As I wrote in my lengthy post about the musical (and book) Les Miserables in 2013*, I had never seen a stage production of it at the time I saw the movie.
This was rectified yesterday, when my wife and I sat in the balcony at QPAC to watch it, wishing we had opera glasses. (Actually, if you sit right at the front of the balcony, which we moved close to after intermission, it's not too bad. But the cheaper seats up the back - very far away indeed.)
Anyway, it is a very good production, and the favourable reviews it has received are well deserved. Perhaps it was due to more familiarity with the score from seeing the movie, but I found it more moving in parts than the movie. (My general line is that it is easier to be moved by the realism of a movie than the artifice of a stage show.)
Certainly, I have certain earworms stuck in my head today that are showing no signs of leaving.
I noticed as we left that Cats is returning next year: a show I have zero interest in seeing, although I suppose that any show with good singers will have bits that are good. My wife and daughter went to see Wicked by themselves earlier this year, and liked it well enough. The other musical viewed recently was Anything Goes, which got it's own explanatory post too.
My point in noting this is to observe that the creation of really successful narrative musicals seems to take place at an incredibly slow rate. When they are big successes, they just keep returning, decade after decade. But perhaps this is just from an outside of Broadway perspective: I see that someone in Variety was noting in 2013 that maybe there were too many new musicals at that time for them to all be successful.
* you should read it - it's the style of post I like doing in particular, and enjoy re-reading when I have forgotten half of it.
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