It’s no secret that modern dating is tough, so Damsels In The DMs exists to offer insight and reflection on the modern dating experience. Hosted by Aash Patel, Lauren Harris, and Alejandro Valtierra, each episode looks at a different facet of dating culture and the hosts examine a letter from listeners, fostering conversations to build a sense of community. This episode, the hosts are joined by Eve Bradley, a UK-based abuse recovery mentor devoted to helping survivors of domestic and narcissistic abuse move on. Bradley speaks candidly about her experiences with traumatic relationships and discusses the difficult process of breaking trauma bonds, as well as the warning signs of narcissistic behavior. The hosts deftly navigate a difficult conversation, unpacking potentially unfamiliar terms and breaking down patterns of behavior to understand the nuances within this type of relationship. Any listeners looking to move past a toxic relationship of their own will be assured they are not alone. [Jose Nateras]
It’s that time of year when this movie-review podcast spends the whole month focused on scary stuff. And the first film out of the gate comes from the blaxploitation era, a 1976 tale of possession starring Glynn Turman as a young man whose body gets taken over by the spirit of a vengeance-seeking 1940s hustler. Hosts Justin Brown and Brandon Collins spend a good hour explaining how this movie is more ridiculous than terrifying, as Turman’s character puts his hair in a conk, covers himself in a zoot suit, and goes on a rampage—and no one else in the film picks up on how crazy that is. The episode slides in and out of several tangents, like when Collins spends a few minutes doing a very mediocre Ryan Coogler impersonation. They also discuss who would play Turman’s character if this movie were remade today with an all-white cast. (Collins picks either Jason Bateman or Freddie Highmore, while Brown goes with Danny McBride or Tom Holland.) Since the movie is cuckoo bananas, the hosts make sure this episode is equally batshit. [Craig D. Lindsey]
When comedian Joe Mande peaced out of the Twitterverse for good in 2017, he left behind a memorable pinned analogy: “Twitter is the internet’s version of smoking embalming fluid.” It’s an addictive, painful high that, despite leaving users worse off and despondent, keeps them coming back for more, he suggested. That perspective seems to be empathized with but not entirely shared by writers, creators, and very online people Dana Schwarz and Andrew Ti, who offer nuanced thoughts on the benefits and horrors of digital interaction with strangers during this week’s conversation with host Yusong Liu. Doughboys listeners will recognize Liu as that series’ former producer/current mailbag apparition, and he’s been a comedic voice, streamer, and podcaster in his own right now for some time. Currently two episodes in, Liu’s latest series focuses on and takes seriously issues relevant to millennials, delving into topics (like being on camera) deeper than the hacky and blithe commentary that usually mars mainstream discussion of the demographic. It’s an all-around considerate and insightful episode, particularly when it comes to acknowledging the power that social media has to reinforce the lack of popularity for awful ideas, if not to actually change minds. [Dan Jakes]
In every episode of MusicalSplaining, Broadway fanatic Lindsay Ellis tries to convince showtune skeptic Kaveh Taherian that musicals are more than just embarrassing theater-kid nonsense. This particular episode is special, though, as it marks the first time in two years that the pair have been able to venture out and experience an actual live performance. For this momentous occasion, the hosts have invited friend of the show Elisa Hansen to watch the latest Off-Broadway production of the doo-wop-killer-plant-romance Little Shop Of Horrors. The trio have nothing but positive things to say about the latest iteration of the oft-revived musical and some of that excitement is due to finally watching a show with a packed audience again. Taherian in particular was delighted by the intimacy offered by a smaller theater as well as being able to witness the terror of a child in the front row who was not prepared for a giant man-eating puppet. In addition to this recounting of public emotional trauma, there’s also plenty of musical history and trivia, including what the term “Off-Broadway” actually means and how the success of Little Shop led to the Disney renaissance of the late ’80s and early ’90s. [Anthony D Herrera]
44 Comments
LOL, you have to feel for a kid who walks into a theater not knowing they’re about to encounter a giant man-eating plant puppet.
You have got to love those moments when you’re like “this is appropriate for a kid” and then you’re like “oh wow how did I ever think this was appropriate for a kid?” It’s usually because of forgetting how violent most american entertainment is but it can also be forgetting that things we are very used to are very terrifying because we have forgotten how our psyches were shredded by the simplest things as children 🙂
I had two cousins in a local youth theater troupe and as a result saw a lot of musicals targeted to families. I remember they did a show involving a dragon and they constructed a really impressive puppet. It was huge, with articulated jaws, glowing red eyes, and smoke that bellowed from it’s nostrils. Kids in the audience loved it! But there was one early performance where, to jazz things up, they put some prop bones in the puppet’s mouth. So the puppet comes out on stage like always, roars, and two femurs and a skull fall out of its mouth. Several kids started crying and the troupe got a lot of complaints. Not for making kids in the audience cry, but for the bones implying the desecration of human remains.
waitwaitwait…desecration of human remains by…the plant? Or by the youth theater troupe? Was it indecent of the fictional man-eating plant not to digest the bones as well?I can imagine somebody putting in a part where the plant seems to have a hairball and then spits out a skull “I hate when they get stuck!”
