Bring It On

Last week, my sister and I ventured into the city and saw Bring It On: The Musical!



The night started with the two of us meeting up at Nordstrom to eat dinner at the Nordstrom Bistro. We each took BART in separately (since I was coming from work and she was coming from home) but I was not paying attention at all to my surroundings and got off at the completely wrong BART station. There is a station that leaves right at Nordstrom and the San Francisco Shopping Centre. I got off at the station before that. I was really confused on where I was for a moment because I had never gotten off at that station before but I walked the few blocks down to the next station and actually got there right when my sister did!

After dinner, we headed to the theater. The musical was at the Orpheum Theater. There are 3 theaters that Broadway productions come to in San Francisco and I think the Orpheum may be my favorite. I bought the tickets through the website Goldstar. The tickets were originally $80 for orchestra seats but on Goldstar I was able to get them for $40 each. I was a little worried about where the seats would be located but they were actually not bad. We were to the side but not too far over. The good thing about the seats at the Orpheum is that the seats are staggered enough that you can usually see between the people's heads that are in front of you.

We sat in our seats and had about 15 minutes to go before curtain so we read our Playbill and participated in this text trivia game. The first question was how many Bring It On movies have there been. I am partly ashamed to have known that the answer was 5. The other 2 question were easily found in the Playbill. It was almost time for the show when they started a countdown on screens on stage. It felt like you were at a basketball game or something.

So the main reason I wanted to see this was because one of my favorites is in it.

Neil Haskell from So You Think You Can Dance!

Love him! I saw him last year in West Side Story so I knew I wanted to see him again since I heard he would have a larger role in this musical.

I didn't have high expectations about the musical but I actually really enjoyed it. There were parts where I was hysterically laughing. There were some points in the plot that could have been improved but I think the cast did really well. The females in the show really stood out for me. Campbell is the main character and I loved her voice and she had some really cute outfits. Danielle the other female lead character had a really strong voice. The character Bridget was perfectly played and provided a lot of great comic relief; in some ways I think she stole the show. Eva, the antagonist in Campbell's world, had really great moments in the show. You loved to hate her. Another one of my favorite characters was Skylar. She was portraying a cheerleader in a way that I think most people identify cheerleaders as. But she played the role great. Neil was super cute as always. It was hard for me not to watch him whenever he was on stage. In fact I was watching him during a large routine and ended up missing a huge stunt performed by some of the ensemble.

At the theater they really were playing up the social media aspect and had a listing of the casts' twitter names. Of course I tweeted at Neil but he didn't tweet me back but Taylor Louderman, the girl who played Campbell, did!

The musical doesn't really follow the story of any of the movies (I have seen 4 out of the 5, again ashamed to admit that) but it has some elements from a few of the them. I was never a cheerleader but I do enjoy watching cheerleading because it always amazes me when the girls do crazy stunts and are just fearless about it. I would be so scared. Overall, the music was catchy and the cheer stunts were really good.  I would recommend this musical if you want to have a fun night out at the theater.

Here is a little preview of the show.