Can I give half a honk for potential? I would love to see Michelle do a pull-out-the-stops dramatic piece and I love the music. I saw it live at Campbell's and of course on tape. I think the overall structure of the program is excellent--highlight moves at great points in the music, well balanced, great jump content, nice footwork sequence. Watching it closely on tape, I felt "Tosca" was in better shape than "Aranjuez" was at the same point last year. Like "Aranjuez," "Tosca" seems to have sections between jumps that right now are mostly stroking, but I think that is the working approach Team Kwan has purposefully chosen. That is, get the overall structure in place, get the feel of the music and jumps, premiere it at Campbell's to see how it feels in front of an audience, then start working on the details. In the coming months, I think there will be some in-betweens added or changed and that the footwork sequence will become even more intricate and difficult. Performance-wise, with repetition, I think Michelle will get deeper into her knees, more relaxed and expansive in her arms and upper body, and will develop the character to make it her own much the way she developed the "menacingly sexual" quality she did for "The Feeling Begins."
My hesitancy in giving a full HONK! is that this is Michelle's follow-up season to what I thought was a wonderful season of transformation. Now nobody laugh (okay, ROFLYAO, lol), but the changes in Michelle's skating, coach, training, and choreography reminds me of the changes John Travolta went through when he did "Pulp Fiction." It's not a perfect analogy since Travolta's career was kind of stagnating prior to "Pulp" whereas Michelle's was still going great guns prior to last season, she just made a lot of changes. Where I see the similarities between them is that in both Michelle and Travolta, many people saw them as having a whole new range of artistic expression. Some people had always seen it, but after "Pulp" for JT and "Aranjuez"/"TFB" for Michelle, virtually everybody saw it.
Anyway, after Travolta did "Pulp" he got a lot of A-list scripts, which included "Get Shorty." Travolta did not want to do "Get Shorty" because he didn't think it was right for him, but he liked the script. So he called Quentin Tarantino and talked to him about it. Tarantino told Travolta, "The movie you do after 'Pulp' is even more important than doing 'Pulp.'" So I feel that what Michelle does this season, now that she has established herself as having even more depth, range, movement ability, technical strength, etc. than she already had, is even more important than what she did last season. She has to live up to her own new standards. It can be very difficult to recreate that magic since people will be expecting a lot, whereas last season Michelle was coming off "Sheh" and a repeat of her "Rach" SP, so the "new" Michelle of "Aranjuez" and "TFB" was a wonderful surprise to many (again, I know many of you believed in her all along).
So I like the structural outline of "Tosca" and would love to have unmitigated faith that Michelle and team will do with it and her new SP what they did last season with "Aran" and "TFB." The main source of my hesitancy is not Michelle, but actually Morosov. Last year he seemed to put his whole focus and heart and soul into Michelle's programs. This season he's working with a lot of skaters. I just hope he doesn't get full of himself and see his success with "TFB" and his contributions to "Aranjuez" as merely a stepping stone to establishing his own reputation. I hope Morosov will still push himself to make "Tosca" as full, innovative, and interesting as what he did for Michelle last season. I have no doubt Michelle will take care of the performance end of things and that may indeed be enough. In short, right now I see "Tosca" has having the possibility to go either the way of "Sheh," which I felt did not fulfill its potential, or the way of "Aranjuez," which I felt was a very strong program in which Michelle was able to expand herself into new ways of moving and a new level of performance. Let's say I'm honking for "Tosca" to go the way of "Aranjuez," and that it will be like Travolta's performance in "Get Shorty."
Rgirl
If we seem TOO happy about the program, it might irritate some people, so I decided to start this thread so those of us who liked it can share what they liked about it.