I honestly don’t know. Some people just really objected to the idea that a fictional character’s fictional remains weren’t given an appropriate burial.
I mean either the plant has to digest the bones, poop the bones, or hurk the bones…Seymour can’t then bury the bones unless they’re you know not in the plant…I think in the movie perhaps he wraps the bones in bags and drops them in trashcans or something? I just liked the idea that your community thought the kids theatre troupe went and made a deal with Gustavo the Body Snatcher for real human bones. The more I think about your story the funnier and more nonsensical it is— “Hey kids, we are doing Sweeney Todd and Arsenic and Old Lace this season, go get the body snatcher and tell him we are going to need at least three fresh corpses every two weeks of the run, after that they get gamey!”
And they were big plastic bones too!
“Them theatre kids dug up and desecrated Andre the Giant’s body!”
I think by the end, full size Audrey II manages to eat and digest the people, bones (and clothes) and all. IIRC when we see Seymour in silhouette axing bodies and putting parts in trash cans I think at that point he’s just using them for their blood and Audrey II hasn’t progressed to solids yet. This is a weird discussion 😛
That makes sense at the early stages. Actually now that I think about it, there is a point where Seymour chops up the bodies and is throwing the whole bodyparts (bone-in) into the plant’s mouth maybe even up to when he doesn’t know yet that the plant can swallow people wholeConversations like this are why the internet exists! well, this and disinformation to overturn democracy.
I saw Little Shop of Horrors when I was 7 (the movie) because my aunt knew I loved musicals and was a huge fan. I woulda thought she’d know just how easily everything terrified me at that age, but no… It really did scar me for a few years LOL (and then I became Little Mermaid obsessed at 9 and learned it was by the same songwriters…)
it’s not hard to see how it could happen with the movie, or when you’re in the front row and the tendrils are RIGHT THERE…I think most companies rent their plant from the same few places but other put them together themselves and I’m sure they get pretty creative
Yeah, it wasn’t just the plant (though that was a big part of it) but also the tone of the thing piece was not something I was ready for at that age. Now we look at it and see with how much affection it’s done for the characters, etc–but back then I remember everything with the dentist upsetting me, and even just the fact that these characters were stuck on Skid Row “where the food is slopped”. At least I saw the movie with the “happy” ending and not the original ending (though I’m not sure how much of a difference that made lol)
I love the musical and have been in productions of it, but the commercial for the 1986 film apparently were the most frightening thing on television for me at 4 years old – my mother loves to remind me that it would send me screaming from the living room.
Yeah… and presented in the fruity, needy format of a musical.
Sometimes it feels really good to be out of the loop.
Short version, she got called out for several microaggressions that she did, refused to acknowledge that she did anything wrong, and then deleted her Twitter rather than just apologize.She than released a 90 minute video a few weeks later to complain about “Cancel Culture”, posted screenshots of out of context tweets she got from cyberstalking her ex-bestie’s Twitter that falsely equivocated criticizing her at all as harassment, listed off her “sins” with jokey jokes and drinking shots all while not really apologizing because “Apologies are about control.”, and calling her critics “wokescolds” (Which is rightwing newspeak literally coined by Ben Shapiro.) and “Diet Nazis” even though a good chunk of her critics were PoC or LGBT.Ever since, Lindsay has basically incorporated being “Canceled” as part of her brand even though she has openly admitted there were actual consequences for the controversy since her Patreon and subscriber numbers went up, she has a NYT Bestselling Series, and enough money to apparently fly to Paris just to shoot a single video for her YouTube series.She also capes for her equally shitty friend Natalie Wynn who basically makes one or two 90 minute videos a year where she basically vlogs in pretty dresses about how people on Twitter are mean to her, mocks and belittles asexual and nonbinary people, and stirs up drama on Twitter every few months to boost her Patreon numbers rather than actually make content.
Wow, this is a reading of the events through the most unsympathetic point of view.
Go take your outdated twitter dramas somewhere else.
Yup, just glad I don’t know what’s going on and glad nobody’s trying to explain it to me.
Ugh, I love most of Lindsay’s work but she is clearly a drunken “I got mine fuck you” trainwreck and the more famous she becomes the bigger the kaboom is gonna be. Everything she did to react to this situation made it worse. She could’ve just turned her phone off and it would’ve petered out.
