#mdamr

[saltavenegar]

Back on my bullshit 👹

#my art #animatic #wip #mdamr #Moby dick #Moby dick a musical reckoning #ishmael #queequeg #a bosom friend #filled with surge of inspiration #i say this about every musical but I want to animatic whole thing or as much as I can #bc Y’know #no visual recording was taken

[playtonart]

I have a couple Moby Dick audios but back in 2020 a user that I'm pretty sure is inactive now said they had edited the audio they had into tracks. Anyone have that?

#i know dave isnt proud of it but I need food #and from what I listened to so far I love it #i can totally see the problems #but it doesn't kill the show for me #dave malloy #malloysicals #moby dick #mdamr

[supercantaloupe]

repeating myself here i know but everytime i think about dave malloy’s moby dick musical i go a little wild in the brain...genuinely contains some of his best writing imo. like i think the high points of mdamr rival those of octet compositionally and preludes/comet literarily. have you LISTENED to ahab? sermon?? a squeeze of the hand?? plus there’s the variety of the more fun numbers with bosom friend and cetology and stubb kills a whale and the whale as a dish...it’s good writing! it’s good music!! or the numbers that blend drama/emotion with a deceptively sweet tune like shanty and the pacific...and then the serious/dramatic scenes. some of them are fucking gutting, brought to life and emotion even greater than melville’s original prose. whalesong interlude iii/roll on. the pequod meets the rachel (my GD i cannot listen to the pequod meets the rachel without getting weepy. i swear.) but between all the highest highs of the show there’s some deep and utter low points in the writing...i think the script is bloated, the show tries to say too much at once, it’s clumsy and meandering...and ugh, the fedallah monologue...overall the whole product as it is right now makes me so Frustrated cause i see SUCH promise in it (cause there’s So Much there already that’s amazing!!) but the combination of the high points with the lows and all the connective tissue between makes for a messy final product. i really really hope that the show gets revised and revived at some point in the future because i genuinely really want to (and hope to) see it succeed, i think it has something wonderful to offer audiences if it could just find its sea legs (as it were)

#sasha speaks #it's late and i'm exhausted from rehearsal but i'm listening to bits of the audio again and getting emotional and opinion-y again so. #bear with me here. #like i love comet so so much i think it's the strongest large format musical of dave's so far #i think octet slightly edges out comet as my favorite of his shows overall #and of course i have a deep fondness for ghost quartet and preludes too (for different reasons) #but genuinely i think mdamr has some of dave's best songwriting!! period!! #and i see SUCH promise in it...i really want it to shine but the missteps drag. it. down. for real #i want it to succeed i want to shine. i want it to be revised and revived #or at least have an album made...

[this-is-a-dystopian-parable]

Finally is right >:) welcome @spleensmasher what a wonderful pfp i will now be spamming all my MDAMR content

[druid-for-hire]

six  fanarts, ft Hélène Kuragina from Great Comet of 1812, Persephone from Hadestown, Laurey from Oklahoma! (2019), Starbuck from Moby Dick: A Musical Reckoning, Toby from Octet, and Percy Jackson  :O

 thanks everybody for your suggestions!

#pjo #percy jackson #hadestown #great comet #oklahoma 2019 #tgc #natasha pierre and the great comet of 1812 #npatgco1812 #moby dick #mdamr #octet #octet musical #my art #or someone that i queue-sed to be

[pocketsizedquasar]

So.... I followed you in the wee beginnings of my giant moby dick obsession and I've been avidly consuming your comic. But TODAY I found your writings on the musical and... oh my gosh that part with Fedallah . just. you make all the good points there! And its like... I saw it at ART before my giant obsession took root, but so much of it confuses me! and moby dick is a book with some pretty explicit sections about race (if not a big coherent Take) 1/?

so to take it and then make it all about how some white man is ruining the voyage (ahem, the US) is so strange to me!? Like there ARE sections about whiteness, and there are parts where Ishmael totally turns protestant evangelizing ideas on their heads (queequeg as being tainted by christianity, also the part where queequeg says something along the lines of ... poor ishmael, so confused). Idk maybe i'm just a purist. 2/?

I have to say though... the song version of the reverend's sermon at the beginning absolutely takes my breath away (and i'm sad that I don't have any audio version...). Do you have a take on all the prophet imagery/stuff going on in the book? (elijah, ahab, jonah &c).ANyways, I've been rambling. tl;dr: your comic is So Good and I have opinions about the 2019 musical. 3/3

--

hhhh first off thank u for following & for ur kind words!! i’m so glad to be a part of Whale Obsessions & i’m glad you like my comic!!

