Yes!! Watch it! 😀 It’s amazing! (And thank Mochi)
Month: June 2017
@fixaidea Yeah, absolutely! But I also really like many of the specific choices made in Dallas.
I’m hoping the movie Ladj Ly’s working on might be something like this btw, although I get the feeling it might be a very loose adaptation. (I still definitely have high hopes for it.)
@fixaidea Yeah, absolutely! But I also really like many of the specific choices made in Dallas.
Man, you know what would be amazing though? A movie/tv adaptation of Les Mis based on the Dallas production.
You’d have to make some changes of course like Cosette should probably be black to match Fantine, etc. It’s different on screen than on stage.
Man, you know what would be amazing though? A movie/tv adaptation of Les Mis based on the Dallas production.
Yes yes yes
And gad I loved how VALJEAN of all characters was shown in–almost the way the people around him saw him, at first? They did a great job of creating the sense of the Other that people are putting on him, of that little society making him a Dangerous Man. And so much of that was the acting, of course, but it was also EVERYONE’S acting, the way the people he meets at first seem really scared, really angry to see him!
Yes! DTC’s Valjean was amazing – he had agency, he had his bitter resentment, and he has his own identity. His outward character in the first act was essentially, “Society decided I was dangerous? Well, I’ll be fucking lethal.”
And he is. He’s viewed as a danger to the peace, so he embraces it. In the brick, Valjean learns to read so that he can continue his great plan for revenge. (And then he ends up using this ability not for revenge, but to teach Cosette the alphabet. There’s meta rant about how love is the strongest force of opposition against systematic oppression, but that’s for another time.)
He’s brown, he’s Muslim, he’s a victim of police brutality and unfair imprisonment. And the way he stays sane is to harbour that resentment against the system/world that “always hated” him. That’s one of the reasons his soliloquy is so powerful – he begins to question the emotions that have led him this far.
In some ways I think DTC’s production was more accurate to the original intention of the story than the other productions of the musical. The time period may have been on the opposite side of a two-century chasm, but the story – oh, the story.
Books like this cannot be useless.
pilferingapples replied to your post: DTC Les Mis
I feel like this production is THE one that gets the Thenardiers. They get laughs because they make people SO uncomfortable that some sort of response is prompted, and they’re not shocking enough to make people scream, it’s just…unease, unhappiness, CONSTANTLY. And especially for the kids, the not-cute kids, the not-sweet kids, who people treat as responsible for their parents and forget and overlook.
AAAGH this production hits so hard.
Yes, that’s it, that’s it exactly – they make people uncomfortable. The entire production does! And it’s very deliberate – the characters aren’t easy to love, they’re not easy even to like, they’re not easy to want to emulate.
DTC Les Mis
Because I can’t shut up about this wonderful production. (And because @pilferingapples is a horrible enabler. :P)
I was watching the Dallas Theatre Centre’s 2014 production of Les Mis again today, and as always crying a lot over how brilliantly Liesl Tommy adapted the musical for the modern day.
The thing about Dallas Les Mis that hits home particularly perfectly for me is that every situation feels real. The abuse of the workers, the lovely ladies, the prisoners, the students, the children – it’s all the same stuff we see on the news. And the characters are all people I’ve seen before.
is there a part 2 to the youtube link? now i’ve watched all of part 1 but can’t find part 2
Yep! Both parts are on Youtube. 🙂
liberté • égalité • amitié 