there were a few of the suit looks that were very good but they could have pushed the costumes so much further!! i'm disappointed.Īre the space groups gonna have space imagery in every one of their stages even if it doesn't make sense.
i do NOT understand how they missed this opportunity!! like seriously this would have been so cute if the girls had had pastel mini poodle skirts and there's literally no reason they couldn't! they gave up having cute floofs for shaking for plain old boring shorts!! a CRIME!!! there are a thousand ways to adapt rockabilly style to something that looks 'modern' and they managed to hit none of them. i can read what the intention was, but the song is literally about ass shaking and there are NO POODLE SKIRTS. While i appreciate how lesbian this was, if you're looking to do a rockabilly/soda fountain theme, there are so many better ways to style. but all they did with this was use is as a ceiling for fifteen seconds? i would have liked to have seen them use it in a more dynamic way. i would have liked to have seen a wide shot to see if that would have made a difference, but with a large active set piece like fabric, it's usually brought out because it serves a specific function. I am also not totally sure what the deal is with the sheet. i found there was a lot of single person in centre tradeoffs in the same physical place and made the stage feel very static, even though i know they did move around the space. i don't think it was wrong of them to want to add some levels, but it also means that they unintentionally trapped the majority of the choreography on that one side of the stage. I understand the intent of the tables, but they read way too much like school bleachers, which just further confuses the theme. the strongest moments were when they had a concrete theme but there were only those two moments. like these red and black gothic costumes and then these multicoloured liquid simulations and space squares have no connection and the stage feels very confused. it left all the elements feeling very disjointed from each other. there were very clearly some gothic and almost horror elements, like the pipe organ at the dance break, but none of the rest of the stage reflected that at all. like i said for the costumes, i don't know what the intention of this stage was. Loved the intro! not the hugest fan of the added in post smoke effects but the witchy potion gothic type vibe was a very promising start to the stage. they clearly seem to be biasing towards these very blasty instrumentals but the vocals can't seem to match the intensity, which is a shame because i can tell that some of these girls have pipes, but i can't really hear it, yanno? when you have this large a group those vocals should be almost too much, not vaguely breathy. I'm wondering if it's maybe a producer on wjsn's end, but again like their last stage i found the levels between the vocals and the track to be a little bit wonky.
cathedral windows were very cool and very easily the best part of the stage they did a huge amount for establishing the gothic theme, but then they immediately toss all that worlduilding away for more windows xp screensavers? i want to have words with their projection designer, what are they DOING. but the details here, like the jewelry, are almost too small to be noticed if there were not camera closeups if you're wanting to go gothic, you should go for overexaggeration, which is already something that you should be doing with stage costumes anyways. which is a problem because the other design elements are all over the place. costumes are a very important component of establishing theme with a performance, and these are a touch too vague to be truly expressive of theme independant of the other design elements. I can't really tell what the intention of these costumes are. no rankings until next ep but the airing order did happen to go from least to most fave so there you go! i was generally pretty pleased with the staging that i saw in this episode, it felt generally a bit more grounded and natural than some of the first stages did.
it's big enough that you can pack a good number of dancers on it, but it's not so big that it swallows up a smaller number of people.
unsurprised to see that i was right in that they were downgrading stages, and honestly? this is a great stage size and configuration. it's always so fun to see what groups come up with and how they interpret the songs. I think these episodes are my favourite from this series. Episode three! it's the first round of the song swaps!