This was a heavy pop-culture weekend for me, in an unusual way, with one musical theater performance and one animated movie. Neither of these are really my top choice, genre-wise, but it was nice to get out of the house…

Kate and SteelyKid are way into Hamilton, and the touring production is coming to Proctor’s in August, so in order to be sure of getting tickets, we bought a season subscription. We got four seats, though I have yet to see any shows in that, because the one week I was going to go, The Pip rebelled and I ended up staying home with him; the other weeks, I’ve voluntarily given up my seat so SteelyKid could invite her BFF.

Anyway, at the previous show in the subscription, SteelyKid saw an ad for The Lightning Thief musical, based on Rick Riordan’s book from the Percy Jackson series. She loved the books, so I got a text from the theater asking me to look into tickets.

The Pip had to be just about dragged out of the house, with promises from Kate that if he hated the first half, she would take him home at intermission. Of course, he was captivated from the start, so that wasn’t a problem…

For my part, the show was… fine. It’s a very small and minimalist production– only seven actors in the cast, most playing multiple parts, and the stage is just a backdrop with some bits of scaffolding that serve multiple purposes, and a few props that get wheeled in as needed. The monsters were puppets, and when they needed Percy to use his magical powers to hit people with big waves of water, the role of the waves was played by toilet paper rolls shot out with leaf blowers.

The cast was working very hard– as noted above, most were playing multiple roles– and it was kind of fascinating to watch the logistics of the production. As noted above, though, I’m not a big musical fan, and this didn’t really rise to a level that gets past the fundamental dippiness of people just randomly bursting into song. SteelyKid loved it, though, which was the important thing, and at bedtime when she found that Kate had downloaded the soundtrack to her iPod her face absolutely lit up.

The other pop-culture moment of the weekend was taking The Pip to an early Sunday morning showing of The Lego Movie 2, which he’s been clamoring to see for a while. I usually take the kids out for lunch and shopping on Sunday mornings, so this took the place of that in our regular routine. SteelyKid opted to stay home and have a friend over instead, so it was just a Dad and Dude event.

I took SteelyKid to the first Lego movie back when it came out, and enjoyed it more than I expected to. The animated bits of that moved along very briskly and had a good mix of jokes that worked for both kids and adults. The live-action bits with Will Ferrell and the kid were very effective, and genuinely touching, possibly because they were a surprise.

The animated bits of this were also very good, with some quality jokes at both levels, but the live-action section fell short of the quality of the first. The message in those bits had potential, but where Will Ferrell dialed things down to play the fussy dad figure in a very effective way, Maya Rudolph’s harried mother felt like sitcom shtick (an impression not helped by Ferrell’s few lines yelled from offscreen) in a way that undermined the whole sequence.

Again, The Pip loved it, which was the really important thing. As an adult, though, this wasn’t as good as the original, though it was fun to see it with the Little Dude.

In the broader pop-culture universe, of course, the Academy Awards were last night, and a lot of people are angry that a movie I haven’t seen won Best Picture over a bunch of other movies I haven’t seen and also Black Panther which I didn’t think was all that great. (Honestly, I thought the Spider-Man cartoon, which we saw over New Year’s in South Carolina, was better– its story was much less predictable, and Miles Morales had a better character arc than anyone in Black Panther.)

The Oscars were mostly notable as my annual reminder that there was a time when I would’ve made an effort to see more of the sort of movies that end up nominated for awards, and been more invested in the whole thing. Then again, from the tenor of a lot of this year’s Oscars conversation, maybe I’m happier being out of the loop on this one…