it recently occurred to me that a lot of other people might be interested in this, so here is an *audio-only* bootleg of ONCE starring heath saunders and julie benko, at the hangar theatre on july 9, 2021.
it was an outdoor venue next to a pond, so disclaimer there's a lot of extraneous noise like wind through the trees, birds, and quite a lot of frogs.
i'm literally never on tumblr anymore, i only came on to share this, but if the link ever stops working please send me a message and i WILL get to it, eventually.
I just wanna say bc I KNOW you're somewhere on tumblr, to the teenage girl who attended Take Your Kid To Work Day at an office building in Ontario, Canada circa 2013 and had a conversation with a middle aged woman in which you showed her your Black Veil Brides fanart and fanfics and ship content and told her about different fanfic tropes including a/b/o verse bc she happened to know who Panic! at The Disco and Fallout Boy were and thus you felt the need to show her your bandblr ship art, that was my fucking mother and I had to clarify all that to her including looking my mother in the eye and trying to explain a/b/o verse without sounding like a lunatic.
It's been 10 years and I still regularly sent evil energies in your direction. Since you'd be probably two years younger than me and thus legally an adult now, please know if this post reaches you it's on sight.
Gonna be honest, I really didn’t care much for the original Once. Yes, it won awards and was even adapted into the official Broadway musical that I’ll be reviewing now, but at the end of the day it was just “meh” for me. I got bored and distracted a few times while I was supposed to be watching (which, personally, doesn’t happen very often). The plot was slow and felt like some major wasted potential, as I could tell that what was there was raw, thoughtful, and had real meaning behind it. The execution was simply and unfortunately subpar.
However, the Broadway adaptation was definitely not the worst thing I’ve witnessed.
This version finally went full throttle with its musical aspect, whereas in the original story there were maybe one or two musical numbers that made the film’s genre feel entirely undecided. The music was great and very faithful to its origin— which, as always, will be a point in my book. Overall, I do believe the decision to adapt it into a fleshed-out musical was a great (and smart) idea.
*by live theatre i mean plays, musicals, operas, ballets, concert versions of musicals, staged readings, & things of that nature. EDIT: YES this includes amateur, local, kids, high school, & community theatre. almost every show i've seen has been local
if you want, list the names of the shows you've seen in the tags!