There are two deadly places, musically speaking, in that scene - Enjolras’ “Where are the leaders of the land?” and Thenardier’s “Everyone here? You know your place.” - and for the same reason. There are six chords before the Thenardier entrance, and six repetitions of the chorus’ “It’ll come, it’ll come…” Mis-count, and you can take everyone else onstage with you for a long and bumpy ride.
Watching a guy in a Marius costume sing my line was mind-bending.
Le Ministre de l’au-delà, Combeferre (Enjolras understudy), 1st Canadian tour (Calgary, Vancouver, Anchorage, Toronto 2nd production) 1990 - 1991, Enjolras (Toronto 2nd production, Ottawa, Regina) 1991 - 1992
I watched the 25th Anniversary show on PBS and found myself continually having to explain to others what was going on because the stage offered few visual clues (the scene with the toppled wagon was especially vague). I didn’t know if that was because they were focusing on the music for that particular broadcast or because that’s just what the show looks like now. If it’s the latter, I think it suffers for it.
Oh, no, that’s just for the concert. The new productions still have all the staging and everything, they just changed some things around - instead of being on a chain-gang, Valjean is on a slave ship at the beginning, the barricade no longer turns to see both sides, they use backing movies to set the scene in several places, etc.
This promo video shows some of the stuff. The production I saw was also confusing for people who didn’t know the show as the Thenardiers were white and Eponine was black. “Wait, she’s their daughter?” Valjean was also black in our show.
Yeah, Michael Ball IS Marius. The dynamics he wrings out of that simple song are stunning, and he manages to work up all that emotion without adversely affecting the singing. Fantastic performer. Of course, he’s had decades to work on it, and is too “old” to play Marius should he only be discovered now, so comparing Nick Jonas to Michael Ball is really unfair. (“Old” both chronologically, giving him a richer voice, and in having the life experience to draw those emotions from, an advantage a younger actor doesn’t have). That being said, Nick Jonas still doesn’t compare favorably to other Mariuses closer to his age, I’m sorry to say.
Ah, much better. I sort of suspected as much both to keep the focus on the music and not to “give away” the show to people who don’t buy tickets. But the comments up-thread had me uncertain.
I’ve watched that 25th anniversary concert several times, and I always wonder why they reversed who is singing those lines. There seems to be no good reason for it that I can see.
No doubt. Singing Bring Him Home in front of Colm Wilkinson is about the only thing I’d less rather do.
Speaking of, my favorite part of the 25th anniversary was the “four Valjeans”. I don’t care how old Wilkinson is, if they ever do a Les Mis movie (the musical I mean) he HAS to be Valjean.
A question for Le Ministre- just how crowded is the backstage of Les Mis? Those sets are freaking HUGE and I’ve wondered if there’s even wiggle room back there.
OK, that shot of Javert falling looks awesome! I wish I could see this production, but it looks like the closest it’ll get to New York is the Kennedy Center.
Do you know who’s playing Valjean? It looked like John Owen-Jones in that video, but I thought he was currently in London?
When Javert jumped off the bridge, they also transitioned it so that he was floating in the air and the backing movies gave the sensation of watching him falling from above. It was actually pretty cool.
The original design is for a box set - you see the back wall in full light for the wedding scene, but in general everyone is distracted by the tables, the full colour ball gowns and the sight of the full company waltzing on the rotating turntable. There’s about 2 feet between the barricade towers and the side walls - not much room to manoeuvre between the middle and downstage entrances when they are off-stage. Other than that, though, the large set pieces are stowed onstage inside the box. The gates fold and live upstage right, the ABC Café is on a radio controlled truck unit that lives upstage centre, the bridge is flown, the sewer is a flat with forced-perspective lights that give the illusion of a huge cavernous space… The lighting was fantastic, taking small spaces at a time on stage and making you think the rest of it was just behind, in the shadows.
And some of the effects were totally old school - in the courtroom (24601), the judges’ bench was achieved by two stage hands holding a horizontal bar set on poles with a drape coming down off it. Upstage of it, the Factory Foreman, Enjolras and Grantaire walked downstage with 4 foot stepladders and climbed up on them, wearing black robes over other costume pieces. At the appropriate moment, just before the change in lights, we would stand up and bang our gavels…
Outside the box, it depended entirely on the theatre. For most of them, we had oodles of room. The Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto was quite cramped, with the men’s change room being a long, narrow corridor about the width of a semi-trailer truck. In regular use, it was the loading dock. The backstage is four storeys high with no elevator, so given the choice between doing all your quick changes by running up and down the stairs, or watching what you did with your elbows in a space that was uncannily like a submarine, we went with the option that was on the same floor.
That was one of the most fun aspects of the show for me - the tracking and transitions which were more or less set from the original production, but were also subject to tinkering. For instance, the body that Thenardier carries in the sewer is always the smallest student in the cast, whoever that might have been.
Finding out that Enjolras goes from a kneeling member of the chain gang to part of the crowd as Jean Valjean presents his yellow ticket of leave, to a guy being paid in the factory, to one of Javert’s policemen during Fantine’s arrest, to Enjolras, to the old waiter at the wedding back to Enjolras for the finale is really mindblowingly cool. And everybody goes through this…
The ones that totally amazed me were the swings, who had to learn the tracks of every member of the ensemble, and who had to improvise a solution to ‘swing hell’ whenever three or more members of the company had to cancel. Sadly, they are often looked down upon as not having been good enough to have got a real role. In my opinion, they are underappreciated geniuses.