#boublil and schönberg

[oh-great-authoress]

Nadia Sings no. 4

Link to last week’s song

Today we have a modern musical theater classic: “On My Own” from the musical Les Miserables (music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, lyrics by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, based on the 1862 novel of the same name by Victor Hugo)

Life is apparently tiring when you’re catching up on two week’s worth of housework from when your parents were in the hospital, but I managed to figure out this week’s Nadia Sings.

(My dad thanks you all for your thoughts and prayers, he’s now been home for a week after receiving his lifesaving laparoscopic gallbladder surgery. He’s feeling almost completely normal, and is doing light work around the house.)

This song is one of my favorites, especially having grown up idolizing my fellow Filipino, Lea Salonga.

#pinoy pride

🇵🇭

I dare say I like it even more than “I Dreamed a Dream”.

And for those who know, before you say, “Wait a minute, it sounds weird,” I am not singing it in original key, because (and not to sound like such a soprano, I’m just really being honest here) the original key is too low for me.

Like, you-cannot-hear-the-low-notes low.

I tell you, it was such a strange experience hearing the introduction that high.

Once again, using my trusty recording studio (*cough*mydiningroom*cough*), and my favorite recording app, BandLab (not an advertisement, you guys know the drill 🤣), I put this together, and, as usual, while I put a little reverb effect on the backing track I used, as well as on my vocal track, this is otherwise as unadulterated a track as the one I posted last week, just my voice, with no pitch correction, recorded into my iPhone.

I hope you enjoy!!

(Headphones recommended to hear the reverb)

Tagging the same people I tagged last week, as well as those who enjoyed last week’s offering:

@welsharcher

@valmare

@batmantaking-hobbits2gallifrey

@justhereforfandomandfriends

@musewrangler

@oh-nostalgiia

@sakar-rad

@radical-sky

@randomfoggytiger

@agentfaust

@two-microscopes

@canmking

If you would like to be taken off the taglist, just send me a message, no hard feelings, and if you’d like to be added to the taglist, just interact with/reblog this post or send me an ask!

[doyouknowthismusical]

[haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll]

Tracklist:

At The End Of The Day • I Dreamed A Dream • Lovely Ladies • Who Am I? • Come To Me • Confrontation • Castle On A Cloud • Master Of The House • Stars • Look Down • Little People • Red And Black • Do You Hear The People Sing? • I Saw Him Once • In My Life • A Heart Full Of Love • One Day More • On My Own • The Attack • A Little Fall Of Rain • Drink With Me • Bring Him Home • Dog Eats Dog • Javert's Suicide: Soliloquy • Empty Chairs At Empty Tables • Wedding Chorale • Beggars At The Feast • Finale

Spotify ♪ YouTube

[comediesmusicales]

Teaser for the 2024 French revival production of La Révolution Française

It was a looooong time coming but it's FINALLY going to happen. A new French production of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's first musical La Révolution Française will take place in Paris from January 31st to February 25th 2024 in an unusual but rather appropriate place : le réfectoire des Cordeliers, the place where the members of the Society of the friends of the rights of man and of the citizen, founded by Georges Danton in 1790 used to meet (before the municipality of Paris kicked them out in May 1791).

Also known as the Club des Cordeliers, the society also counted Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat or Jacques-René Hébert among its members. This new production of La Révolution Française will be in concert format and will be directed by Marie Zamora.

[misspeculiar-principe]

On My Own

I don't know why I sang this out of nowhere.

(Source)

[ulrichgebert]

Dann haben wir uns doch mal an Miss Saigon gewagt, das ich auch immer etwas misstrauisch beäugt habe, obwohl es für die eigentlich total begrüßenswerte Erfindung von Jonathan Pryce als Musicalstar verantwortlich war. In der Aufzeichnung der 25-Jahre-Jubiläumsaufführung, die nun auch schon wieder 9 Jahre her ist.  Misstrauisch beäugt habe ich es, weil es von den Leuten ist, die auch Les misérables geschrieben habe, und weil ich Madama Butterfly auch immer misstrauisch beäuge. Es ist dann auch wieder ein ziemliches Spektakel mit gelegentlich etwas brachialer Musik (trotz Solosaxophon), aber man kann ihnen zumindest nicht vorwerfen, daß sie sich auf ihrem Erfolgsrezept ausgeruht hätten, und eigentlich ist es tatsächlich nicht so schrecklich, wie ich immer angenommen habe. Aber kommen Sie, ein Hubschrauber?

(x)

[unknown171204]

Les Misérables 1980

I have already talked about Les Misérables , but I wanted to expand on the subject a little more, by detailing the three French versions as best I can !!

This strange idea of ​​adapting Victor Hugo's novel into a musical came from Alain Boublil after he attended a performance of the musical Oliver! play in London ( he reports having perceived in his mind a resemblance between Oliver Twist and Gavroche )

Carried away by what he considers (rightly) as a flash of genius, he will work in collaboration with Claude-Michel Schönberg and Jean-Marc Natel to compose the music and lyrics for the future album

Fortunately the album will experience its small success with the public, this victory will make the creators grow wings who will launch head first into the torrent of stage creation !

