art and les and life and mis and feelings.

There is nothing ordinary about a musical that has absolutely no spoken dialogue (for the sake of argument, those breath’d words that had little-to-no tone were exclamations of instantaneous pitch, dammit!). Nor is there anything ordinary about the French Revolution(s) nor someone jumping from a bridge and audibly cracking their spine nor Anne Hathaway not skrelting her way through “I dreamed a dream” nor that beautiful man, Aaron Tveit, telling me to revolt against the state. This is non-normalcy, for what? 5 bucks.

So sure. It is all song, but it doesn’t lack anything in lyrical quality. The words they sing are the words they sing in “real” life. Of course there is a huge difference between the silver screen and the heaven that is stage…but a director can only do so much. A director can’t build a stage in every home, in every workplace, on every street.

Given this, any broadway play can seem dramatically unique at times, which can be misread as “trite and irrelevant”, but oh hey…it’s drama. And in such scenes of drama there has to be some type of contrast later on. Amoral/Immoral characters build up the key moments for the protagonists and (failed) comedic moments not only contrast the terror that is revolution, the police, and the downtrodden society, but also construct scenes of irony. This contrast is what makes the drama dramatic and comparable to real life. Actual life can be filled with song, death, unemployment, revolutionary thoughts, prostitution; this musical has themes and moments which make the everyday experiences extraordinary and the horrific moments that we wished could disappear appear before our eyes.

Thus, there is something you can find in the unordinary that is eerily ordinary. Any work of art has a connection to human experience (bold claim) or why else would we protect it, feel it, watch it, taste it? I use urinals. I walk in grand halls wearing robes. I point to my friends. I smile enigmatically, i.e. I frown. I count. I wear meat dresses. I wear clothing. If you want to reduce all art to “ordinary” be my guest. Leave me the keys and I’ll steal it out of your mind so I can keep it all to myself.

What made this viewing experience all-too-human for me were the few moments of imperfection in the singing. Having the actors sing on-set was another level of reality that was built into this production. So when you say, “oh shit, gurl, Anne quivered on that one high note”…no duh! She’s a dying woman turned to prostitution to save her only child and she is constantly being destroyed by the society she is enslaved to. And you call that sappy? *falls off chair never to arise again*

Granted, Les Mis as a book is monstrous. Hugo has a way of creating epics like Tolstoy and like Homer, which don’t ever quite finish even after you’ve ended the last page and closed the cover. Les Mis the musical, I’ve heard, is equally as thrilling, brilliant, overdone. It is a production. But now you think that just because it gets turned into a movie it will somehow be toned down into something tasteful you can handle? If anything, I want a movie to jar me more. I want it to be so dramatic it becomes melodramatic. I want it to ooze sap like a Birch.

I’m not looking for originality. I’m not looking for zest. I’m looking for Les Mis and…I’ve found it.