Yep yep. I like a lot of her videos very much (and I know she’s had some terrible experiences due to her videos) but she can be so utterly frustrating in how strongly she ever refuses to acknowledge any errors on her part (and they can be with more minor things–like I mentioned I find this musical podcast she does as frustrating because she just makes so many statements that are completely wrong–no big deal in the long run, but enough to frustrate me).
Lindsay is fine and the brigading on her was stupid. She has examined the concept of being “cancelled” critically rather than trying to claim any sort of mantle of it if you bother to actually listen to her.
Yeah, I really don’t have the bandwith for it, what with the world being in a constant state of nigh-Stygian blight.
And so many in the loop are like damned souls trying to drag everyone else down to hell with them.
We could have been getting information on a related comic book right now, but instead we got… that absolute mess, which apparently required a part 2 that was equally a mess.
Ah yes, generations from now we will remember one of a thousand million twitter dramas that didn’t amount to absolutely anything, and that nobody cared about a few weeks later.
Ok, but first you better musicalsplainingsplain me what musicalsplaining is.
it’s a podcast show (trill)
where you get info (trill)
about mu-u-u-si-calls you might (trill) not (trill) know! (horn sting button)
Ok, you obviously spent a couple minutes on that so here’s a star.
awww thanks, but actually only as much time as it took to write itI’ve seen a lot of musicals
I’m a fan of a lot of Ellis’ video essays (her one from a few months back about why Disney characters maybe aren’t as problematic as people like to make out, is great). But the episodes of musicalspalining I’ve listened to have drove me, as a huge musical theatre geek, nuts. I had to drop it when I realized every episode made me post completely obnoxious corrections to all the misinformation she’d give (and I get it, the podcast doesn’t exist to be factually correct, but there were some examples which were just completely wrong). There’s no way Ellis or anyone involved ever read my comments anyway, so…
But I’m not surprised that Little Shop is a musical that people who think they hate musicals fall for. It’s deceptively clever–in that it is one of those works that likes to point out how silly musicals can be. And yet, Ashman and Menken are so brilliant that, unlike other examples, they never condescend to the form and the people who love it–Skid Row is as good a “meet your cast!” number as Sondheim or anyone has done.
I hate musicals, and Little Shop is on my short list of musicals I’d LOVE to be in.
I don’t have a speaking role for you, but you can be a plant in the background. Can you sit still?
I’ll either be a begonia or a carnation. FUCK hydrangeas.
I have a friend who has a recurring gig as an Audrey Too puppeteer in my city. He also often works with the same performer who does vocals for the puppet. It’s kind of a weird niche market that he’s cornered.
I just find it hard to deal with her, and a much greater extent Natalie’s, drama. It’s almost like once every two or three months one of them will say something stupid, hurtful, or both, refuse to actually apologize when it would be so easy to do so, and then complain about how people on Twitter are mean to them and how they’ve been “Canceled” even though they both make at least $300,000 on Patreon alone.Sometimes I just think it’s just not worth drawing attention to them and let them just burn out on their own because being a stubborn jackass can only get you so far.
Oh trust me, I know your feelings on both women (and I feel I should apologize that I’ve picked on you in other threads for always bringing up how awful they are whenever they get mentioned). I don’t feel nearly as strongly as you do, but I also don’t think you’re wrong and their, well, hypocritical behaviour can be annoying to see.
Sometimes I just think it’s just not worth drawing attention to them and let them just burn out on their own because being a stubborn jackass can only get you so far. Do this. They’re both niche. They’re both eking out a comfortable living being niche, but neither is poised to become some kind of audience-warping iconoclast. Take a bird’s eye view of it, and you’ll see how little influence or real-world sway they actually have.Like…it’s a slapfight between folks jacked-in to Internet drama and content creators who “win” either way.
It bears repeating that while filming the 1986 Little Shop of Horrors film, the Audry II plant was animatronic and could only move very slowly. They realized that they would have to speed up the film in its scenes in order for the plant to move at normal speed (and faster) in the film. And because so many of its scenes were with Rick Moranis, for those scenes Moranis had to act at 1/4 speed so that it would look normal when sped up, including all of his singing with the plant too. And he looks completely normal during those scenes even though he’s moving and singing veeeeeeeery slooooooooly.Now that’s talent.
I actually think it does give those sequences a slight “this doesn’t QUITE look right” element that’s perfect (and this is not to disagree with you about how great Moranis is there). Frank Oz actually deserves a ton of credit for details like that in the film–like in the opening title song, it’s pouring rain and yet none of the rain lands on Crystal, Ronette and Chiffon (who incidentally Ashman and Menken wrote a song for, with that exact title, that was meant to play during the end credits. It’s great)
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