& ohhh boy. the musical. the musical the musical. i actually have a more distilled, shorter post in my drafts about my problems w the musical bc my existing review is kind of long and unwieldy but YEAH, tl;dr a white man trying to take a story already very intrinsically about race and modify the racial aspects to make it “more relevant” to “modern america” is. dumb and shitty and not his place as a white man to do and i’m Not a Fan. you don’t need to try to make md relevant to modern day america! by virtue of the fact that it’s already about race and racialized dynamics in the 19th century US -- dynamics which still exist -- it’s already relevant to today! especially when he takes away a lot of the existing racial commentary in favor of adding his own lukewarm white takes on racism! like what abt the time ishmael learns he fucked up wrt queequeg on his own, without queequeg having to pull some bs “i’m just like you!!” moment like so many characters of color in white narratives are forced to? what about ishmael drawing comparisons between the pequod and colonialism/imperialism, and talking abt how the act of whaling at sea mirrors US colonialism on land? what abt the fact that all of the officers on the pequod are white and most of the sailors are poc (which is mentioned in a brief throwaway line in the musical but otherwise not meaningfully discussed bc the officers are played by WOC)? there’s like. so much to work with already that you can build off instead of just... eschewing that to insert your own opinions lmao. and it’s less work!! to just work with what already exists and build on it!! 

and !! yeah the sermon song is absolutely fantastic. there are several really really good musical moments in the show (which makes the problems w it all the more frustrating imo). it’s a lovely lovely song sung beautifully and a really wonderful opener. psst if you want an audio boot of the show dm me i can link u to one that my friend took the night we went together

but yeah re: prophet stuff in the book-- i live for that shit. the sermon chapter is probably one of my favorites in the story, both for its beautiful language and for how much it foreshadows everything! something i think a lot of adaptations (not just the musical) get wrong about Moby Dick is the exclusion of the on land chapters. and, like, I understand why people do it -- they want to get to sea and the adventure as soon as possible -- but the problem is those first 20 or so chapters exist to frame the story in a way that we can’t really when we get to sea. there’s so much foreshadowing and tone-setting and groundwork that’s done in those early chapters that we miss out on if we just skip them (not to mention the adorable character interactions btwn Ish & Queequeg, Ish & Peter Coffin, & really just the only time we actually get to see Ishmael be a character).

putting the rest under a cut cause this is getting long lol

but yeah so much of what shows up in the latter half of the book is explicitly referenced in those opening chapters. aside from the obvious biblical connotations of the names (ishmael, elijah, ahab), connotations that the narrative itself is well aware of and comments on, there’s so many little things that just... really nicely hint at what comes in the end.

like, okay. ishmael getting saved by queequeg’s coffin at the very end? in what can easily be interpreted as ~divine~ or ~angelic~ intervention (esp if we consider the biblical origins of his name)? okay, cool, look at this line that ishmael yells when he first sees queequeg in peter coffin’s inn:

(ID: “Landlord, for God’s sake, Peter Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!”)

or how about the swinging lantern in Jonah’s cabin that shows up in the sermon? 

(ID:  “Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!’ he groans, ‘straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!’”)

that image, the rocking, swinging lantern, reappears again and again in Ahab’s cabin throughout the book! it’s there in the beginning when we see Ahab charting their course for the first time, it’s there when the ship sees the mysterious spooky Spirit Spout TM and Starbuck finds Ahab sleeping in the cabin, clinging to a rocking lantern, it’s there when Starbuck has his existential crisis over whether or not he’s going to kill Ahab (another Jonah parallel -- killing the captain would save everyone else).

or how about when queequeg saves that racist dumbass on the schooner to nantucket, and ishmael literally tells us queequeg’s going to die?

(ID: All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.)

there’s just a ton of really lovely little nods and details and symbols in the early chapters that lay down the foundations for what comes later. those chapters, and elijah and ahab and jonah and the sermon and peter coffin, have a job to do: they’re there so we know how this ends before we’ve even started. before ishmael ever sets foot on the claw-footed pequod, we know, at least on some level, she’s destined to sink.

remember, ishmael is telling us this story in hindsight. he knows how it ends. he doesn’t deceive us, doesn’t try to hide or avoid it. he makes it very clear from the beginning that this is a story where everyone dies.

sorry that got so long! thank you for the asks i always love an excuse to ramble about Dick

#mobydick #moby dick #ishmael #queequeg #ahab #captain ahab #starbuck #jonah #elijah #herman melville #melville #moby dick: a musical reckoning #moby dick musical #mdamr #dave malloy #quasartalks #quasarwrites #classic lit #classic literature #litblr #bookblr #dark academia #academia #literature analysis #analysis #ask #gene-ious #i ramble a lot about this book huh #anyway

[kafkastan]

complete and total WIP but here’s me singing & playing a bit of “the sermon” :)

#moby dick a musical reckoning #mdamr #malloysicals #moby dick #original content #my singing

[misterstubb]

All righty beloved shipmates, I’ve got it all edited up- shoot me a message for audio from the 1/11/20 evening performance (both full and tracked for your convenience). I’m more than happy to gift if you shoot me a message but would also be over the moon if anyone would be willing to trade for other nights of the show.

