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Oct. 2nd, 2018 09:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThose of you who have been around here for a while will remember how much I love the French musical Notre-Dame de Paris. I love it SO much that when genarti and I went to go see the 20th-anniversary version in Montreal this weekend I could answer all her plot questions about blink-and-you-miss-it plot events in the show, despite the fact that she speaks French and I don't.
(Notre-Dame de Paris the musical does not care about plot. Notre-Dame de Paris the musical cares about FEELINGS and DIGRESSIONS. Gringoire and Frollo singing philosophically about architecture and the printing press gets four and a half minutes; the trial of Esmeralda takes ninety seconds.)
Anyway: it was amazing? Our Esmeralda was SO GOOD, I could have just sat and listened to her sing the whole dang thing. And, unlike the original cast Esmeralda, she occasionally danced!
In most ways, the production looked essentially identical to the recorded version, which I have watched many times and lovingly picspammed a few years back because, again, I have a lot of feelings about this show. Any changes were pretty much small and cast-driven. A few disconnected notes:
- our Gringoire played much more hapless than the original Gringoire; Gringoire Classic mostly succeeds at being an ironic commentator on events except when Clopin turns the joke on him in "Cour des Miracles," and this Gringoire was Trying a Lot Harder at being on top of events and Succeeding Less
- Esmeralda, in addition to just being a wildly charismatic actress, played younger and more naive, which I liked a lot; Fleur-de-Lys, in contrast, played older, which I did not like, as it made her seem very much in control of her whole situation, when the whole point of making Fleur-de-Lys textually fourteen in the musical rather than the grown woman she is in Hugo's novel is to emphasize how much she too is a victim of Phoebus (in specific) and The Patriarchy (in general) but lashes down (at Esmeralda, a woman with less privilege) instead of up
- so many cute little Esmeralda and Clopin moments in this production! They high-five during "Les Sans-Papiers," he helps her get water for Quasimodo and then encourages her when she's scared, it's ADORABLE
- as a sidenote, this Clopin was good but not as good as Luck Mervil, who is just charisma on wheels
- seeing the show live makes it very clear how weird the pacing is -- like, there's all this high drama of Esmeralda's trial and torture and imprisonment and then! everything stops! so Frollo can sing a sad song!
- honestly THREE Frollo songs about his boner for Esmeralda is WAY too many and at least one of those should be replaced with some actual Frollo-Quasimodo interaction
- I did remember the gyrating Speedo-clad men who appear spotlit in the background to illustrate Phoebus' emotional state during "Déchiré;" I did not remember that there were FIVE of them! It's like the part when the glistening Jason Stathams start multiplying in that one music video!
- Frollo getting attacked by scenery during "Tu Vas Me Detruire" is pretty much exactly the same onstage (thoughgenarti thought the scenery was SLIGHTLY less aggressive in the live production) but remains hilarious no matter what
All gyrating Stathams and attack scenery aside, a thing I do want to reiterate is that the creators of this show took an iconic but deeply racist and sexist nineteenth-century novel and transformed it into a call for justice for refugees and undocumented people, like, that is the most important theme in this musical; I've been wanting to see it for the past fifteen years but 2018 is definitely A Time to do so.
genarti and I went to go see the 20th-anniversary version in Montreal this weekend I could answer all her plot questions about blink-and-you-miss-it plot events in the show, despite the fact that she speaks French and I don't.(Notre-Dame de Paris the musical does not care about plot. Notre-Dame de Paris the musical cares about FEELINGS and DIGRESSIONS. Gringoire and Frollo singing philosophically about architecture and the printing press gets four and a half minutes; the trial of Esmeralda takes ninety seconds.)
Anyway: it was amazing? Our Esmeralda was SO GOOD, I could have just sat and listened to her sing the whole dang thing. And, unlike the original cast Esmeralda, she occasionally danced!
