a big fan of the musical and I was also desperately overdue for a new glasses prescription. I rented the movie out of curiosity because I'd heard it was a train wreck, and I liveblogged my reactions to a friend over discord who hadn't seen it, and the first thing I had to say was how much people must've been overreacting about how old Ben Platt looked (I distinctly remember my friend later in a VC curiously saying "That's weird, I heard he looked super old" when I remarked how surprising it was that he still looked like a teenager). Lo and behold, I did eventually get that change in prescription, and the next time I saw a screenshot of the movie I was in fits of laughter about how wrong I was. The lesson? Be up-to-date on your optometrist appointments I guess!
Lmaooo this is me looking at myself before heading out, thinking aww I'm still a cute teen! Put on my glasses and in HD it's viciously apparent I'm nearly 30
As someone in desperate need of new glasses this cracked me up to read 😂😂
I love how when people speculate plots for what Dear Evan Hansen is about based on listening to the soundtrack or something, it is always better than what Dear Evan Hansen is actually about.
There's not a single Deer in this movie
Fucked up
Oh deer!
The most notable thing about the movie is that it’s imdb page credits two snake wranglers despite no snakes appearing the the film, implying the existence of a secret snake cut
You are right, omg... there are no snakes in the released movie, right? I haven't seen it...
WHAT
#ReleaseTheSnakeCut
There Make Be Snakes
WHERES THE SNAKES...
In Zoe's defense, she drives like that during Requiem because the movie is set in Maryland. Most realistic thing in the film, really.
What are the driving stario types of Maryland?
@@emilydurkee8664 Think of any possible violation of rules of the road. You drive through Maryland long enough, you see 'em happen around you all the time, in any combination.
@@andrewnebztbh I think every state has that same stereotype
Maryland mentioned
What people against bootlegs don't understand is that... bootlegs exist because there is nothing else we can do. I live in Italy. I'm a big musical fan... what exactly should I do to watch Hamilton? The tickets are extremely expensive, the lines are so long sometimes it's impossible to find an available seat for days, and I'm not even talking about plane tickets, hotel, and food, and time I don't have to take a single 800 euro vacation to watch a musical I'M NOT EVEN SURE I'LL ENJOY. But you know what musical I never had to watch from a bootleg. Cats. The Phantom of the Opera. Because I have the damn dvd of the actual show! Musicals talk mostly about poor people and minorities... but they are just for rich american people. If they would just release the original shows on dvd like we do on the opera, you won't have to make cheap terrible movies! And there won't be no need to have a Wicked bootleg version!
I live in Germany. They translate the musicals into German. Including the songs. I don't want to see a second rate version some translator threw together. I want to see the real shit. That I'd rather watcha crappy camera recording should show how much that policy of translating everything is bullshit.
Same. I live in Hungary and only saw Phantom and Le Mis live in my own country, translated of course. But for a show to get that kind of traction it needs to be very popular, usually it has a movie adaptation at that point, so we are behind by many years. And the translation isn't always that great. And the casting isn't always that great. So I would very much prefer accesible proshots on streaming services.
I'm not much for musicals personally, but video gaming has the same nonsense debate going on. Companies will literally refuse to ever sell another copy of a game to anyone anywhere on Earth and then be mad when piracy of said unsupported games crops up. Not to change the topic from musicals, of course.
@@blarg2429 I'll always remember that time Hotline Miami 2 got banned in Australia and the devs supported piracy just so more people will play it.
THIS. The common mantra in the sphere of piracy is "sharing is caring". It makes media and information accessible to ALL people, regardless of location and socioeconomic status.
I wish there were more “movies” like Hamilton, as in just a high quality recording of the show being performed. Surely that is cheaper, easier and safe?
Or actually good adaptations like tick tick boom, where they recognize what can be amd can't be translated to screen
I've always assumed Broadway producers think that it'll somehow lower ticket sales
@@karinmaria6455 false, I saw Hamilton at my local theater, and that thing was PACKED. It was crazy lol, and the actors were really good. It’s nothing compared to seeing it on a screen. Broadway producers don’t have any clue what they’re talking about lol
@@patentpending7016 Oh I completely agree with you, no stage recording will ever make up for actually seeing the show live. It's just that that seems to be an argument I always see pop up, even if I personally think it's dumb.
@@patentpending7016 watching bootlegs honestly make me want to watch the actual musical MORE
"when this movie isn't making the worst choices possible, it's making the most boring ones" is such a wonderful, perfect, inadvertent thesis statement
I honestly think _Dear Evan Hansen_ could’ve been a really good horror musical if right before ‘Only Us’ it was revealed that Evan actually killed Conor and staged the whole thing. Then ‘Only Us’ would end up being really tense because you the audience know the truth but the characters don’t yet.
Haha, oh boy. I'm betting there's gonna be a YOU musical in the future...
@@reikun86 Oh god no
@@junereishi I never thought there was gonna be a Spongebob musical, but here we are...