This heavy task will be entrusted to Robert Hossein , an French director, actor, screenwriter, dialogue writer , who will use his fame to the best of his ability to promote the show (which he would be criticized for and mocked , trample his enthusiasm)

The very first production of Les Misérables was created and then performed in Paris at the Palais des Sports in September 1980

Scheduled for a minimum of eight weeks, it will be played for sixteen weeks, with the Palais des sports no longer available beyond that With 107 performances, it attracted around 500,000 spectators

( I don't know how it works in the United Kingdom and the United States at the same time but in France it will be necessary to reach the end of the 90s for the musicals to travel throughout the country + outside of France )

DISTRIBUTION :

Maurice Barrier : Jean Valjean

Jean Vallée : Javert

Rose Laurens : Fantine

Yvan Dautin : Mr Thénardier

Marie-France Roussel : Mrs Thénardier

Maryse Cédolin / Sylvie Camacho / Priscilla Patron : little Cosette

( alternately the little girls also played little Eponine and Azelma )

Fabienne Guyon : Cosette

Marianne Mille : Éponine

Cyrille Dupont / Fabrice Ploquin / Florence Davis : Gavroche

Gilles Buhlmann : Marius

Christian Ratellin : Enjolras

René-Louis Baron : Combeferre

Dominique Tirmont : Mr Gillenormand

Anne Forrez : Mrs Gillenormand

Claude Reva : Storyteller

There remain too few archives of the original shows, unfortunately at the time filming in theaters and performance halls was not a common reflex ...

I did my best to find as much as possible :

Unreleased Javert song, not kept in the album and show ⤵️

The Full Live Recording of the Show :

ANECDOTES :

If I'm not mistaken, this is the only version that uses the character of Azelma , the sister of Eponine and Gavroche

...

Cyrille Dupont, one of the three kids who played Gavroche, was known vocally for singing the theme song for Nobody's Boy : Remi

( In French " Remi sans famille " ) :

...

Florence Davis one of three actors playing Gavroche was a girl ?!

Strange artistic choice ? Or last-rescue liner ??

...

Robert Hossein was so marked by this show that two years later, he made a film adaptation of the original novel !!

Starring the legend Lino Ventura as Jean Valjean and the very young Emmanuel Curtil as Gavroche (this little boy is today an ICONIC voice actor in France : Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Matthew Perry and many many others characters )

The Full Movie :

While I'm writing about the 1990 and 2024 versions, I recommend you take a look at my Masterlist :)

[protectionsquad24601]

I don't think people understand how intrinsically Jewish the Les Misérables musical is. The writers of the original French musical were Claude-Michel Schönberg (Hungarian Jew), Alain Boublil (Sephardic Jew), and directed by Robert Hossein (Moldovian Jew). Schöneberg also composed the music. It was adapted into English by Herbert Kretzmer (Lithuanian Jew).

The lyrics include many references to Jewish beliefs and values. Schöneberg said in an interview, "When I’m writing a show there is always a part that is typically Jewish."

However, the one that sticks out to me especially is a line from the Epilogue:

"They will live again in freedom,

In the garden of the Lord;

They will walk behind the ploughshare,

They will put away the sword."

The origin of the phrase - specifically, the bit about 'ploughshares' and 'swords' - can be traced back to a nevuah (prophecy) by Yeshayahu (Isaiah), a Jewish navi (prophet) from the sefer Yeshayahu (Book of Isaiah). (Sorry, yes, I insist on the Hebrew words first.)

"The Torah will go forth from Tzion (Zion) and the word of Hashem from Yerushalayim (Jerusalem)... They will then cut their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning knives. No nation will lift a sword against the other, and they will no longer learn warfare."

This is a quote about the 'end of days', and the idea of a peaceful paradise free from war was emulated in the song to convey a similar paradise for our barricade boys, the casualties of the June Rebellion. This is only one of the many examples of Jewish themes and references in the Les Misérables musical!

[bakanokiwami]

TOP 10 THEATER ON AO3 BASED ON NUMBER OF FANWORKS, SINGLE CATEGORY TAGS ONLY VERSION (2009-2022)

If you want to see the Theater bar chart with the multi-category fandoms included, please check this post.

To make these bar chart race, all series titles in the Theater Category on November 29 (or the closest date to it) of every year were copy-pasted from Wayback Machine to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, manually filtered for fandoms belonging in only one category, and then inputted to Flourish to turn into a bar chart race.

Locked fanworks aren't included in the count because Wayback Machine can’t view those, only Ao3 users can.

The high-ranking Les Miserables tags (Les Misérables - All Media Types & Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil) are both in multiple categories (Books & Literature & Theater) so it has been excluded in this bar chart. You can see it multicategory version.

