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re: terrible

Posted by:	sf 05:20 pm EDT 03/28/14
In reply to:	re: terrible - Michael_Portantiere 04:12 pm EDT 03/28/14

"Again, for the most part, the songs as written with the original French lyrics weren't intended to specifically relate to specific moments in the plot. Do you disagree with that?" Yes. They were written for a French audience, with the underlying assumption - which in France, would be accurate - that everyone watching would be intimately familiar with the plot. The original French version of the show is not precisely constructed like a traditional musical, or even a rock opera like 'Jesus Christ Superstar' (although it was definitely influenced by JCS). It's more a series of tableaux that present famous scenes from the novel, and it leaves out far more of the plot than the RSC-Cameron Mackintosh version. The songs mostly don't quite have the sort of character-revealing lyrics that British and American audiences have come to expect in musicals, but they certainly relate to the plot. They don't come out of nowhere, and they would not be interchangeable between scenes. Some of the melodies, of course, are used in different scenes in the later version of the show, but that's not the same thing. The second set of French lyrics retains a few song titles and individual lines from the original, but they're character lyrics; the original French lyrics are mostly commentary, but that's because they were written to be part of a big spectacle staged in a sports stadium for an audience who already knew the source material backwards, forwards and sideways.

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