Tonight on GeekNights, we review Studio PONOC's Mary and the Witch's Flower. It's not bad per se, but it is definitely flawed. In the news, there is a 12th Yowamushi Pedal stage play, and the New York International Children's Film Festival has a fantastic 2018 lineup that we will definitely be seeing.
Things of the Day
Episode Links
Nov 30th-Dec 2nd
I already bought Lu Over the Wall tickets for the March 10th showing, if you feel like meeting up
Nerd stage shows are interesting. At any given time, there is an off-broadway translation of at least one nerd property. They tend to run for a few months, and then sometimes travel to other cities. I really enjoyed the Toxic Avenger, Heathers, Evil Dead, and Silence of the Lambs musicals.
Porting nerd franchises to other real-life experiences happens in the escape room business as well. I went to the pop-up Resident Evil escape room because I have a RE-obsessed high school buddy, and it was an easy night out. It was garbage. Same thing with the Zelda escape room, which was also crap.
On the topic of D&D on stage, certainly nobody does it like Penny Arcade, but Critical Role, with Matt Mercer and his crew of voice actors-turned-players have eclipsed Acq Inc a long time ago. WotC latched onto the Matt Mercer fandom hysteria and has been using him to lead an in-house show called Force Grey, where Mercer DMs for a bunch of insufferable nerd celebrities (think Chris Hardwick and Jonah Ray). WotC has their heads up their asses though and I wonder how successful this venture really is. Here’s a great example: they did a live stage show version of Force Grey in NYC, and scheduled it on the same weekend that PAX Unplugged was in Philly.
The best live dnd experience I have seen outside of penny arcade is d20 live. They will do one shots and limitd campaigns with a cast of people at conventions that are not D&D systems.
We ha them do their first American performance at magfest here if you want to take a look, their con bravo stuff has more of their “regular crew” but this ensamble worked well too.
Re: music for animals: https://www.musicforcats.com
I have played samples for all three of my cats and observed them respond in positive ways. Obviously, I can’t actually ask them for a review, but they seemed to like it. Ordinarily they are completely indifferent to music. (Except for David Bowie–I have one cat who hates his music and runs out of the room if someone plays one of his songs.)