Oh boy that’s a cool idea
This plot would have worked if Evan thought his letter was why Connor killed himself and the show focused on Evan's feelings of guilt and fear that he'll get into trouble, not his desire for friends and a girlfriend.
Nail on the head. His motivations come across as pretty creepy because of how much he focuses on the sister.
honestly that just sounds like a completely different story than what this play is. Like the theme of how people use the death of the people around them as a prop for gaining things would just not be there.
and like, a thing i commented on jonny nickolson's video of dear evan hansen - as someone with anxiety and all, i'd be so terrified i'd be caught if a family thought i'm friends with their dead kid and i played along. and it would be nice if we had more songs of evan being anxious or doubting if hes doing the right thing or contemplating how to tell them
Or if the narrative didn't try to excuse Evan's lies. DEH had the perfect premise for a really interesting tragic drama with a main character doing shitty things for shitty reasons. It wouldn't even need to compromise on its heartfelt message, as punishment at the end of a story is a common way for writers to say, "Look at this asshole and don't be like them." Maybe Evan tries pushing someone's mental health crisis further for his own gain, and society's misunderstanding of mental illness enables the manipulation until someone else reaches out to the victim. Same moral but with villain songs.
@@pleasantchimera3285 Eh my issue is the inspiration for the musical is how when a kid died in one if the writers high school suddenly everyone acted like they knew him when they didnt. That happened at my school and you know there were people doing it because they wanted attention but more often then not they were freaking out, because someone they went to school with who they could have reached out to, someone a lot of them bullied, killed themselves. Two people who didn't know the kid killed themselves shortly afterwards. It just doesn't sit well with me that someone would use high schoolers dealing with a death of a schoolmate for this moral and not at least acknowledge the other shit people who didn't know Connor are working through.
I feel like society is on the verge of re-discovering what Howard Ashman knew all along: animation is the PERFECT medium in which to adapt musicals. Both use abstraction and have a heightened sense of reality that makes them very compatible. 2D animation making a comeback when???
Yeah I feel like Hollywood needs to realize this. They probably won't, but still. Maybe Howard can haunt them from beyond the grave.
I wish it comes back. So many student animators who do it for projects are already so much better than disneys works-- if they did it more itd just be visually orgasmic
youtube already got it with musical animatics being incredibly popular
PLEEEAse i would kill for that
@@maxscene7 my guess is in 20-something years, when children who grew up on anime being mainstream, who grew up on mature "kids" cartoons with big communities outside its target demographic are ones making media and deciding what media should be made.
Can we all agree that not all musicals need to be made into movies just like all books don’t need to be made into movies…? I’m over it. Producers end up rushing the script and sell a mediocre product to make a quick buck.
Oh, this is a book too. I, I couple years ago, couldn’t get into the musical, for some reason I just didn’t like it, I didn’t like the music, the story… Got the book, read it, was like “This is good!” Then I realized “nah I just wanted to like it, it was bad, not good, weird, not good”
You’re totally right, some musicals should just be left alone. Successful adaptation is such a skill and it seems in many cases it’s too hard to pull off. Even when the original creators are involved, like the Phantom of the Opera film. It’s the same in reverse; have you ever read novelisations of classic films? Some are fine, but there are so many scenes where you can’t help but think ‘that worked in live action’ or ‘this didn’t drag so much when you didn’t have to describe every single action beat’. Counterpoint: I have seen the Back to the Future musical in London with the original cast twice and it was INCREDIBLE. Totally nailed it and I’m not a BTTF super fan but I asked friends who were and they said they were also absolutely in love with it. There were even some small changes that improved the story and flow. Some adaptations are worthy but honestly you wonder why live action film studios gamble on musicals at all.
I feel like this musucal especially could've been a great movie.
"Do you want him to go to child jail too?" 😂😂 I think most people realistically wanted more of the in-universe characters to tell him off or at least show some bewilderment at Dear Evan's weird, kinda pathetic lie spiral
That's what Good For You was! Honestly I feel like that was a worse movie decision than the weird old guy makeup, and that's saying something
@@kells4315 lmao they made a lot of narrative....shifts for the movie 😂
Yeah, that's why "Good for You" is so important. It's my personal favorite of the musical other than requiem, because it really gives the audience a chance to reprimand Evan for his actions. It makes me so sad that they took it out of the musical.
Literally yes, he got huge sums of money for himself and for a charity by telling a bunch of provably untrue lies. That's fraud at the very least, and since we see the orchard gets at least 6 figures, probably other stuff. Those are crimes, and seeing him at least in an orange jumpsuit picking up trash by the side of the road at the end instead of reading fucking RPO would've made it feel like he at least got a slap on the wrist, probably the most that can be expected since he's an upper middle class (not lower, his mom's a nurse) mediocre white man
I wanted Connor's dad to straight up put him through the living room table or something. Give me catharsis, PLEASE.
An hour and 17 minute video from Jenny Nicholson, an extended takedown in the works by Schaf, and now a 2-hour video by Sarah?? Wow, we really hit the jackpot with this movie
I though I’d had an original thought when this came to my mind. I guess there are a lot of us.
