I Love Bare: A Bopera

here’s the thing about Jason McConnell is that you can look at his actions from a distance and call him selfish and a bad boyfriend and all that, and he is, but he is also a high schooler in a restrictive, choking situation. he is being compressed from all angles into what everyone expects of him, the valedictorian, the star of the show, the one that will keep the McConnell flame burning. he is crushed by expectations, by the fact that he will never be able to be what they want him to be, by the fact that he hasn’t even had a chance to figure out who he is or what he wants for himself. he’s not just a bad guy, a “problematic” character— he’s a kid in a bad situation who’s lashing out bc he feels so out of control in life that he has to take control wherever he can. he is so much more complex than his worst moments, and I think bare only becomes more beautiful and painful when we look at the intricacies of Jason and understand why he does what he does

Concept: Amber Riley as Sister Chantelle in a Bare: A Pop Opera

hot take but Warning is a good song. First because the lyrics are pretty ('a quiet kind of distance' 'all the dreams I had for him fade away, lost in words I could not say' etc). But also because this song is about one of the most important themes in the show: the importance of words. 'One simple word, and the whole world has changed'. This idea first appears during 911!E ('you tell one person, that's it, cat's out of the bag'). You cannot take back what was said and one word is enough to change everything and your entire life. So this song also foreshadows what would be Jason's death: 'Peter, what I did [said] was messed up, I'm sorry / It's done', 'If maybe we were silent or we had spoken'. So yeah Warning supremacy actually

bare is a musical and a tragedy. it's a tragedy within a musical. Peter is the main character of the musical and Jason is the main character of the tragedy. The plot is made up of the interactions between Peter's plot and Jason's plot

Do you ever think about the amount of guilt Lucas probabaly has surrounding Jason's death?

everyone say thank you bare argentina for making theatre kid peter canon

honestly the mere setup for the main themes of bare in epiphany is so good. the first thing we hear in the song is the main tune to bare, the song (which itself repeats throughout the show as a sort of motif) and which is peter and jason's (two gay boys') final confession of love. and then, immediately it's followed by in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit i will go unto the altar of God, amen i.e. the standard catholic prayer (it is in latin, however and from the research i did, this prayer is usually said in the dialect of the region where the church is established, so i don't know why it is in the original latin. maybe to symbolise the seriousness with which tradition is taken at st. cecelia's?). this, in turn subtly sets up the theme of religion and homosexuality, something both peter and jason struggle with later in the show

I love how in bapo, romeo & juliet isn't being performed as play, but as a musical, no, an opera. They mention during rehearsals that they're "out of tune". Anyway, the concept is so amusing to me lmao. I mean, imagine going to see your child's production of r&j but its just kids (probably badly) singing all the lines for 2 hours straight. Shakespeare is enough of a headache now add singing to the mix