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mrsluigivargasLast week I chewed through most of the Turnabout Musical (TM) and Turnabout: An Ace Attorney Musical (TAAAM) content, and I really enjoyed it! I don’t usually watch/listen to musicals, because they don’t appeal to me (it seems really hard to find a musical that both isn't full of romance and isn't sad). If you don’t know, Turnabout Musical chronicles the events of the first Ace Attorney game, and TAAAM is a sort of remake or variation of TM. They could be considered different musicals with the same foundation, tbh.
I gotta say, re-experiencing the plot of this game, especially the last case, made me realize how much of a fucking miracle it was that last defendant got that not guilty verdict in the end. It was like the universe looked at him and was like, 'no this isn't the karma you're owed; this was placed on your shoulders by someone else without my permission, and I'll see to it that they don’t escape my grasp by doing so,' and then pulled the most wack batshit off-the-wall nonsense imaginable behind the scenes to accomplish that. I'm obsessed with it. I also really appreciate the musical lifting up Phoenix's connection to Mia and really honing in on the Phoenix-Maya friendship as a solid throughline. That's the benefit of video-game adaptations, I suppose; you get to explore the relationships more thoroughly!
The 2015 original soundtrack was a pleasant listen, and since the two productions I watched don’t have any Turnabout Samurai content, it was nice to hear those songs being sung, haha. I like the Wendy Oldbag ones especially, they're fun. One thing I had to get used to really really quickly was the amount of cross-talk in the songs; sometimes there would be 2 or 3 people singing different things at once and it was kind of mind bending. One song has 5 (!) simultaneous parts! It turned my brain to mush.
The two productions of TM that I watched were a 2016 production and a 2021 production. Of them I think I like the 2021 one more. At first I was feeling the opposite, because the 2021 version is a whole hour shorter and cuts out a lot of cool songs (Decree of the Prosecutor and Anything to Win being the most notable absences), but the acting more than makes up for it. The two parts of the 2021 production I keep gravitating to are the It's Gotta Be the Butz performance (the actor was having the time of his life - I was crying laughing by the end of it!) and the last 10 or so minutes of the show, because the actors made a lot of cool decisions wrt it.
For instance, in the Justice for All reprise, Phoenix and Mia hug! It's very sweet! There's also the last song; it’s a bit of a medley of reprises, and while the 2021 production cuts out half of them, Phoenix and Maya are literally crying on stage while they sing the I'll Be There section which adds so so much to the scene. Especially since! The usual live version of this song takes place at the after-trial celebration dinner, and has a running gag of a waitress in the background trying to figure out who to give the bill to. This gag is silly, but kind of takes away from a lot of the reflection that’s happening between the characters in the final moments of the musical. But the 2021 production doesn’t have that waitress!!! So Maya and Phoenix can cry uninterrupted :)
In all the versions of the I'll Be There section of that final song, Phoenix and Maya don’t finish that final phrase. In the original, it's because a train whistle sounds. In the 2016 production, it’s the waitress that interrupts them. But in 2021, the two of them get so choked up that they go in for a hug~ Again, without the waitress the emotions of this scene can really thrive! And then! In the other versions of the song Phoenix starts the Objection song section that comes right after that, but in 2021 Maya has to start it because Phoenix is too busy wiping tears from his eyes, haha. It's a cute touch.
For the Objection song section of that song in the original, it's just Phoenix and Maya. For the live versions, it turns into a song that the whole cast joins in on, as a sort of last hurrah for the show. But the 2021 version is strategic about who joins in when~! Most notably, on the phrase "I'll be with you", Mia walks in from Phoenix's side of the stage and sings it, and Gumshoe walks up and clasps Edgeworth on the shoulder while he sings it (and Edgeworth nods back 🥺). They squeezed in one last reinforcement of what these characters mean to each other at the final minute and I love it to pieces.
Anyway yeah the 2021 version is my favorite.
But the 2016 production had some good moments too! It's Gotta Be the Butz is still a riot, for instance. And the 2016 cast had more people than the 2021 one, so there were a few original characters; I miss Belinda and the Surprisingly Movable Statue every day. And I think I like how Payne and Redd White were portrayed a little better here, as well (I guess they have more room to be silly with the increased runtime). Two other tiny moments that I loved were how in I'll Be There when Maya's singing about helping Phoenix out in court every time they outsmart him she boops his nose, and near the end when final culprit is caught out he picks up the gun off the evidence table and points it at the defense, the bailiff points his gun at the culprit in response, and there's a bit of a standoff. A wonderfully tense moment. There's also, of course, all the songs that the 2021 production cut that appear in this one. Also, this production's video has subtitles. Yay, accessibility!
TAAAM is the newest version of the musical; Act 1 was released last month, and Act 2 is supposed to release next month, I think? They reworked the scenes and the script some of the song lyrics to make it more suitable for live performances apparently; all I know is that some of the minor plot changes had me hissing like a cat at my screen, lmao (11:24 AM? No State v Fey Day 1???). But it was still fun! They brought back Reawakening, which I hadn't heard in a while and was still a solid emotional suckerpunch, and Redd White Adieu's got some of the chaos of that 5-part hellscape I mentioned earlier, which makes it a bit of an earworm. And they generalized the main conflict to fighting police corruption and the fickle court of public opinion, which makes the musical that much more accessible to people who don’t know Ace Attorney. The only thing I'm nervous about is the ending, because again, I'm very attached to the last 10 minutes of the 2021 production, and if that waitress shows her face…
(Also It's Gotta be the Butz isn't gonna be the same without a live person running around being ridiculous...)