Popular bad movie + musical + bewildering ignorance about mental illness puts it in just about everybody's wheelhouse. All it needs to do is take place in the Star Wars universe and it'd be the most internet-critiqued flick ever made.
Omg this is bad but I was like I'm sure I've seen this already is it a reupload? And I was thinking of Jenny's video.
kennie jd reviewed it as well yesterday-- if you want more DEH content its a great vid
Yeah, I'm still waiting for Schaff to come out with the extended DEH video! I really enjoyed Kennie's video on it as well, I think my favourite subgenre is long videos on the DEH film!
He doesn’t look anxious, he looks like he has a fever and is about to throw up
as someone with pretty severe anxiety, ben platt's sickly, hulking form in this movie is exactly how i think i look at all times
@@alick7825 Yeah accurate
to be fair, bad anxiety often does feel like a fever and nausea 😩
Basically the human version of your cat about to puke on the carpet
@@Weirdanimalboy oh my Gooood 🤣
I think it’s so fascinating how people were so shocked to evan’s true character. Musicals have had morally ambiguous leads for ages. Roxie Hart, Harold hill, Sweeney Todd, and basically the full cast of Cabaret immediately come to mind.
Im gonna go watch Chicago
Me: Didn't watch the two-hour-long "Dear Evan Hansen" cause of Reasons Also Me: Watches 3 hours of DHE criticisms from Sarah Z and Jenny
"There isn't *literally* a group of people screaming 'NO NO NO' at Alexander Hamilton when he's about to cheat on his wife" Oh boy would history have been different if that were the case
Bold of you to assume he would have listened.
@@evies.1018 mans was probably an exhibitionist, them damn Reynolds Papers
Of all the bits in Hamilton that one solidified me liking the show bc it was such a great musical moment
Wait, the kid in Dear Evan Hansen is "fixed" by dating and goes off his meds and the show never addresses this????
Yes, popularity is the cure to mood disorders apparently and you can stop your meds cold turkey with no ramifications 🙃🙃🙃
That’s some fuckin Dream Mask shit man stopped taking the normal Pills
@@gamertrask9153 i wear a mask with a smile for hours at a time (but the sus version)
No but he thinks he is and then they never address it
that's supposed to be Evan's perspective, not something the story wants to promote but still fucked up
He had won a Grammy, an Emmy, and a Tony for playing Evan Hansen. My theory is that he wanted to be the first person to EGOT for the same role.
Definitely. Though to be honest that would have been the cheapest EGOT of all time because it would have so little range.
What Sarah said about the “I Want” song being the second or third song in a musical is true. Encanto is another recent example of this. You can’t have “Waiting on a Miracle” without “The Family Madrigal.”
Another issue with cutting Good for You: the song slapped ten times harder than anything else in the show
amen.
I freaking love that song
How they managed to make a real life human being fall into the uncanny valley just with makeup and hair is beyond me
the make up department here should work in horror films, they would kill it
Ben Platt's hair is real. I think they wanted to hide his hairline because he had a different style on stage.
If it was just the makeup and weird lil orphan annie mop head wig, then it’d get a pass. But its Platt’s weird acting that just brings it all together to make it a very weird performance.
having my brother take his own life last year with my mom being overly attached to this musical (having you will be found performed at his funeral), i have had a very complicated relationship with this story, though now that I've sat and thought, i realize that i feel absolutely 0 comfort from this show. if someone had known my brother better then i did (we had a complicated relationship so that would be believable) i would absolutely not want to hear lies about his life. the musical of course says that the Murphy's needed it then, but i would never want someone to manipulate me like that and that feeling really overshadows the "inspirational" messages in the story
Re: Bootlegging musicals and crappy film adaptations: I don't understand why you can livestream concerts and symphonies but not musicals. Last year my husband and I watched several performances from our symphony via livestream. We paid a ticket fee, not as much as we would have live but not insubstantial. The stream was only offered for certain performances. They sent all stream ticket holders the link via email and you tuned in 15 minutes before the concert to catch technical issues. There was even a before performance chat streaming. The venues only hold so many people, and they could make so much more money from people around the world who are NEVER going to fly to NYC. Live shows are still better, I don't think it would affect attendance at all. Just increase it.
I know of this one indie musical production company that does that, it's called Starkid productions. When they're touring they have digital tickets alongside the physical tickets not only that but they release Pro-shots too on KZhead for FREE after about a year or so of the show being on tour. I think more people who make musicals should look at them for inspiration. At least for the digital ticket thing anyway.
@@channelwhatchamacallit2614 Starkid is fantastic and it's so nice to get high quality versions of the musicals they release for free! Like I would love to go see them live but realistically that's not going to be possible for me for a while so it's nice to be able to experience it from home in one of the best conditions possible.
The performers in concerts are not represented by a union in conflict with the film actors union
heck you can livestream OPERA which is basically musicals with slightly different music
It's funny how "His best friend died... You won't believe what happens next!" is supposedly a moment criticizing viral but fake feel-good content. But then the way the movie shows the rest of the sequence plays the sentiment with absolute sincerity. And that statement is basically the plot summary of Dear Evan Hansen. "His best friend died... You won't believe what happens next! He gets the girl! He gets popular! He feels bad for himself though so it's fine. His karmic punishment is having to work while he goes to college!"
