Little Did I Know

I love love love this!!!!

This is a great idea! But the plot is kinda cliche and random (at the same time lol). The songs are okay, but the lyrics are rough. When the entire chorus for one song is just “Blah, Blah, Blah,” I have issues with that. It’s worth a listen if you are missing your musicals, but I would never call it “Broadway-level.” Also, is that guy the man who played the man who sings Hellfire in Hunchback of Notre Dame? I can’t think of his name at the moment.

In the trailer, Kurt Hugo Schneider introduces this program as “the first true Broadway-level podcast musical”. Unfortunately for this musical, this automatically pits “Little Did I Know” against Two-Up Productions’ 2017 podcast musical, “36 Questions”. And “36 Questions” did it better. “36 Questions” has dialogue, but the songs both stand on their own and tell their own story, and they move you through the musical. It’s all a cohesive whole, and the parts all work together to “show” the story, and dialogue isn’t generally used as exposition. The characters speak directly to the audience, but that’s part of the conceit of the musical. Natalie/Judith is intentionally creating a record of events. We, the audience, hear the story as it unfolds. For this, the songs are really flat. There’s a lot of exposition, and the story moves mostly behind the scenes. We get moments of a summer, but between the snippets, we know time moves because we are told time moves. The songs are also a bit of a disconnect from the story. They’re not particularly complex, but they also rather lack structure. Often, it’ll seem like there’s been a missed opportunity for a tighter lyric, like the song has been set up for the expectation of a rhyme or repeated rhythm, but the expectation is neither fulfilled nor subverted. There isn’t generally really anything creative or interesting done. This is all telling with not much actually showing. This works better in the beginning when we’re getting to know the characters, but at the end, it just feels like there wasn’t really ever enough depth. Mostly, I leave this wondering why this is being promoted as “the first true Broadway-level podcast musical”. Was no one involved in the production aware of “36 Questions”? Did anyone actually check to see if there had be previous podcast musicals? What did they mean by “Broadway-level”, and if someone knew about “36 Questions”, what about it makes it not Broadway level or pseudoBroadway-level? Why doesn’t “36 Questions” fit?

Tho I want to kill Kurt and Laura for singing “Hi Veronica”, due to the fact I’m singing the “Bla bla bla” part all day lol