Fandom tags that are no longer in the Theater category tag as of posting this are left out of the bar chart race. These tags are usually either miscategorized or already have other tags referring to the same fandom.

Please refer to this post for more fanfiction bar chart races.

Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏

[bewareofitalics]

One chapter into the Julie Rose translation, and it's already jarring:

Napoléon, seeing the old boy give him the once-over with a certain curiosity, wheeled round and said brusquely: “Who is this little man staring at me?” “Your Majesty,” said Monsieur Myriel, “you see a little man, and I see a great man. Both of us may benefit.”

"Little" man?????????????????????

And now I'm reading the introduction by Adam Gopnik but I'm not sure how seriously I should take it because this is the second sentence:

I write these words having just returned from a packed Boxing Day performance of the operetta version of the book by Schönberg and Boublil, whose emblematic image of an embattled, wide-eyed nymphet, taken directly from the illustration of Cosette in the first French edition, has by now become familiar to the world.

Emphases mine. Les Mis is not an operetta! Pop opera, sure, or you could just call it, y'know, a musical. And "nymphet"??????????????? My immediate association for that word is Lolita (through cultural osmosis, I haven't read it), and all the definitions I'm finding involve sexuality. Which I hope is not what anyone thinks of when looking at the iconic Cosette illustration. :(

[sillylotrpolls]

There is, of course, already a @lordoftheringsmusical, and its soundtrack is gorgeous (give your ears a treat if you haven't heard it before), and some operas too, but that's no reason not to fantasize about another adaptation. After all, you can never have enough singing and dancing orcs.

[doyouknowthismusical]

[cometomecosette]

"Authenticity" is hard to capture when adapting Les Misérables, because as @secretmellowblog, @pilferingapples, and others have pointed out, it was already a period piece when it was published, and Hugo used events of the past to address current social issues.

Hugo used the 1832 June Rebellion to comment on the 1848 Revolution and as a veiled call to arms against Napoleon III.

A century later, Boublil and Schönberg wrote the musical, and as @pilferingapples has said, they seem to have let the student protests of May 1968 (which took place in their youth) influence their view of the June Rebellion. Hence the lines in the musical that seem to paint it as a naïve endeavor by inexperienced schoolboys, which ignore the historical fact of the 1830 Revolution.

So what we see in the stage musical is 1832 through the lenses of 1848 and 1862, through the lens of 1968.

Then when the 2012 film version of the musical was released, Tom Hooper cited Occupy Wall Street as a source of inspiration. So what we get is 1832 through the lenses of 1848 and 1862, through the lens of 1968, through the lens of 2011.

Of course this just shows that the themes are always relevant. But if the real revolutionaries of 1832 were to see all of this, I'm sure they would point out some distortions in each new telling.

[comediesmusicales]

Les Misérables in Paris in 2024

A new french version of Les Misérables will be performed at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris from November 2024 on.

This new production will be directed by Ladislas Chollat (Résiste, Oliver Twist, le musical) and will feature new songs and new lyrics by Alain Boublil and Claude Michel Schönberg themselves.

The last auditions will be broadcast live on French radio show 42nd Street, on October 15th, and some cast members will be revealed !

[feeling-and-form]

the best act 2 finales from stage musicals, broadway and european, and crossover works. reprises, medleys, and instrumentals included. no disney.

[YouTube] [Spotify]

There’s No Business Like Show Business / They Say It’s Wonderful (Reprise) - Annie, Get Your Gun (Berlin)

Ol’ Man River (Reprise) - Show Boat (Kern/Hammerstein)

You’ll Never Walk Alone (Reprise) - Carousel (Rodgers/Hammerstein)

Rose’s Turn - Gypsy! (Styne/Sondheim)

Finale - West Side Story (Bernstein/Sondheim)

Der Schleier fällt - Elisabeth (Lévay/Kunze)

Ich hab geträumt von Manderley (Reprise) - Rebecca (Lévay/Kunze)

Down Once More / Track Down This Murderer - The Phantom of the Opera (Webber/Hart)

One (Reprise) - A Chorus Line (Hamlisch/Kleban)

Nowadays / Hot Honey Rag - Chicago (Kander/Ebb)

Climb Ev’ry Mountain (Reprise) - The Sound of Music (Rodgers/Hammerstein)

Oklahoma! - Oklahoma! (Rodgers/Hammerstein)

Finale - Wicked (Schwartz)

Lawd, I’m On My Way - Porgy and Bess (Gershwin)

Finale (Medley) - Hello, Dolly! (Herman)

Epilogue - Les Misérables (Schönberg/Boublil)

John Nineteen Forty-One - Jesus Christ Superstar (Webber)

Danse mon Esméralda - Notre Dame de Paris (Cocciante/Plamondon)

Anatevka - Fiddler on the Roof (Bock/Harnick)

Coupables - Roméo et Juliette (Presgurvic)

Le monde est stone - Starmania (Berger/Plamondon)

Der Tanz der Vampire - Tanz der Vampire (Steinman/Kunze)