#ghost quartet#never take the stars away from me
fuckkkk i forgot about never take the stars away from me. fucking heartwrenching!!!!!!
obv ghost quartet is not a story super focused on giving detailed lore of its characters but yeah. the telescope as a whole song rlly shifts/deepens how you understand rose's poetry. similarly i would argue to how the whole musical starts from the camera shop scene where we get a simple retelling of the entire rose red / pearl white saga, only for the musical itself to slowly go so much more into detail about what happened.
its not even just that rose wrote the poems as a gift for the astronomer. she sees things in the stars. she's genuinely affected by the world and its beauty and its pain. "i love the way you see the world / i love the way your soul sings / i wish that i could sing like you / i wish that i could feels things / never take the stars away from me" and then he does. and then her sister loves him more than her.
and then danyazade dies. scheherazade is left with the shah with no stardust left and they are both miserable and full of regret. and the starchild is a ghost in the eyes of her god, staring up at the stars and wondering about the man a million lightyears away whose already turned to dust. and roxie is asking her mama to read her arabian nights, and lady usher sings about the little moons, little candles, little snowflakes, little glows, little bits of stardust. and her mother wasn't very nice.
maybe im just too lose in the gq sauce but actually drives me crazy how we know so little about these characters lives in any real detailed way yet there is a never ending amount of analysis i feel i can do on them that makes me want to cry and scream and wail. dave malloy let me kiss you with tongue under the moonlight.