#blake baumgartner

Villains

Monster Blood by R. L. Stine

Jules and Mickey rob a convenience store. They hit the road ready to make love and make a new life in Florida. Until their car runs out of gas in the middle of the woods. Luckily, they find an empty house nearby. They search it for car keys or a way to siphon gasoline. They find a little girl chained up in the basement. Then George and Gloria come home.

Villains (2019) is Bonnie and Clyde meets Misery. Young horror icons Bill Skarsgård (It) and Maika Monroe (It Follows) have great chemistry together. This film is funny, but Jules and Mickey’s relationship made me care about them and added real tension to the film. It’s like a horror romance filled with twists and turns.

[A little contextualizing is necessary here.  As this is a series about the lives and careers of two individuals with significant careers on Broadway and in film (Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon), there are a lot of well known Broadway numbers on this soundtrack.  As the show is meant to be documenting the numbers as performed (as opposed to within the context of the work), these numbers are not just “Actor X performs song A” but “Actor X as Actor Y performs Song A.”  I’ll spell it out more explicitly below.]

Featuring the following tracks:

Bianca Marroquin (as Chita Rivera), Rema Webb (as Paula Kelley) and The Fandango Girls - “Hey Big Spender” (from “Sweet Charity”)

PJ Benjamin (as Russ Brown), Nick Blaemire (as James Komack) and Brian Cali (as Nathaniel Frey) - “Heart” (from “Damn Yankees”)

Kelli Barrett (as Liza Minnelli) and The Kit Kat Girls - “Mein Herr” (from “Cabaret”)

Ethan Slater (as Joel Grey), Alysha Umphress and Morgan Weed - “Two Ladies” (from “Cabaret”) [Umphress and Weed’s characters are not given names in the episode.]

Kelli Barrett (as Liza Minnelli) - “Cabaret” (from “Cabaret”)

Nathan Barr - “Pas De Deux”

Tim Young (as John Rubinstein) - “Corner Of The Sky” (from “Pippin”)

Blake Baumgartner (as Nicole Fosse) - “I Guess I’ll Miss The Man” (from “Pippin”) [Yes, this is sung by Bob Fosse’s daughter.  And yes, in context, that is as weird as you might imagine.]

Bianca Marroquin (as Chita Rivera) - “All That Jazz” (from “Chicago”)

Tyler Hanes (as Jerry Orbach) and Sean Patrick Doyle (as Michael O’Haughey) - “We Both Reached For The Gun” (from “Chicago”)

Michelle Williams (as Gwen Verdon) - “Razzle Dazzle” (from “Chicago”)

Lin-Manuel Miranda (as Roy Scheider) - “Mr. Bojangles”