Les Mis Observations

       I had never watched Les Miserables, let alone heard of the musical before i came to sturgeon heights. Because I was in last years Grade 9 Musical Production of  "Broadway's Top 20" I decided to try and understand the musicals that we had featured, Les Mis being one of them. At first I definitely thought it was boring. After Watching the movie a couple of times I began to have a basic understanding and even started liking it a bit. Then a couple months later when most of the cast of our cast watched Les Mis in the choir room, I started to sing along with some of the songs. After that day I became very fond of the musical. Over the summer I watched the movie quite a number of times. Through watching the movie and listening to the tracks I was able to observe a couple of things that occur multiple times, somethings that interest me, and other things that I do not quite understand. In this blog post I will be mentioning some re-occurring objects or themes. I will also mention some things I learned from this musical, and finally I will finish off with a couple of my favourite Scenes or Songs in the musical. So lets get to it!

     I found that a lot of the songs sounds quite similar. By that I don't mean that the same song was sung more than one time like with the Prologue and The Beggars. By this I simply mean that the way the songs sound is quite similar. For example with:  The beginning of "At the end of the day" and the beginning of "One day More". As you would hear if you listen to the songs,  you can hear that the tracks sound quite the same. Almost to the point that if you were listening to one of the tracks without knowing the title of it, you could easily confuse it with a the other piece if you were not so familiar with the musical because of the similarities of the sound. If you are familiar with the musical with the musical you may be able to differentiate the songs, but you can still hear the resemblance.

     A theme in this musical is definitely Suffering. Throughout the musical you will encounter multiple different characters that suffer. At the beginning of the musical you witness the prisoners suffering with chains and hard label. We then see that Fantine suffers after she is fired. She meets the prostitutes and sells her hair and does other harsh things to her body to earn enough money to pay for her daughter. We then observe that Fanitne's daughter Cosette suffers when her care takers take care of her in a "not so caring" manner. We notice much more suffering throughout the musical with more physical and psychological pain.

     Some things that I learned from watching this version of the musical are....
 
    - The story line to the musical.
    - Not all productions have to have spoken script.
    - The Musical can be performed in multiple different formats. ( movie, play etc)


  Some of my favourite scenes/songs are... First or all, "At the End of the Day" I like this scene because it features one of my favourite characters which is Fantine. I also like this scene because it reprents the musical quite well. There is a lot of begging that occurs in the musical, and Fantine begging the Foreman to let her keep her job is an example of that action. Another one of my Favourite scenes/songs in the musical is "The InKeepers Song."  I like this one becuase the song is so catchy and in my opinion it is fun. Finally my third and final Favourite scene/song is "The Barricade." So many things happen in this scene and one of my favourite is Eponine's solo "On My Own" I actually find her song so relatable and I find it easy to understand what she is going through even though I've never been through the same situation as her. This son just gives me so many "feels" and I just love it. That's about all I can say on that topic because it's almost like... No words can explain it. That's at least how I feel.

Well I hope you enjoyed my entry and I am excited to read some of the other blog post as well. If you would like to know some facts about me I will be posting that by the 29th of September! The post will be named "stuff about me." It's basically just me growing up and how I found music. You don't HAVE to read it, it's only if you want to know more about me that you may not already know.