Starring the Baby-sitters Club! Part 3!

[road_baby]

Well, after a pretty good streak of normalcy, I went and fucked up my sleep schedule. I slept until 5:30 pm (and missed Animal Crossing events) and after touring Tumblr I came to snark. And so far this book is a breeze! It's pretty fun tearing into the BSC when they're acting stupid rather than bitchy. Stupidity is so much easier to handle than

Comments

This book though

[jessicarae729]

I love this one because it's so unbelievably unrealistic in so many glorious, awesome ways. My husband has been involved in a technical side of high school & middle school productions at our local schools for about 10 years and the only part of this that makes any sense, is that schools do, sometimes, perform musicals.

My personal directing experience is with K-5 age kids at my church, but knowing the musical directors at the above schools, I can assure you that both they and I would have re-casted Wendy about 6 chapters ago.

Logan's whole thing makes zero sense, because nobody would EVER have all the performers in a musical, all at one rehearsal waiting for their scene. It's called a rehearsal schedule. Scenes 4-6 at this 2 hour rehearsal. Full company for songs 1, 4, & 9 at this 2 hour rehearsal. These 5 characters for these 2 scenes. Etc. Because anyone with a brain (didn't Ann want to be a teacher???) knows that unsupervised kids backstage = chaos and I hate to be a party pooper but 8th graders ARE STILL KIDS.

Jessi's assistant producer thing - FYI, the producer's job has nothing to do with coaching kids and helping with choreography. More like, fundraising, putting the program together, contacting corporate sponsors, being the point person for all the other adults (director, musical director, choreographer, technical crew, etc).

And to your other post about costumes - my personal experience with the above schools is that whatever can be borrowed or rented usually is, and sometimes things are created in-house if the person in charge of costumes is skilled in that area and wants to do so. The MS choir/musical director is an amazing sewist and he created Belle's yellow dress among other costumes when they did B&B Jr. I think they got someone to make that dress when the high school did B&B, but the rest of the costumes were rented from someplace in Kentucky. Students measuring other students is idiotic. And I think in most cases, something created in house would be sewn large with the ability to adjust because you may want to do that musical again at some point, and kids vary in sizes (not that clothing manufacturers would be aware of that but I digress), so getting the kids' actual measurements probably wouldn't be necessary anyway.

Doing Peter Pan without flying wires is just sad. If you can't afford it, do something else, like Annie.

Re: This book though

[the1812overture]

I did Belle's ballgown last year for a theater, and the side seams were first serged, and then basted together to fit her. This enables the side-seams to be pulled out without the edges being raw, and then re-fitted to someone else.

I agree that having KIDS measure people is dumb. Measurements are vital to have correct, even when making things to be adjustable.

Peter Pan without wires is cute if done right. Basically you can't act like you think you're putting on a professional production. And Annie...oh god, not that one again.

You described the rehearsal schedule better than I did, and you're 100% right about it.

Re: This book though

[road_baby]

Thanks so much for your insight on how a play is actually produced! I always wonder why Ann couldn't do even the smallest bit of research for her books. I mean, I kinda get it. When these books were in production, they were coming out like once a month. But there are so many mistakes in them! And even if they were cranked out once a month, that doesn't excuse the overwhelming amount of continuity errors in them.

Yeah, Jessi obviously doesn't know what a producer does. It's not like she's making any final decisions about how the play is done. She's not in charge of anything but the choreography. But she has this idea that Mal asking about a costume means she's doing all the work.

I always thought it seemed like a lot of work to be making all the costumes from scratch. Especially complex ones Like Captain Hook's and Mrs Darling's. And if they're only gonna fit that one person, it's kinda a waste, right? This book is such fail.

Re: This book though

[the1812overture]

When they were coming out about that fast, there were ghost-writers.

Jessi's not even in charge of choreography. Coming up with a simple little dance number, which will have to be approved of by the choreographer, who will answer to the director, doesn't put her in charge. She sure thinks highly of herself. $10 says that Mal asked her once or twice if she thinks something looks okay. That would be like me asking my husband if he thinks a gown I'm designing and making looks okay, he says yes, then he claims he's a costumer.

Re: This book though

[road_baby]

$10 says that Mal asked her once or twice if she thinks something looks okay

That's $10 you'd win because I'm sure that's exactly what happened.

Re: This book though

[jessicarae729]

I always felt like since there were so many ghostwriters, the ghostwriters should be responsible for doing research, or at least pointing out glaring plotholes. Like in the the case of SS#9, obviously the book would be boring to have all the leads cast to high school kids, like it would be in real life with a district-wide musical. OK, fine, so just have SMS do the musical. Literally the only part it would affect is Sam's being in the musical, and who could ever keep track of whether he & Stacey were on or off, so just replace him with Pete Black and literally nothing else changes. They could still include SES kids under the auspices of having younger kids to be the Lost Boys etc. The ghostwriter should have caught Karen being in there, not being an SES student.

And if you're going to write a book about the school putting on a musical, either you need a ghostwriter with experience in that department, or you need him/her to do some, I don't know, RESEARCH???

I always feel like, I wouldn't write a book about a kids' science class or something like that, without doing a lot of research about the actual science, so that it was accurate. So I should be able to expect that a book about kids doing a musical, should have some vague semblance of reality behind it. Oh, like the one who wrote that one about Stacey being in the Mathletes. Whoever that was, included actual math problems and my recollection is that they were age-appropriate for an advanced middle school student. That takes research, or expertise. More of that, please.