You won't believe what happened next -> They buried him.
His karmic punishment is that everyone hates him
+
Have we all collectively realized that Dear Evan Hansen is just 3 Dhar Mann videos in a trenchcoat?
@@nicoledempsey3415 LMAO
I think another reason people thought it was about a gay kid is that “The Connor Project” sounds like “The Trevor Project.” I assumed that was one of those obvious expies fiction will often use.
Well Connor is canonically gay so I think that was intentional (he has a secret boyfriend in the book)
@@nicholast.4933 I'm sorry, he has a secret boyfriend but we have to see the trauma following his death through fucking EVAN??! we've been ripped off.
@@ellaisplotting yeah and he literally only exists for like two scenes
Ironically the movie “Trevor” that inspired the creation of the Trevor project, is now a musical and the character’s costume looks so much like Evan’s
@@nicholast.4933 Oh no, there's a book?
tbh I wished Dear Evan Hansen focused more on Connor. The book is probably my favorite adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen because we get to see Connor's thoughts about his family and school and his ex-friend who I don't think is mentioned in any other DEH adaptation. I feel like if the movie took inspiration from the book then I would've liked it a whole lot more.
Oh, Miguel and Connor were more than just friends
@@fashionablechangeling1988 I know!!!! their arc was honestly so sad but I absolutely loved it
If anything good came from Dear Evan Hansen, it got me curious about Connor.
I loved having Connor’s angle in the book! When I found out it wasn’t in the musical or movie, I wasn’t happy. WHY miss that great opportunity to show Connor’s perspective?
I really liked the book too because we know more about Connor and Evan's daddy issues as well, and felt terrible for Zoe too
There’s no way Hollywood would ever let this happen if Evan Hansen was a female role. He didn’t just look old, he looked washed out and unkempt. An actress who got too old and unattractive would have been out on her ass, nepotism or not
I stand by the fact that Hadestown would be an absolutely GORGEOUS animated film. So much of what makes the staging of Hadestown so good is the ways they creatively interpret the mythological aspects (which obviously would not translate well in live action. Like I just KNOW they would try to use a ton of CGI and it would suck.) But in animation they could lean more into the mythological-inspired settings without having to justify things existing in reality and UGH I need this film to exist so bad
I saw Hadestown in 2017, during a run across Canada where they were still working out the kinks and on god, you're completely right. I don't know what the staging of it is like now, but there were so many moments where the set design and lighting made it *feel* like I was seeing an animation in real life, it would be perfect
110% agree. There are so many Hadestown animatics on this website that could serve as a basis for a feature length version, including a gorgeous full color version of Wait For Me
I agree insofar as that the theoretical perfect film of Hadestown would probably be animated, but the risk there is that often adapting to animation is done to save on time and budget by making it a chintzy cheap bag of references and line-drops, as opposed to because the people making it had a clear creative vision that required an animated medium to work. In alternate realities, both the best and the worst adaptation of this musical are animated films.
As an artist who's heard amazing things about hadestown I want to see this
Honestly, a song of the sea style animation of hadestown would be GORGEOUS
The near-irresistible urge to edit the Dear Evan Hansen Wikipedia page so that Evan's name is Dear.
Do it. I dare you.
@@acchuptalaily7353 more like I _dear_ you
The fact that this is Evan's story and not Connor's was always sort of the point, for me anyways. How could it be Connors story? No one really knew Connor because no one made the effort to get to know him when he was still alive and now it's too late. Whatever his story was will never be told and realizing how unfair and tragic this is reinforces how important it is to reach out to people. This was always the cruel irony about the Connor project, it perfectly showcases why everyone should have a place and chance to be heard, but not through keeping Connor's memory alive but rather by making the audience aware of how messed up it is that in truth no one knows or will ever know, who Connor really was.
4:02 2015 Broadway Musical 🎭 9:17 Positive Praise 11:05 Relationship Shipping & Teenager Broadway 15:32 2020 Movie 🎥 18:20 The Positives 20:20 The Negatives 23:15 Insufficient Punishment? 28:21 Being an Adaptation 39:10 Looking weird and deranged vs understandably teenager 40:22 Song Change from theater stage to Film Screen 48:16 Songs have specific times to heighten emotion and (climax points) 57:34 52:49 Fundamentally Same Struggles 55:35 Dug Into A Hole 1:00:54 The Movie Ending 1:04:40 Connor's Ghost 1:07:37 Cinematography, Staging, Lighting; The Director's toolkit 1:09:45 4th Wall 1:11:05 _The Last 5 Years_ 1:37:54 Film fails on Tone and Direction, and filming in some scenes 1:43:30 Good and Bad Film Adaptation 1:50:52 _Come From Away_ 1:52:35 Musical Film is a challenge to work with 1:53:33 Love Art Resonation with Art 1:57:04 Nebula platform
Thank you!
