for some things I'm a poor audience

[incandescens]

There ought to be a term for a second reading of books where there's an important revelation near the end, which casts a different light on multiple conversations and encounters when you actually know what's going on behind the scenes and what X really means when they say something or do something which you totally fail to mark as important the

Comments

[flemmings]

For your first paragraph, Ima Ichiko all the time, and as I'm discovering, Steven Brust and Emma Bull writing together. Or possibly apart, but that's when the whole Taltos saga goes retroactively pear-shaped after a certain book.

In the old days, nonsingers in film musicals didn't do their own singing. When did that change? And what a bad idea for something as all-stops-out as Les Miz. Rex Harrison could talk his way through Henry Higgins' songs, but those were very lowkey by comparison.

[incandescens]

I don't know when it did change, but apparently it has done so, much to my regret. I'm now listening to the Complete Symphonic Les Miserables (complete sung-through with actual singers, and Philip Quast as a very good Javert) as remedy.

The songs that particularly suffer are the ones with comparatively simple tunes and sustained high notes, like "Bring Him Home" (though don't ask me for my opinion on this song vis-a-vis the original book and Valjean's opinion of Marius, I tend to go into righteous fury mode) where there's no room to hide from the fact that such songs need a good supported voice to perform them.

[flemmings]

I'm not at all up on Les Miz's music, but I can well imagine. And of course, the last time I read the book was (cough) 55 year ago in what I must assume was an abridged edition, so am unable to even remember who Marius is, much less Valjean's opinion of him.

[incandescens]

Oh, Marius is the Young Hero who ends up with Cosette, the Young Heroine - and as often happens, they are rather less interesting (to me, at least) than most of the other characters.

(Valjean, at least initially, hates him, because he's taking Cosette away. Rather a difference from the song's "He's like the son I might have known / if Heaven had granted me a son...")