In Revue: A (New!) Musical Roundup Series #0 “Stars” + #1 “Mix Tape”

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Hello my fellow musical scholars, it's time for the inaugural installment of In Revue, a roundup style forum series for musicals!

Broadway Bid'ness

[Various news items that should be of interest.]

Kristen Chenoweth will read for and may head up a revival of Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
LMM and J.Lo teamed up on a charity track for Orlando, "Love Makes The World Go Round," and it's dropping tonight (midnight EST)! There's a preview video here, and @Freeus already has the transcription started, song page here!
The Great Comet put out a trailer for their upcoming Broadway debut. It looks AMAZEBALLS.

Community Center Stage

[Cool stuff happening around Genius!]

First, @davemalloy is back at it again! He spent last week annotating the heck outta his show Ghost Quartet! This was in conjunction with the release of a new live album that's up for streaming and pay-what-you-can on Bandcamp. If you're new to the show, check out his verifieds—they're funny and fascinating as all get out. If you have a chance to see the show (it's coming to Joe's Pub in NYC later this month and to the Edinburgh Fringe Fest in August), I would recommend.

Second, to help support this thread series and help our users find each other among the wilds of Genius, I made a new musicals community page! Right now it's only got one show per letter of the alphabet (I had a little too much fun putting that together…), but hopefully it will balloon to showcase all the amazing shows that the world/Genius has to offer. Check it out, get your name out there, hype for your faves.

Some Genius scholars to keep your eyes on: @EmRoseLA is adding some fresh fire to Hamilton, @WTParker is taking on The Book of Mormon, @lemoncave is filling in holes by transcribing songs from Chess and other classics, @emlc is going ham on song bios for Wicked with @BadWolfBroadway @cordyceps and @racheljacobson coming in with lots of annotations as well, @carsongraham and @upstartcrow are bringing activity back to In The Heights, and @cordyleome continues her streak as our top musical all-rounder, doing some great stuff on Spamalot and Jesus Christ Superstar in particular.

Side by Side By Genius

[This section will spotlight one "meme" song from a musical that has been nominated to get #TheGeniusTreatment, i.e. a shiny transcription, red cleanup, and lots of super awesome annotations!]

The reason why the subject said #0 and #1 is that I wanted to give a good example of what these songs should look like at the beginning of the week and at the end of the week. Pretend we already had one of these last Thursday, and that I nominated "Stars" from Les Miserables. I've already given you the hype on Les Mis in general, but this song in particular is a classic Broadway solo. It's got compositional passion, a sweet extended metaphor, Biblical references, some cool production history and stage direction notes, a break in the fourth wall, and is ripe to be unpacked re: its depiction of Javert's authoritarian ethics/philosophy. Cool cool. Check out what it looks like after we put some work in to bring this song up to A++, fully annotated quality:

http://genius.com/Claude-michel-schonberg-stars-lyrics

Now for this week, we're going with something a bit lighter and accessible to lots of different people. "Mix Tape" from Avenue Q! It's a cute and pretty straightforward song about a lady puppet getting a mix tape from a gentleman puppet, and analyzing the… somewhat eclectic… song picks to see if he's trying to tell her he likes her. It's adorable, self-contained, and references like 25 popular songs, all worthy of annotation. @Rinster and @noliterally have already given the track a go, so it shouldn't be too hard to take this page to greatness.

http://genius.com/Avenue-q-mix-tape-lyrics