Ily for this
As someone with anxiety, whose favorite Disney Renaissance movie is Aladdin, who was rooting for "How Far I'll Go" from Moana to win Best Song, and who has developed a seething hatred for P.T. Barnum, I get the distinct impression that Pasek and Paul's songwriting career is specifically aimed to piss me off.
As someone who loves greatest showman: valid moana should have won
Pasek and Paul have become my enemies… I literally can’t escape them and they disappoint every time
At this point a new (movie) musical will pop out that I hate and there's an 80% chance these two were responsible
Damn those headlines were something else: ‘Teen suicide electrifies Broadway’ wtf
the only thing good about the headline is that it caught my attention 😭
there's an actual episode of it's always sunny in philadelphia where mac and dennis find a corpse in their bar and lie to the dead man's daughter about how close they were to her father so that they could sleep with her, and it still manages to be less uncomfortable than this.
23:27 I don’t think it’s ever established whether or not Conner actually ever cared about the orchard. In fact in the novel, it’s stated that he never really thought much of it.
Yeah they have this huge proyect named after him and it's all made up.
I don't think he did. I wish the story delved more into the faux social activism part of the fundraiser. Alana's character interests me because she puts the pressure on that if they don't make enough money to save the orchard, then they will never be able to save the suicidal (pretty extreme and unrealistic, but that's how zealous she was about the project), but because they ended up raising enough money, it's like her position and beliefs were validated. Faux social activism is interesting to me, because it's hard to tell who is really genuine about participating, or who is just doing it for the social brownie points.
I will argue that there is one musical that begins with an "I want" song, and it's perfect. It is The Goofy Movie. I will die on this hill.
Did you see the video by Sideways on that? He said it technically is an establishing song combined with an I want song
@@RM-mx5ol I did! Loved that video, although I only watched it once. I was inspired by that as well as my own observations
The Goofy Movie is the greatest musical of all time.
Several musicals start with the I Want, but it’s less common than saving it for the 2nd or 3rd number.
@@Matrim42 true. I do see Sarah's point that starting with an establishing song makes more sense to set up what the characters want to change about the status quo in the I Want song. But I can think of a few musicals that do both at once. The Goofy Movie, Beauty and the Beast, Heathers kind of does this too. I'm not as big of a musical aficionado as many in these comments are, so I'm sure there are more I'm unaware of.
As a longtime fan of Starkid musicals, which have always been filmed and posted on KZhead for free, I'm so hopeful for proshots becoming more common
Same!
proshots are just so much better than adaptations, you get all the benefits of reaching a wider audience without having to compromise on message, framing, music, impact, any of it!
What’s a proshot?
@@Catglittercrafts A way to watch theaters online in a not potato quality.
@@Catglittercrafts a professional recording of the show, like the one of Hamilton that ended up on disney+
"looking like a dog that swallowed a bee." SARAH. PLEASE. It's too accurate.
I wanted to sympathize with Evan. I really did. He was the best representation of my social anxiety struggles. Still kind of is. Then the movie turns it on its head and makes me feel icky for relating to the representation they held out for us on a string.
That's the thing. Along with his anxiety, his need to please others, and his abandonment issues (dad left, mom works a lot), he wanted what was missing in life (which is understandable.) It gets gross when he resorts to making fake emails and back dating them to look convincing, and passing off his original letter as Connor's suicide note. It's one thing if this was all a big misunderstanding, it's another when we see how far Evan was willing to go to keep the ruse.
I felt that... I really don't like this musical but "Waving through a window" will always be one of the most relatable songs to me
@@reikun86yes, exactly. He isn't a great person, he isn't supposed to be. He's just a teenager who massively fucked up. He doesn't have to act like a great person in other to be a relatable and compelling character. ... Also the book was great, using Connor's pov and the character of Miguel to show how Connor was his own person that Evan capitalized on for his own gain was really good.
DEH winning over the Great Comet of 1812 at the Tonys was my villain origin story
Totally! I love Great Comet sooo much
Great Comet was done SO dirty. It deserved so much more than humanity gave it. 😔
plus you cant even say that deh was the only musical to cover mental health because guess which one ALSO did during the SAME TONY SEASON??? great FUCKING comet. this is also my villain origin story
Dave Malloy is a fucking genius and I will not sleep until more people recognize this fact.
As someone who doesn't really like Dear Even Hansen's source material, I genuinely gasped when I heard you say they cut Good for You. WHY?? IT'S SO GOOD. Out of all the songs to cut, the "consequences" song is NOT THE ONE TO CUT.
They just can't do that to Ben Platt!
Honestly I feel that for everyone who's angry at Evan for his actions throughout the musical, "good for you" is the song that allows the audience to "reprimand" Evan. I remember listening to it the first time and thinking. "Yes Evan get roasted. You can't do something like this." It shows that Evan's actions were wrong. By taking it out of the musical, it makes it seem like Evan was in the right. It drives me insane.
