What I liked
- Megan Watt (Daenerys): Show-stealing numbers. Twice. Her voice and performance is worth the price of admission alone. Absolutely brilliant.
- Brice Mitchell Wiliams (Jon Snow): Flawless comic timing. It takes the right type of personality to pull off the suffering of a bastard. Brice clearly has a bastard’s heart.
- Casey Suddeth (Arya Stark): Perfect pouting matched with a defiance worthy of the character, Casey NAILED Arya beautifully.
- Tony Cellucci (Tyrion Lannister): DO NOT MISS Tyrion’s incredible and understated performances in the front row chair for the first 20 mins. of the show. His reactions there are some of the funniest parts of the entire show, hands down. I honestly had as much fun watching him as I did anything else during that time (of course it helped that I was sitting right behind him).
What I didn't like
*Trying to Cover Too Much: While I appreciate that this show is covering the first season of GoT, parody is about hitting the BEST points. And this show’s strengths were when it hit the moments that everyone remembers and cares about.
This show tried to cover too much of the season and in the process spent time on things that aren’t important or memorable at the cost of being a little tighter, a little stronger or a little more able to focus on the bigger moments such as “Mother of all Dragons” (which felt shorted at the end of everything) to me.
My overall impression
Let’s get this straight up front—this is a show for people who are fans of Game of Thrones. I think you really do need to know the show to have any real chance of enjoying what’s happening here.
But if you ARE a fan, boy is there a lot to enjoy about this parody musical. The costumes are fantastic. The casting choices are almost unanimously great in look, voice and characterization. There are inspired choices in staging, such as the various dire wolf attacks throughout the show. It’s enormously fun.
Like any parody-style musical, there are numbers that are more effective than others. Who doesn’t love comedy songs about incest? (Lots of people, I suppose—but who that hasn’t intentionally come to a GoT musical?) Who doesn’t love a song about how much it sucks to be a bastard? Or to become the Khaleesi? Everything you imagine to be in the show is there. And that’s great.
If there’s a flaw, it’s that some of these moments feel shorted because the show ALSO focuses on moments that are less important, less remembered, less iconic. I walked out of the show both very happy I’d seen it and wishing that some of the numbers had been given slightly more time/attention by cutting/tightening other moments. It’s always my opinion that parody works best when it focuses on the highlights of what it references, and that might have helped this show be even better than the really, really good it already is. And it IS really good. Especially if you’re a GoT fan.