In most ways, the production looked essentially identical to the recorded version, which I have watched many times and lovingly picspammed a few years back because, again, I have a lot of feelings about this show. Any changes were pretty much small and cast-driven. A few disconnected notes:
- our Gringoire played much more hapless than the original Gringoire; Gringoire Classic mostly succeeds at being an ironic commentator on events except when Clopin turns the joke on him in "Cour des Miracles," and this Gringoire was Trying a Lot Harder at being on top of events and Succeeding Less
- Esmeralda, in addition to just being a wildly charismatic actress, played younger and more naive, which I liked a lot; Fleur-de-Lys, in contrast, played older, which I did not like, as it made her seem very much in control of her whole situation, when the whole point of making Fleur-de-Lys textually fourteen in the musical rather than the grown woman she is in Hugo's novel is to emphasize how much she too is a victim of Phoebus (in specific) and The Patriarchy (in general) but lashes down (at Esmeralda, a woman with less privilege) instead of up
- so many cute little Esmeralda and Clopin moments in this production! They high-five during "Les Sans-Papiers," he helps her get water for Quasimodo and then encourages her when she's scared, it's ADORABLE
- as a sidenote, this Clopin was good but not as good as Luck Mervil, who is just charisma on wheels
- seeing the show live makes it very clear how weird the pacing is -- like, there's all this high drama of Esmeralda's trial and torture and imprisonment and then! everything stops! so Frollo can sing a sad song!
- honestly THREE Frollo songs about his boner for Esmeralda is WAY too many and at least one of those should be replaced with some actual Frollo-Quasimodo interaction
- I did remember the gyrating Speedo-clad men who appear spotlit in the background to illustrate Phoebus' emotional state during "Déchiré;" I did not remember that there were FIVE of them! It's like the part when the glistening Jason Stathams start multiplying in that one music video!
- Frollo getting attacked by scenery during "Tu Vas Me Detruire" is pretty much exactly the same onstage (though
genarti thought the scenery was SLIGHTLY less aggressive in the live production) but remains hilarious no matter what All gyrating Stathams and attack scenery aside, a thing I do want to reiterate is that the creators of this show took an iconic but deeply racist and sexist nineteenth-century novel and transformed it into a call for justice for refugees and undocumented people, like, that is the most important theme in this musical; I've been wanting to see it for the past fifteen years but 2018 is definitely A Time to do so.
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Date: 2018-10-03 05:26 am (UTC)The other thing that I found fascinating is that -- okay, I love several of these songs, but they are almost all quite repetitive. You have a good song, and then the singer repeats 2/3 of it unnecessarily! Except that in the live show, it didn't come across as unnecessary, because you have all the lighting and the genuinely amazing dancers climbing all over the scenery and backflipping over police barricades etc going on at the same time, so it comes across as operatic: "here, let me deal with the plot in two sentences and then spend a while holding forth about my FEELINGS, all of my FEELINGS which I FEEL while dramatic pageantry backs me up!" The video tried to achieve this same effect with a lot of enthusiastic use of Adobe Premiere effects but it doesn't work, and honestly I'm not sure if video can capture that same entire-stage effect.
(...It works except with Frollo. Sorry, Daniel Lavoie, your voice is great, but he is not as magnetic and expressive with body language acting as he really needs to be for the part -- and it doesn't help that, for better or for worse, he's the only one whose songs are never backed by a bunch of gyrating and backflipping dancers, so all we've got is him, his slightly stiff gestures, and okay occasionally scenery slow-mo attacking him.)
ANYWAY IT WAS SO GOOD
AND ESMERALDA WAS SO AMAZING AND I LOVED FLAILY GRINGOIRE AND ALL THE DANCERS AND ALMOST EVERYONE WAS SO AMAZING
And I wish the political commentary were not as relevant as it is, but given the relevance I am very very glad this show chooses to hit hard about that, and that all of the most genuinely moving and memorably hard-hitting parts of the show are about that. As I told you, Gringoire may have led the audience in a singalong of "Le Temps de cathédrales" at the end (and I may still have that in my head on and off, days later), but when I told some Québécois friends about going to see the show it was "Les sans-papiers" that they started singing, and that is one anecdote but I think it's representative for the real heart of the show.
And in conclusion, this was ridicuous and dramatic and I am super super glad we went. :D
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Date: 2018-10-04 04:06 am (UTC)"Les Cloches" is always going to be my favorite song from the show musically, but yeah, "Les sans-papiers" is the heart of it. I ALSO AM SO GLAD WE WENT. :DDDDD
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Date: 2018-10-03 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-04 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-28 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-30 02:16 pm (UTC)(I have also returned to this post to appreciate it properly now that I have seen the musical. It was excellent. And much appreciated by what, judging by the mass audience joining in at the end, was London's entire French population).
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Date: 2019-01-31 02:47 am (UTC)sometimes other plot things need to happen besides your repressed lust and agony, Frollo!!
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Date: 2019-01-31 02:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-15 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-27 02:58 pm (UTC)