#moby dick musical #mdamr

[tragedyposting]

take this with a grain of salt i guess bc its just my interpretation but a thought on moby dick: a musical reckoning’s treatment of Pip. I think now that the Pip-not-Pip in the Ballad of Pip was meant to be Pip's full soul i.e. the man he was meant to be but would never become when the childhood trauma separated his soul from him (I suppose it was something like catatonic shock) so having a different character that is the loosed soul of Pip kind of worked okay but that would have been much more effective, imo, sung by a black man (maybe double the actor who plays fedallah) or even the actress who played the preacher/the captain since the reason Pip undergoes his trauma is because Stubb deems Pip (a black boy’s) life to not be worth the financial risk of saving- it’s an inherently racial trauma. I don’t think the musical was like...a racist overall work but I think it needs a good deal of shaping up when it comes to how it handles its social messages overall, that one especially.

#mdamr #dave malloy #pip

[minipliny]

@seagodofmagic I am tagging you as I remember you discussing how MDAMR didn’t have the actual lived experience of black sailors in the 19th century as a reference point -- I just finished Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail by W. Jeffrey Bolster and it was a great compendium of all this information!!! The introduction is also the author being like ‘as I sailed around the West Indies as part of my 10 years as a sailor, hearing the sea-yarns of the old salts around me, I wondered how their experience compared to the biography of Olaudah Equiano the 18th century formerly enslaved mariner which I was reading below decks” which I did...not expect as the story of how someone wrote their academic history book! It has many stories and also gave a huge amount of context to Paul Cuffe’s autobiography aka one of my favourite pieces of 19th century life writing and the most full of inexplicable privateering. Highlights definitely include the 1812 Dartmoor Prison imprisoned sailors putting on Romeo and Juliet, Robert Smalls just sailing all the way up to the Union Army, Richard Crafus King of Boston, and the Royal Navy veteran who built an entire replica square rigged ship to wear as a headdress in the streets of 18th century London.

[prinsesa-ng-musika]

(LATE POST) my thoughts after watching the beowulf — a thousand years of baggage proshot ^-^

HI THIS IS REALLY LATE I WAS SUPPOSED TO FINISH THIS A LITTLE LESS THAN TWO MONTHS AGO OOPS

hello hello so i’ve collected my thoughts and here is a list of the most significant thoughts and feelings i had while watching the show. beowulf is one of my favorite malloy shows, so i’m glad i got a chance to see the real thing, even virtually.

-the beginning part is so lovely lmao i love how the academics break the fourth wall and also interact with each other

-geatland and heorot being pronounced differently by the academics is so amusing oops

-academic 1 is an absolute child and i love him sm hnnn

-can i just say i am head over heels in love with both of the warriors bc they have to sing, dance, and even move props and stuff around in the same show??? not to mention they also choreographed a bunch of stuff

-heorot (the song) sounds even prettier and funkier than i remembered how is that even Possible??

-back to the warriors, i kind of freaking love their relationship dynamic!! that’s a bit weird to say/explain considering shaye and anna actually play multiple warriors (bc a lot of them die oops) but that bit towards the end of heorot was so heartbreaking and all their choreo later on hnnn

-i did not expect what kind of a face to actually make me feel a lot of things but it did omg

-I DON’T REMEMBER WHAT PART EXACTLY THIS WAS AT BUT AT SOME POINT ACADEMIC 1 STARTS SNEEZING AND THEN HE GOES UNDER THE TABLE AND THE OTHER TWO LOOK CONCERNED AND THEN ACADEMIC 2 JUST PULLS OUT A HANDKERCHIEF/CLOTH/TISSUE/ WHATEVER AND DROPS IT UNDER THE TABLE FOR HIM AND IT WAS HILARIOUS

-ah it’s so great that i can actually see/hear the part where beowulf and grendel essentially roast each other before they battle! grendel calling beowulf “bambi” tho was quite a highlight

-okay so pinwheel is kind of my favorite song bc even tho it barely has any purpose in the show since its theme is never brought up again lmao, it’s so simple and pretty and light and the whistling is so lovely! therefore its staging, which is basically beowulf playing with action figures lol, is also so strange to be put in the show but i enjoy it regardless!

