The thing about Les Mis is that Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk is the single most romantic moment in literary history
les miserables
So I learned the most BEWILDERING thing today, which is that back in 2004 Queen Elizabeth II invited French President Jacques Chirac to a banquet at Windsor Castle and someone (presumably not either of them) got the idea to invite the West End Les Mis cast and have them perform the show’s greatest hits in a room of powerful Europeans.
While a protest was going on outside the castle gates. (Unfortunately it was not a protest in favour of anything good, but that’s another story.)
Someone then made a documentary about it feat. the rageful songs of Les Mis set to the backdrop of banqueting at Windsor Castle, which is accidentally FANTASTIC social commentary, and a very bemused Michael Ball.
(You can watch it here. The non-Les Mis parts are very pro-monarchy and incredibly cloying.)
latching onto characters that have “i’m already dead at the start of this story” written on their foreheads like that sign can’t stop me because i can’t read
“This group is remarkable, although it has vanished in the invisible depths which are behind us. At the point of this drama which we have now attained, it will not be labor lost, perhaps, to throw a ray of light upon these heads, before the reader watches them enter the shadows of a tragic adventure.“
My probably most unpopular Les Miserables opinion
…is also my probably most unpopular Star Wars opinion.
It isssss: Revenge of the Sith-era Hayden Christensen would have made an absolutely amazing Enjolras.
“Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. He was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous. One would have said, to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had already, in some previous state of existence, traversed the revolutionary apocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though he had been a witness. He was acquainted with all the minute details of the great affair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular thing in a youth. He was an officiating priest and a man of war; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of the democracy; above the contemporary movement, the priest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his lids a little red, his lower lip was thick and easily became disdainful, his brow was lofty. A great deal of brow in a face is like a great deal of horizon in a view. Like certain young men at the beginning of this century and the end of the last, who became illustrious at an early age, he was endowed with excessive youth, and was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to hours of pallor. Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and twenty years appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did not seem as though he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman. He had but one passion—the right; but one thought—to overthrow the obstacle.”
He’s probably too old now though. :(