Girasoul

My daughter's elementary school did a production of Cinderella, and I wasn't that fond of that musical, but my daughter insisted on listening to the revival soundtrack on repeat and when I heard Harada's performance Stepsister's Lament, I was just completely blown away -- she just has such mastery of the comic timing, the singing, the everything. So then I went down a rabbit hole watching her musical performances on YouTube and with Schmigadoon, as much as I love Chenoweth, Harada was the one I was most excited to see. And I thought she sang her song fabulously.

Yeah...I mean, Max was especially idiotic this episode but at the same time a lot of his behavior lined up with things I saw i the last year in work in health-related research-- a team I work with includes a number of people with administrative positions at a big teaching hospital/medical center and after the George Floyd protests started, it was crazy to me the amount of well-meaning white savior-ism -- the brainstorming of ways to make a quick fix for racism, even while being blind to all the thankless and grueling work that was being and had been done on those exact topics/issues by people of color at the hospital for years (and kind of like this episode, thankfully at a certain point they did start listening and then doing more of the day-to-day work of addressing racism). So even though it was maddening just how much idiotic behavior they had Max doing all within the same episode, it also was like....yup.

Yes! I was totally thinking that some of the comments on here about contestants lacking personality and about Noel/Matt being juvenile and tiresome are very much related. I personally like Hermine and over the episodes have found some of her comments rather low-key witty. I also don't see the contestants, as a group, as noticeably any more awkward/boring than previous groups -- they all seem nice, bonded with each other and with their own quirks/humor when they're allowed to have more of a moment on camera. My take on a number of scenes is that as Matt and Noel keep up their repetitive, juvenile hijinks that are clearly aimed at each other/Paul/camera rather than about engaging the contestants, there are contestants whose response is to just kind of try to push on with their own work. I used to like Noel fine, but this season -- yeesh! And not only is Noel noticeably more often in territory that is just creepy/harass-y but it makes me so annoyed that the production team seems to think this is what we want to watch and leaves those cringe-y scenes in. I'll keep watching for now only because I like the contestants themselves.

Probably French soldiers - with thanks to the avclub review for the explanation, those were the Mino/Minon warriors of the Dahomey Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahomey_Amazons and in late 1800s most were wiped out in a battle with French soldiers. Amazing story and apparently Lupita N'yongo has been planning a movie about them, which I really hope happens. I'm so glad this episode included them so that I could learn about them.