-bonus: academic 3 watching beowulf just play with the action figures is just GOLDEN XD

-i did not know that not only was sung by warrior two??? which is weird bc i’ve listened to all of beardo and mdamr, so you’d think i recognize her voice by now, but noooo. well, i’m glad!

-the academics just splashing the water during underwater battle was so cute lmaoooo

-ending: still Emotional thank you very much

that’s it

#finally decided to just. post this and finish #now there's nothing left in my drafts yay #beowulf: a thousand years of baggage #dave malloy #jason craig #berry shares

[supercantaloupe]

i really really hope dave malloy’s moby dick musical gets revised and restaged at some point because i think it has some of dave’s best songwriting yet. but also some of the script is. really really bad

#sasha speaks #and other parts are good!! the ahab and starbuck stuff i think is still really really good #genuinely songs like the pacific and squeeze of the hand and i think stubb kills a whale are some of my favorite malloy songs #but. eugh. as high as the high points are i think the low points are also WAY lower than in his other works #like. fedallah is a MESS #it's really really bad... #i really want mdamr to be Good it just needs a lot of work to get there bc right now it's all over the place #but i think it has real potential. it just needs to be reigned in and revised #but pleeeaaase i hope it gets the work it needs and i hope it gets produced again #i would like to see it

[supercantaloupe]

last post reminding me suddenly how very much i am into kalyn west

#'but when i say pull by gd you better puuuuulll!!' #i was going to add something to the end of the above statement like 'in her performances' or 'her singing voice' but. #honestly. it wouldn't be fair. i just think she's neat #sasha speaks #also GD i need to relisten to mdamr. the messy parts are a true mess but the good bits SOAR #genuinely i think some of malloy's best songwriting is in moby dick...i reeallly hope the book gets revised #and the show revived at some point

[supercantaloupe]

For the top 5 ask, what are your top five Dave Malloy cinematic universe songs

it’s a THEATRICAL universe. though i long for the day when dave malloy’s canon makes it to the big screen and i can watch octet in the second most ironic way possible whenever i want

5. The Astronomer - Ghost Quartet

4. Hero - Ghost Quartet

3. No One Else - Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

2. The Field - Octet

1. The Pacific - Moby Dick: a Musical Reckoning

[ask meme]

#sasha answers #anon #ty for asking! #dave malloy #great comet #ghost quartet #octet #mdamr #the order of these is probably also heavily subject to rearranging #this is not to say i dont like the weird screechy shit or the absolute BANGERS dave can churn out #i love those a lot in their own respects as well #but i have a deeply soft spot for the soft ballads hymns and arias he writes #honorable mentions go out to Beautiful; Whalesong Interlude II; the Forest; Pierre and Natasha; Lilacs #and probably a dozen others #also for the record the most ironic way possible to watch octet is bootleg of the stage production #ask meme

[pocketsizedquasar]

this is my fault for bringing the musical up again in the discord but i truly lose my fucking shit every time i remember dave malloy was fully like “i’m going to make moby dick more relevant to modern day america, and so i’m going to take this persian zoroastrian character and make him a Black (& not persian also) muslim character”

essentially writing off an entire ethnicity and our religion as “irrelevant” 

#mobydick #moby dick #moby dick: a musical reckoning #moby dick musical #mdamr #fedallah #herman melville #dave malloy #i'm tagging this with the musical tags actually because Fuck this #quasartalks #also. fully not that fedallahs rep in book was good at ALL #it wasnt #it was a grossly orientalized caricature #but the solution to that isnt to ERASE his race and culture??! #like #in what world #does that make sense #also making him do an Exotic Middle Eastern Accent TM?? #fucked up

[tragedyposting]

I would like to talk about Moby Dick critically but I would so rather speak in terms of what worked and what needs to be worked on then like what was "bad" and if the writer should be cancelled...so might not talk about it on tumblr

nd like let me note that like I am not a person of color so its not up to me to decide things like if the problems it have are racist enough to deal with cancelling but thats just not how I deal with media. EX personally: the work did have a line that struck me as kinda...antisemitic* but I felt that it was because the work’s main problem isn’t with like, being antisemitic there, its about the creators not being done thinking about what they’re saying. Which I would like to give them the chance to work on before I quit. Of course no one is obligated to stick around to see it but I want to leave a place for it?

*lumped in circumcision with like, killing gay people and stoning people to death in a sense of like “oh those crazy mystical jews” even though 70% of american men are circumcised even though jews are like 2% of the whole population :/

#mdamr