The Rivals of Amziah King is something like a beehive. Within it there is an abundance of sweetness produced by an intensity of driven, like-minded community fellowship, a heaviness of necessity for the work and the vitality of what it means, and a sense of awe with the process and structure so critical to that taste that is yearned for. But be careful, because it also stings and stings hard when disturbed. The compulsively eclectic sophomore feature from director Andrew Patterson I find myself at a bit of a loss to characterize with its equal elements of western noir, crime drama, coming-of-age film, and slice-of-life vibes movie -arguably also a low-key rural musical. It runs in and out of each of these qualifiers yet manages to largely stay cohesive somehow, its texture as multifarious yet fitting as a honeycomb. Exuberant in its style and by turns endearing, eccentric, and dramatically mystifying in its story, it is one of the more inspired movie concepts we’ve seen all year and c...
The concept of SIX is quite fun for a musical. It is also exactly the kind of concept you would expect from a pair of theatre kids in university -which is indeed when Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss first created the show. Crossing the stories of the wives of Henry VIII with the aesthetics of girl pop and some very blunt themes on patriarchal readings of history and the notion of restoring these women’s own agency to their stories feels like the kind of idea that would originate in the context of learning academic theories of historiography and feminism for the first time and melding that with some familiar nostalgia. That’s not a knock on the show necessarily , it clearly worked -and Marlow and Moss had the talent to compose it all in a competent way and the foresight to understand the structural limitations of the idea. This likely wouldn’t work as a Hamilton -style epic, it needed to be a short and simple yet striking concert. And as a concert it is a pretty good one. SIX is the latest...