In the best who-would-you-do tradition of choosing Mary Ann over Ginger…
I admit to being influenced by Rebecca Caine and Frances Ruffelle as the first-ever faces I saw put to the roles of Cosette and Eponine.
But just in general, having heard the music before seeing the show… I have to say if I had been Marius, “Cosette Who?” would have been the musical number substituted for “I Saw Her Once.” I would pick Eponine in a heartbeat over Cosette, even if it meant dealing with a potential father-in-law like Thenardier.
I hope this isn’t too theatre-geeky a question. But - who would you choose? Eponine or Cosette?
Though under ordinary circumstances I’d go with Eponine, the In-Law issue is just too big a factor here. The last thing I want is to have to caretake those parasites for the rest of their long unnatural lives. Plus, Eponine is less naive, but her “love” is uncomfortably close to worship. Advantage Cosette.
Absolutely Eponine.
In the original French version, she’s even cooler - (way more songs, including one where she tries to keep info from her father, and another where she talks about Marius and Cosette being “fated” to be together and not wanting to upset that)
Besides, she’d leave the family behind in a second if Marius asked her to.
She’s a more interesting Character then Cosette, who really doesn’t get to do much. Rather sad that she died trying to get marius to as much as acknowledge her existance.
I always though that there was an interesting parallel of the love stories in Les Miserables and A Tale of Two Cities. In both the romantic lead picks the more traditionally beautiful and desirable, though flat and shallow mate (Cosette, Charles Darnay) over the less attractive but far more sophisticated love (Eponine, Sydney Carton) of the one who essentially gives his or her life for the beloved.
I suppose that this means that packaging is more important than character (at least during the French Revolution.
Cosette kind of gets the shaft in the musical(and the film). In the book she was a more interesting character. She and her “father” essentially ran their own charity and she was a very kind and generous person. She had grown up aiding the poor and had a very good education in a convent before they moved away so she wouldn’t have to become a nun. She had been interested in Marius for quite some time before he noticed her, and had grown to love the poor man(he was in a very wretched state during the time period of his life when she first encountered him) as much out of sympathy as from personal attraction. Nothing in the book seemed to indicate that she was shallow although this did not translate as well to the “love at first sight” Cosette of the musical and film. Cosette had her character-building rough life early on, whereas most of the other characters had it much later(Valjean in prison, Marius in the wake of discovering who his father was, Eponine in her family’s ruin after the inn collapsed). Cosette, even though she was very young, was actually a very mature young woman in the book as opposed to the doe eyed love-smitten girl of the musical. The unabridged version of the book is a good read and I highly recommend it. It should be noted that you will very likely cry or feel totally wretched for these poor people at at least one point in the book, so don’t read it if you’re not into catharsis.