@@Whatlander They can't just do that to Dear*
@@Emma.Lou1 Yeah!! That's exactly why I love it, it's an angry song but it feels... you listen to it and it just feels righteous. Like everyone singing is furious but THEY HAVE REASON TO BE. And you as the audience get to root for characters that aren't Evan for a little bit.
Plus Good for You is the best song in the musical (not sorry), so when she said they cut it I was baffled. It’s as iconic as Sincerely Me, and it’s extremely important for the characters AND the plot.
The horror of stumbling across Sincerely Me, falling in love with it, wanting to watch a show about a (possibly) gay kid's journey and then finding out something very different.
The book actually gives more depth to Conner's character, they should have included some of that
It does, and both could’ve done good with more to him, but I personally don’t like how they did it, though it’s really the only way they could have? I don’t like that he comes back as a ghost. I think it’s better if he stays gone, if he only appears when it’s Evan changing how the world thinks he is. He died, and pretending he’s not doesn’t help with the fact that: He died. He’s gone, he can’t and won’t come back, he shouldn’t be able to see what’s going on, how Evan changes everything; He is dead. It’s harsher, yes, but it’s better than him as a ghost still commentating on what’s currently going on.
@@jamietheangryoctopus5938 I personally didn’t mind he was a ghost. I feel it was an interesting outlook and allowed some proper outside perspective on Evan’s actions. But that’s just me, I love me a good ghost story anyways lol.
I’d like to add that if you read the Dear Evan Hansen script, it actually states that Good For You takes place in Evan’s head. They’re not actually saying that stuff to him, but that’s pretty hard to make obvious on stage. No mother would actually be written to talk to their son like that lmao
That actually makes sense now
It really throws me because it reminds me so much of a relative of mine, to such a degree that I always skip it because it puts me in a bad headspace. Which is even more unnerving because at no other point in the show is she like that at all. So it makes sense that it’s Conner’s anxiety and guilt creating monsters out of people he knows.
Yeah, I never knew that!
damn no wonder why he looks like such a sociopath in the movie, they took away his internal guilt song
They could have easily done it by making that scene an unnatural color, or having more of them in the show, instead of just one random one with no context
The thing on props not having to be 100% realistic for the stage is soooo true. I know a guy that lost the plastic prop gun before the scene and just did finger guns instead. It only elevated the humor even more.
What musical was it?
That's adorable. I'm glad it worked out for the production.
Just... just look up all the things that have played Milky White. It's always hilarious seeing how different stagings will portray him
I know a guy who lost his prop gun and just ended up using a real one. Mr Baldwin is still facing the legal repercussions of that decision
Let me guess, Play that goes Wrong?
One of the reasons I think Chicago is one of the best movie musicals. Incorporation of the musics numbers on a stage, shown to be in Roxie’s imagination. It’s like crazy ex girlfriend, we have a further sense of disbelief because we can tell it is not happening in real life, but in the character’s head and is how they are interpreting what’s happening around them.
an idea a friend of mine had re: connor’s song was to just. Make the song a slower, acoustic rendition of waving through a window with maybe slightly different lyrics. it’d be a great way of bringing the similarities between connor and evan full circle.
Lol I wrote lyrics for a Connor version of waving through a window when I was like 15 and I'm sure I wasn't the only one, so there's no excuse
Amusingly enough, the musical did something similar with Alana. I haven't watched it, but I know there is a reprise of Waving Through a Window in there that Alana sings
When talking about how old Ben Platt looks I immediately thought about grease and how it was obvious that the actors were older. However what made grease work vs Evan Hanson is the fact that it wasn't one older person as the lead and everyone else looked younger it's that literally everyone looked roughly the same age or a bit older and it was obvious they were all adults so it's easier to suspend disbelief
Personally, I can't suspend my belief enough to enjoy or believe Grease.
grease is like the reverse bugsy malone to me. adults playing teenagers vs children playing adults. the consistency and inherent silliness of it all makes it easy enough to suspend disbelief enough to be able to enjoy the film. dear evan hanson's problem is all the others look at least somewhat young enough to be passable as teens, except for ben platt.
I think what also helps is that the adults (the principal, phy ed teacher, the server at the malt shop, etc.) look significantly older than the students, showing more of a stark contrast between both.
Yeah. The Grease cast looked old, but cohesive. Ben Plat just stands out a huge pale curly thumb.
when you showed clips from the movie i assumed the repetitive cutting was done by you in a way to avoid copyright, until you talked about the poor editing choices and i realized it is entirely edited using shot reverse shot
YUP
I- same omg
I think this has been said before but I always feel a bit disgusted when I think about the promotional campaign for every single production of DEH - even the movie. When 'You Will Be Found' became the message, people watching the show due to that promotional campaign are then left with such a profound confusion regarding what this show was meant to be about. Maybe it's just me, but I genuinely don't think enough people perceive DEH for what it is - a very screwed up situation. It was marketed so wrong, and I'm really, really glad that you talked about this.
Petition to rename DEH Sickly Benjamin’s Traveling Stage Show
"Lot of shitty scripts can be saved through execution-" an unconventional approach to bad films but I'm willing to try it.
