I heard the bells on Christmas day

Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

Till ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound the carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn, the households born
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Merry Christmas, all!
(and a Pippin New Year too, of course. )

"And Lucy felt the way you do when you wake up and realise that it is the first day of the holidays..."

And it is! Huzzah.

Yesterday's amusement consisted of baking Pfefferkuchen, a sort of German gingerbread that everyone enjoys making and few in this household like to eat, unless it is with large amounts of icing and sprinkles on top. It's Tradition, you see.

All right, all right, I cheated with the pictures-- they aren't actually from yesterday. But what does that matter?

(Side note: Google ads appear to have invaded my sidebar, along with everyone else's. Things look grim. Though for the present, at least, mine are all advertising Les Mis. That is some small comfort, I suppose.)

On Prince Caspain

So! The long-awaited Prince Caspian trailer has finally been released! (Go here to watch it, if by some strange twist of fate you have not seen it already.) On the whole I'm quite pleased with it...or at any rate, resigned to the Inevitable Changes that some people think are necessary. If I can just somehow manage to get out of Purist Mode by May, then all will be well (maybe). I love the whole first part of the trailer-- the train station, the beach, Cair Paravel. The sets and costumes are gorgeous and more or less like the book too. And small, random things, like the fact that Lucy has bare feet after they land on the beach, made me very happy for some reason.

So yes...I have been motivated to read Prince Caspian again. It's the only Narnia book that I actually remember reading for the first time- I think I was about eight. Those first few chapters, with the island and ruined castle and their mysterious origins, fascinated me. (Then the Pevensies and Trumpkin started walking around in the woods, and I became rather less interested in everything. ) I sort of wish now that I hadn't read the books so early, because now I can hardly remember what it was like to encounter everything for the first time. It's become old and familar.

This time 'round I will not make the mistake of watching PC as often as I did LWW-- which wasn't even that often. I loved LWW back in 2005, and I still like it now, but it's not the sort of film you can watch over and over and over again. With the books, I still notice something new almost every time I read them.

Now, to convince the rest of my family to read the book before seeing the movie.

In Which I Seize the Chance to Ramble on and On about one of my Favourite Topics.

An extremely geeky, longwinded post is ahead. You have been warned. Oh, and spoilers throughout, too.

Yesterday my dad and three unnamed friends had the good fortune of seeing Les Misérables, the school edition. My friend's cousins were in the chorus and playing Gavroche; otherwise we probably never would have heard about it. I was trying not to get my hopes up, terribly, because I love Les Mis, love the book, love the Tenth Anniversary and London cast recordings (hate the OBC! hate most movie adaptions!) and therefore could have been Easily Disappointed.

I needn't have bothered. I know Les Mis is amazing to begin with, and pretty hard to kill, but even when I think of all the things wrong with the show and gripe about them to no end (much to the annoyance of Family and Friends) I don't like the musical any less. If that makes any sense...

Until then I think I had always thought of Les Mis as my own personal property. I have a few relatives and friends in Real Life who have seen the show and enjoyed it but they aren't exactly raving fans (particularly the relatives). It occurred to me the other day that I've never actually met anyone who has read the book, which is quite sad, really. Prior to last night it was my book and my musical. (Someone else can claim the 1998 movie.) But then the curtain went up and the orchestra played the first notes of Look Down and all I could think was, Oh, wow.

They cut some things-- quite a lot of bits and pieces and a few whole songs. (Confrontation, which is a terrible, terrible tragedy, and Stars, which is NOT supposed to be cut even in the school edition. I have no idea why they did that.) But actually I barely noticed the cuts (except for the aforementioned Confrontation. Grr.). I didn't even realise that Stars was omitted until this morning, which I know is practically heretical of me. And of them- but anyway. They also took out Marius and Cosette's conversations before their wedding (which was the only omitted thing that really affected the plot; it certainly felt like there was something missing) and the wedding song, neither of which are supposed to be cut in the school edition, but I'm not certain. Despite all that the show was 2 1/4 hours and I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be two hours exactly...maybe they added some parts back in? That's still pretty long though; by the end one could definately tell that the actors were beginning to get tired! I would love to see it again; it's playing tonight still. Alas, I do not yet have my driver's permit and my mum says absolutely not.

Lovely Ladies was Dramatically Edited down to a wordless dance and the Fantine-and-and-the-hair-buyer lines, which was sort of nice, really... Master of the House was also creatively sanitized but it worked pretty well; I never would have noticed anything amiss if I didn't know the song already. It's quite a fun, upbeat song, when one can listen to it without having to fastforward every other minute. Some other songs did not fare so well... let's face it, "St Michele" and "what the heck" just do not rhyme.

It was interesting, some of the things they did, that you would never notice just listening to the soundtrack: Fantine seeing Tholomyes for a moment in I Dreamed a Dream; Grantaire falling backwards in a mock faint while he sang "I am agog, I am aghast;" Young Cosette appearing in the background in the beginning of Fantine's Death and then walking away when Fantine sings "Come to me..." --so sad! Marius tried to climb over the garden gate when he sang "I'm doing everything all wrong..." (he would have fallen into the orchestra pit); and the man-who-looks-like-Valjean (what's his name?) was grinning and pointing to Valjean as Valjean sang "Two-four-six-oh-oooonnnne!" at the trial, as if he was saying "It's him! Not me! Get him!"