Anyway I'm still excited for Act 2! ^_^ I'm glad I caught up with the musical content!
I gotta say, re-experiencing the plot of this game, especially the last case, made me realize how much of a fucking miracle it was that last defendant got that not guilty verdict in the end. It was like the universe looked at him and was like, 'no this isn't the karma you're owed; this was placed on your shoulders by someone else without my permission, and I'll see to it that they don’t escape my grasp by doing so,' and then pulled the most wack batshit off-the-wall nonsense imaginable behind the scenes to accomplish that. I'm obsessed with it. I also really appreciate the musical lifting up Phoenix's connection to Mia and really honing in on the Phoenix-Maya friendship as a solid throughline. That's the benefit of video-game adaptations, I suppose; you get to explore the relationships more thoroughly!
The 2015 original soundtrack was a pleasant listen, and since the two productions I watched don’t have any Turnabout Samurai content, it was nice to hear those songs being sung, haha. I like the Wendy Oldbag ones especially, they're fun. One thing I had to get used to really really quickly was the amount of cross-talk in the songs; sometimes there would be 2 or 3 people singing different things at once and it was kind of mind bending. One song has 5 (!) simultaneous parts! It turned my brain to mush.
The two productions of TM that I watched were a 2016 production and a 2021 production. Of them I think I like the 2021 one more. At first I was feeling the opposite, because the 2021 version is a whole hour shorter and cuts out a lot of cool songs (Decree of the Prosecutor and Anything to Win being the most notable absences), but the acting more than makes up for it. The two parts of the 2021 production I keep gravitating to are the It's Gotta Be the Butz performance (the actor was having the time of his life - I was crying laughing by the end of it!) and the last 10 or so minutes of the show, because the actors made a lot of cool decisions wrt it.
For instance, in the Justice for All reprise, Phoenix and Mia hug! It's very sweet! There's also the last song; it’s a bit of a medley of reprises, and while the 2021 production cuts out half of them, Phoenix and Maya are literally crying on stage while they sing the I'll Be There section which adds so so much to the scene. Especially since! The usual live version of this song takes place at the after-trial celebration dinner, and has a running gag of a waitress in the background trying to figure out who to give the bill to. This gag is silly, but kind of takes away from a lot of the reflection that’s happening between the characters in the final moments of the musical. But the 2021 production doesn’t have that waitress!!! So Maya and Phoenix can cry uninterrupted :)
In all the versions of the I'll Be There section of that final song, Phoenix and Maya don’t finish that final phrase. In the original, it's because a train whistle sounds. In the 2016 production, it’s the waitress that interrupts them. But in 2021, the two of them get so choked up that they go in for a hug~ Again, without the waitress the emotions of this scene can really thrive! And then! In the other versions of the song Phoenix starts the Objection song section that comes right after that, but in 2021 Maya has to start it because Phoenix is too busy wiping tears from his eyes, haha. It's a cute touch.
For the Objection song section of that song in the original, it's just Phoenix and Maya. For the live versions, it turns into a song that the whole cast joins in on, as a sort of last hurrah for the show. But the 2021 version is strategic about who joins in when~! Most notably, on the phrase "I'll be with you", Mia walks in from Phoenix's side of the stage and sings it, and Gumshoe walks up and clasps Edgeworth on the shoulder while he sings it (and Edgeworth nods back 🥺). They squeezed in one last reinforcement of what these characters mean to each other at the final minute and I love it to pieces.
Anyway yeah the 2021 version is my favorite.
But the 2016 production had some good moments too! It's Gotta Be the Butz is still a riot, for instance. And the 2016 cast had more people than the 2021 one, so there were a few original characters; I miss Belinda and the Surprisingly Movable Statue every day. And I think I like how Payne and Redd White were portrayed a little better here, as well (I guess they have more room to be silly with the increased runtime). Two other tiny moments that I loved were how in I'll Be There when Maya's singing about helping Phoenix out in court every time they outsmart him she boops his nose, and near the end when final culprit is caught out he picks up the gun off the evidence table and points it at the defense, the bailiff points his gun at the culprit in response, and there's a bit of a standoff. A wonderfully tense moment. There's also, of course, all the songs that the 2021 production cut that appear in this one. Also, this production's video has subtitles. Yay, accessibility!
TAAAM is the newest version of the musical; Act 1 was released last month, and Act 2 is supposed to release next month, I think? They reworked the scenes and the script some of the song lyrics to make it more suitable for live performances apparently; all I know is that some of the minor plot changes had me hissing like a cat at my screen, lmao (11:24 AM? No State v Fey Day 1???). But it was still fun! They brought back Reawakening, which I hadn't heard in a while and was still a solid emotional suckerpunch, and Redd White Adieu's got some of the chaos of that 5-part hellscape I mentioned earlier, which makes it a bit of an earworm. And they generalized the main conflict to fighting police corruption and the fickle court of public opinion, which makes the musical that much more accessible to people who don’t know Ace Attorney. The only thing I'm nervous about is the ending, because again, I'm very attached to the last 10 minutes of the 2021 production, and if that waitress shows her face…
(Also It's Gotta be the Butz isn't gonna be the same without a live person running around being ridiculous...)
Anyway I'm still excited for Act 2! ^_^ I'm glad I caught up with the musical content!