I’m reminded of Ken Russell, who hated the script for Altered States but was contractually obligated not to alter a line, so he had the actors deliver the dialogue as quickly as humanly possible.
It's weird how the movie industry ignored the success of the 90s recording of Cats, which was of the stage-show, original costumes and props and all. There are sooo many people on the internet who became a fan of Cats because they watched that as kids. It worked so much better than the 2019 movie with hyper-realistic fur and twitching ears. Glad to hear the Hamilton recording got so much traction, I hope this becomes the norm.
Hell, I've gotten into Cats since the 2019 movie came out, just because clips from the recording kept getting recommended to me on KZhead.
me with the proshot of into the woods- never saw the movie adaptation because i never needed to
The channel The Show Must Go On actually had the whole recording last year. It was a lot of fun. (I actually watched it after my sisters and I watched the Cats 2019 on Amazon Prime)
I went into the theatre fully thinking that I knew nothing about cats and ended up being smacked in the face with nostalgia 20 seconds into jellicle songs for jellicle cats because I'd watched the vhs of it about a hundred times as a kid without knowing what it was
Pro-shots are really expensive to shoot though, so only big and successful productions can afford to have them made and released. The Lincoln Center videos that everyone is always talking about are stage monitor recordings and have the quality of like 80s home videos that were shot from 50 feet away.
i understand just how important live performances can be, but i truly believe we should be doing professional recordings of all musicals. i got to see a professional recording of sweeney todd back in high school, not terribly long before the movie was announced. it's a show that i don't think i've had an opportunity to see live ever, aside from a brief rash of local high schools performing it after the movie was released. it felt like a big deal back then, as a kid in a small town in kentucky, and it still feels like a big deal now, honestly. musicals are still largely inaccessible if you don't live in a major city. and that's a huge bummer. i hope things change one day. anyway, great analysis, this video rules
the thing is the vast majority of broadway shows *are* professionally recorded (for advertisements and investors and future stagings etc). they’re just never released to the public.
My heart sings for Sarah noticing that the "I want" song should be second or third!!! YES thank you for sharing the picky theatre nerd perspective because you are right and it is important
"She just has neater hair and slightly fewer wrinkles and bags under her eyes" 100% agreed. She went under less of a transformation than Nanny McPhee
WHAT a callback reference, i saw that movie in the 7th grade and have not thought about it since
OH MY GOD I've been ranting about the Into The Woods movie adaption for YEARS. As a person who will put on the original cast recording and just drive when I'm going through some stuff, I almost cried when I was in the theater and they essentially cut out the Baker and his father's relationship. The song "No More"-- easily my favorite musical theater song ever, is so important to the show and the narrative they were building about parenting and children being little trauma sponges that it ripped away any meaning that non-musical theater folk could have taken away from it. Instead, a classmate told me she didn't like Into The Woods because Johnny Depp was creepy and her family hated the it. Anyway sorry for this, I don't comment ever, but this is a long winded way of saying I'd LOVE a video on Into The Woods someday from you!!
I resent the film adaptation of Sweeney Todd (also starring Johnny Depp) for stripping the musical of its TITLE SONG (🎶Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd, his skin was pale and his eye was odd…🎶) They made it into an instrumental overture 😒
The stage recording is so much better. So pissed it's not on Netflix anymore.
JUBY??
JUBYPHONIC??
Here, I'll give you a positive-- of never seen or heard of the musical, liked the movie enough that i sought out a production of the play and got to see it live. So I'm glad it got made
Break in a glove is my favorite song in Deh simply because everyone hates it so much. Every time someone says "Break in a glove could of been cut" I grow stronger
ironically, watching several creators rip into dear evan hansen has now interested me in starting to watch musicals. I've only seen 2 and a half so far but I did enjoy most of them
I would check out the Team Starkid channel if you haven't already, they have some really good musicals.
@@peggedyourdad9560 Yup. They have the whole production of Twisted free to watch. :)
My main problem is not that Evan isn't "punishded" its that I really don't think the story realizes the gravity of what he did. When Zoey said "you gave my family so much" I had to ask myself, what exactly did he give you. The only thing I can think of is a cold reading in "For Forever"
Yeah, exactly. I don’t care if a character is “punished” or not, but the way the narrative frames the story, the context, and the repercussions is very important, and Dead Evan Hansen does not do a good job of framing how shitty of a thing he did. Literally all he gave them was a wildly shitty experience, and yet the story is still almost coddling him in it’s treatment of what he did.
I felt the same way. I didn't want him to go to jail but like the narrative doesn't seem to understand how fucked up what he did was
That was always my issue with the show. It's so morally fucked up with no real talk of it actually being a terrible thing. Its just a "oops bad decision" not literally "i ruined lives and Conner's legacy because i was selfish, but I hide it behind mental illness". Songs are good, story is not.
Agreed! Zoe should have a song about what it’s like to be kind of relieved your abusive brother was out of your life, and then hear that he had inner depths…then find out that that was actually not true.
