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Adapting an impossible amount of content into a series (The Legend of Vox Machina)

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What do you do if you have a crazy amount of material that you need to adapt into a medium with a limited amount of time and space? This is a question that all artists have had to face at some point. Whether it's adapting books like Wicked or Les Miserables into a two act musical, or condensing a book series like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games into feature length films, some content will inevitably be sacrificed or even changed to fit within a new medium. But what if you are faced with this dilemma on a bigger scale? This is what Critical Role had to face when adapting their first campaign to the screen. For a bit more context for those of you who may be unfamiliar CR, they are a group of prolific voice actors who play Dungeons and Dragons, a tabletop roleplaying game that often involves sessions over 4 hours long full of complicated lore that each player brings to a table. You can imagine it as a fantasy world building game, where each player contributes to the story and the bat...

How a small theatre company does a Hollywood trend better

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You ever obsess about a musical so much that you decide to write a full 2000 word essay talking about postmodernism and the villain-archetype which launches you down a rabbit hole that makes you realise this go ofy show made by a group of UMich graduates is the perfect way to frame the trend of humanising villains in Hollywood? Probably not a common experience, but if a crazy niche like this fascinates you, then you've come to the right place! I'll be breaking down why 'Twisted' works as a musical, and how it works better than most other films in the same genre Why Twisted Works 'Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier' is a 2013 musical created by Team Starkid, which retells the 1992 animated classic Aladdin from Jafar’s perspective. And before you click off because this seems like it devolves into cliche, it doesn’t. Weirdly, this goofy show is a perfect lesson in subversion and humanism. On the surface, this musical is purely satire aimed to generate lau...