As I write this, I am currently sitting in an orchestra pit behind the orchestra, near a door, and in seeing range of my Dad with his trombone and the entire percussion set used. What show am I watching? Les Misérables. Here I am at a show of Les Mis, but I'm not actually watching it, thus why it's justified I'm on my computer. How can I watch a musical or an opera if I'm in the orchestra pit? Exactly. You can't. The actors are above my head and the orchestra is right in front of me.
And here comes Valjean singing "Bring Him Home." Oh, that note didn't quite make it... cut off a little short, but of course the audience still appears to be mesmerized by this amazing vibrato! Bonus points from the judges there, but there's the french horn ruining that note... way to go, brass! Minus one for the orchestra.
No, I'm not going to write a musical review in the sense of how baseball or the Olympics is on TV with announcers. But wouldn't it be entertaining?
So, on today's post, I actually had gotten to thinking about motifs lately. Mainly because here I am at Les Mis and this is the first "musical" that I have seen since "The Light in the Piazza" when I was at school earlier this year. And I put musical here in quotes because of one reason: there's no dialogue breaks in this production. (Oh, there's the applause. Way to go, singer!) By dialogue breaks, I mean that there is no dialogue, just singing. Just like how an opera is.
Personally, I love musicals and I love certain operas. Some of my favorite musicals are mainly contemporary: Wicked, RENT, Phantom of the Opera, Jekyll & Hyde, Kiss Me Kate, and some others. But I do have my favorites in operas. For me, my main one is "Don Giovanni" by W. A. Mozart. It's strange how I can relate more to some musicals over operas, and vice versa. But for this post, it's more or less just writing as... oh, spoiler alert... Gavroche is dying.
I also say that Les Mis can be like an opera in the sense of its very length. With one intermission at 20 minutes, this French Revoltution-era musical clocks in at about three hours. 3 hours is usually the range of a normal opera, but obviously there are some exceptions. A notable exception being going to "Gotterdamurung" by Richard Wagner while in Milan, Italy last summer and that monster was about 6 hours long with two or three intermissions. Basically, all musicals and operas vary.
All in all, whether I've seen one or not, I enjoy going to theatre in general. Plays are fun, but it's also fun to go to operas/musicals because of the variety that can happen in costume, scenery, props, and even language. Language.... well, that one can be tedious depending on who you talk to, but that's one thing I love about operas. Most operas are known to be in French, Italian, or German. But even as Tom Hulce says as Mozart in the film "Amadeus," an opera doesn't have to be in German (or any other language), but can be "in Turkish if you want!"
Oh, the beauty of opera.
On, the unpredictability of musicals.
I mentioned a musical earlier. I also mentioned other ones, but strangely enough, one can safely assume that musicals put on in America... well, they're going to be in English. Some operas are in English, sure, but not as common probably. I have limited knowledge. Anyways, "The Light In the Piazza" (if I spell it like "pizza" ONE MORE TIME...) was a new experience for me seeing that half of the musical actually included Italian and not just because of its setting and the secondary main character, Fabrizio.
In another life, I probably would have loved to be involved in theatre, but I guess being a writer is the second-best thing for that because without the writer, where would we be?
This post is definitely just a musing, but musings are fun to right, I think. :)
*SPOILER*
Oh, look, Javert is on a bridge saying that his life is over. And he'll be jumping off in.......
***
And just for the record, I do have an all-time favorite musical:
West Side Story.
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