This this this. It's actually extremely telling that "Good For You" was cut, because that was the narrative unambiguously saying that what Evan is doing is wrong, and that by continuing to milk the situation he's showing that he's not innocent anymore. The movie wants to make him completely innocent of any bad or selfish intentions, so the writers chose to cut that song to avoid condemning his moral character in the way the stage play does. I don't know if they did it because Marc Platt didn't want his precious baby boy to play anything other than a perfect good guy, or if the writers thought that showing a morally grey protagonist would somehow undermine the message of the show?? But either way, it's such a loss for the show to have completely removed this theme. He's SUPPOSED to be a flawed and selfish person who does the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, like Walt in Breaking Bad. You can pity him and his situation, but you can't excuse his behaviour just because at one point he had good intentions. * edit: spelled Ben's father's name wrong oops
This whole "greater suspension of disbelief for stage shows" is the reason why I think most musical adaptations should be animated. All the musical animatic videos on youtube and the entire disney renaissance just prove that those two mediums go very well together.
Indeed. Animated movies also inherent require greater suspension of disbelief, for similar reasons to stage shows: You know it's not quite real. In the case of stage shows, that's because you can see the sets and that things like rain aren't real and you have to applaud after every big number and often, as in Cats or Hamilton, the actors just kinda pantomime half of the set that isn't there....And, with animated movies, well, obviously, on some level, you're always aware this isn't a real person, it's a drawing. And, since it's not real, who's to say what it can and can't do? No one, that's who. In the same way, say, Mario being a cartoon man allows it to feel right that a guy who can break bricks with his bare hands will fucking die if he touches a turtle with any part of his body save his boots. This is a cartoon world, who's to say what bricks are made, what turtles can and can't do, ETC? But, yeah, I agree. Animation also requires a greater suspension of disbelief and, thus, allows for more abstraction and things that don't fit with how the real world works.
100% agree. Animations can also lean into abstract imagery to convey songs, like Be Our Guest does towards the end. As Lindsay Ellis put it ‘animation can rise visually’ to meet the needs of musicals.
That’s exactly what I was thinking! Since animation is inherently a more stylized medium than live action form, it’s usually more forgiving towards big, dramatic gestures such as, well, bursting into song.
watching the Come from Away proshoot get positive reviews on the same day the overwhelmingly negative Dear Evan Hansen reviews came out truly makes me happy
"... Ben Platt reprising his role as 'Dear'..." caught me sooo of guard hahahahaha
I think the big issue of DearEvan not getting “punished” at the end is that the whole show has all the flags of a morality play and none of the payoff, so it builds that tension and never releases it. It’s fundamentally unsatisfying. If his actions weren’t depicted as inherently wrong then there wouldn’t be a problem, but at the end he’s just returned to status quo, he doesn’t actually lose anything. His lie and manipulations results in a net neutral outcome for him, not a net negative.
EXACTLY THIS. Heck, if the show ended like "Dr. Horrible" where Evan ultimately never faces repercussions but it's very clear this isn't a good thing for him, I'd be content. Let him go full ego trip, and never realize that he's ended up even more alone than when he started. He claims he no longer needs treatment, but he's actually spiraling worse than ever. Just let the story go SOMEWHERE. For a show that's nothing BUT setup built around a precarious lie, to have it simply peter out at the end is a massive waste.
Or Ingrid Goes West!
You could still have a morality play where the protagonist is a bad person, doing bad things, and they manage to get off with no repercussion (and even benefit) from everything bad they do. Not every story that condemns behaviour needs to have a negative outcome for a protagonist. It could be a commentary on a fault of society. The thing is - in order to do that you need to be self aware. Know you’re making a point about how this is harmful for society and how it’s a problem that this behaviour is tolerated and even rewarded. The problem is DEH is extremely unself aware lol. It had no clue about most of what it was doing - let alone being able to pull off a nuanced moral point like this.
Yeah exactly, they keep almost wanting to go there, but never actually doing it. They want to give a morally twisted story about a high school kid falling into a dark lie, but they don’t actually want him to be that bad, or to actually have anything that bad happen to him. They just don’t commit.
@@HW-sw5gb Not a protagonist, but I think Bakugo from MHA is both a good example of what you are talking about, and also a case where it goes too far. Despite Bakugo constantly abusing Midoriya throughout his entire life, Bakugo receives no punishment for this. On one hand, this goes to show how terrible the society in MHA is, where your worth as a person is decided by how flashy your power is, so you can look good on the cameras. This has led to a person like Bakugo, who has severe anger issues and nearly drove Midoriya to suicide, being never reprimanded by his classmates or an authority figure. Even All Might, supposedly the paragon of good and symbol of hope, never tries to confront Bakugo’s abuse of his student. Midoriya himself never seems to think that Bakugo was particularly in the wrong, shown by him basically idolizing him multiple times throughout the series. On the other hand, if this is what the author was trying to convey they went way too far, making me suspicious as to whether what I wrote above is actually true. I stopped even reading the manga because of this, I was so disgusted by how Bakugo was treated that I just couldn’t continue.