If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance baffle them with your bullshit

To say that this is a movie that completely ravaged me is probably an understatement.
After watching it I felt gutted.
These atrocities are what people actually endured in a time before modern law and regulations. And the film rubs your face in that.
Rape, murder, slavery, infanticide. It’s all there.
And none of it is done in a gratuitous way. It’s all there to say, “look at the history here. Look at what was done to millions of people. Women and children”.
It’s a film that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
I bartended at this show on Broadway from time to time and it’s one of the only musicals whose score I actually enjoy, so I went into this ready to slice and dice. It doesn’t help that the press tour has been a wreck of overwrought emotion and performative nonsense (especially from Cynthia Erivo) that reminded me of why I hated doing musical theatre in the first place. Histrionic people constantly operating on level 11, trying to one up each…