Gavroche- ah, Gavroche. He's definately my favourite character in the book; maybe my favourite fictional character. In the musical his part is cut down considerably (isn't everyone's?) and I'm quite sad that they never mention that he's actually the Thenardier's son and Eponine's brother. (And Azelma's and those other two boys' brother...but nevermind.) The Gavroche we saw was really good; I think he was only...ten, or something. I am so, SO glad that they still use Little People in the school editions, and not that Ten Little Bullets song that makes Gavroche look like someone consumed with bitterness who lives only to get revenge on those evil bourgeois who have wronged him. In the book, he thought of the whole revolution as a sort of game, which just makes his fate all the more...er...miserable.

OK. End of rant.

Gavroche's death scene was all wrong though, says I-- after "You need somebody quicker, and I volunteer!" he climbed to the top of the barricade (we'll talk about the barricade later) and proceeded to get shot there, and stay there. At least they didn't cut out the song, but it made it look like he died for nothing at all, without even trying to get the ammunition. All the same, the theatre was completely silent as he sang Little People for the last time, and then fell backwards.

I wasn't too impressed with Javert until they got to Javert's Suicide- that was REALLY good. Much better than the Broadway Javert there, who just sounded weak.
Valjean and Marius...were alright. I'm used to Colm Wilkinson as Valjean because I've never heard anyone else, and Michael Ball, because he is the Marius.
Cosette was good too; she looked just how I imagined Cosette, and wasn't screechy like some Cosettes are.
Eponine had a very nice voice (it contrasted well with Cosette's ridiculously high notes) but I'm not much of a Musical!Eponine fan. One of my friends and I occasionally sing On My Own very loudly and off-key just to see how bad we can make it sound. But I rather liked that Eponine's version of it.
Fantine was probably my favourite singer; she made me actually like I Dreamed a Dream.
Enjolras sounded almost perfect when he was singing the loud, powerful songs, but he didn't sound so good in the quieter parts (like after Eponine's death).

And the Thenardiers were the comic-relief show-stealing characters, of course. Their costumes were just right too- Thenardier wore a garish red waistcoat, and striped stockings and some other Mismatching Items and had awful, stringy hair, and the Thenardiess had a red dress with immense crinolines (or petticoats, whatever they're called) underneath that spun all around when she danced in Master of the House. The Thenardiers are some of the most maddening villains that I've run across. They're so-- so-- I'm not sure, but they remind me of the Sackville-Bagginses.

They didn't use a lot of props-- the ABC Cafe consisted only of a collection of wine-barrels, which the students sat on. That would have been fine except that the empty chairs at empty tables that Marius sings about later are reduced to imaginary, figurative furniture, which isn't quite the same. Maybe they're ghost chairs...like the ghosts of the Friends of the ABC. (Sorry. Can you tell that it's getting late?)


Random notes and observations:

--The audience started clapping at the same exact times as the audience in the TAC does, which I thought was sort of funny...though the clapping in the TAC annoys me to no end (except during Beggars at the Feast) because it gets in the way of the music.

--Jean Valjean wore a strange wig. Javert too, but he wore his (loverly, stupendous) hat most of the time. Marius was also cursed with weirdish hair but he had the most awesome steampunkish coat, so it's all good.

--Eponine and Gavroche both wore newsboy caps (I'm a great fan of newsboy caps), but they insisted on wearing them backwards. Why was that?

--There was no rotating barricade set, just a large pile of barrels and boxes and wagon wheels. It worked pretty well though, especially for those fortunate people who happened to be sitting on the the revolutionaries' side of the barricade. Oh well, we got a nice view of the National Guard. The leader (the one who sings, "You at the barricades listen to this!") was wearing a US Marines uniform. Heh, I wonder if that means anything.

--I'm not exactly sure how they do the sewers part in the real play, but here they just had Valjean walk around the stage a couple times, with sewer-y sound effects. My friend had the audacity to laugh when Valjean picked up Marius and slung him onto his back. *shakes head in despair*

--One thing that I can't figure out in the musical: In the book, Valjean breaks his parole by stealing a coin from a boy, and that's why Javert is after him. But in the musical, he gets out on parole and then steals the silver-- but the Bishop tells the police that they were a gift, so why would Javert still be after Valjean? Or is there something I am missing?

--I know, I must be a complete fool, but I never connected the "There is a lady all in white" line in Castle on a Cloud to Fantine, until she appeared in the middle of the song.

--They added some harmony in Red and Black...which sounded quite nice some of the time, and some of the time it...didn't.


School productions are underrated. I've seen Fiddler on the Roof done by a high school too, and liked it better than the movie, actually. Apart from Valjean, Javert and the Thenardiers, all of the characters in Les Mis aren't that far away from high school age themselves, so it's sort of nice to see a Fantine and Cosette not played as middle-aged women.

While watching Marius and Cosette's wedding I remembered that the End was near-- the end of the play, I mean-- and that was a quite a disheartening realisation. Everyone came out for the finale, the cast raised their hands in the air as they sang the last notes, and then everyone started to applaud...and applaud...and applaud, as they took their bows. They clapped the most for Eponine the poor victimised innocent waif, which irked my book-puristy self, but then the Thenardiers appeared and the applause suddenly grew a great deal louder. A bunch of teenage girls started screaming and cheering when Valjean came out. Jean Valjean fangurls...who would have thought it.

And then it was over...

I have more to say about the story generally, but this is getting insanely long, so I'll save that for next time-- maybe.

"Again he beheld Mabeuf fall, he heard Gavroche singing amid the grape-shot, he felt beneath his lips the cold brow of Eponine; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose erect before him, then dispersed into thin air... The revolt had enveloped everything in its smoke... A fall into the shadows had carried off all except himself. It all seemed to him to have disappeared as though behind the curtain of a theatre. There are curtains like this which drop in life. God passes on to the following act."