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Not sure why I choose to listen to this, so soon after disliking Hunchback so much. But I'm glad I did -- it's really good! I cried a lot!
It's still definitely Hugo, who will cut away from the action of Valjean dragging an unconscious Marius away from the slaughter of the barricade to go into a 90 minute tangent about the history of the Parisian sewer system. But the tangents annoyed me less this time, probably because I actually cared about the characters.
I actually really liked getting the lengthy backstory on literally ever character. Les Mis was the first musical I ever saw, and it has been a lifelong favorite. (Bold choice, I know.) Learning about the bishop and Fantine and all the hidden connections between Gavroche and Marius and the Thénardiers was really cool. It opened whole new vistas onto a plot that I know so well. I really liked the book Gavroche a lot better than the play Gavroche. Gavroche on stage really doesn't much going for him beyond "geewhiz, aren't I cute and plucky?", but Gavroche on the page is a very interesting and fully fleshed out character, almost fey in how he bridges youth and adulthood. Marius is a bit more of a twerp, but we saw so much more of him, and so much more of the courtship between him and Cosette, that I didn't mind. Real people are twerpish. Cosette was still an abstract portrait of a silhouette of an empty ideal, sadly. Javert was about the only character who wasn't improved by the extra material. He's so much more thuggish in the book, just a mindless brute. He is devoted to the law not because of any deeply held philosophical beliefs, but just because he is constitutionally incapable of doing anything else. It made him a lot less compelling, for me.
So, yeah. If you're going to read Hugo, I strongly recommend Les Mis over Hunchback.
It's still definitely Hugo, who will cut away from the action of Valjean dragging an unconscious Marius away from the slaughter of the barricade to go into a 90 minute tangent about the history of the Parisian sewer system. But the tangents annoyed me less this time, probably because I actually cared about the characters.
I actually really liked getting the lengthy backstory on literally ever character. Les Mis was the first musical I ever saw, and it has been a lifelong favorite. (Bold choice, I know.) Learning about the bishop and Fantine and all the hidden connections between Gavroche and Marius and the Thénardiers was really cool. It opened whole new vistas onto a plot that I know so well. I really liked the book Gavroche a lot better than the play Gavroche. Gavroche on stage really doesn't much going for him beyond "geewhiz, aren't I cute and plucky?", but Gavroche on the page is a very interesting and fully fleshed out character, almost fey in how he bridges youth and adulthood. Marius is a bit more of a twerp, but we saw so much more of him, and so much more of the courtship between him and Cosette, that I didn't mind. Real people are twerpish. Cosette was still an abstract portrait of a silhouette of an empty ideal, sadly. Javert was about the only character who wasn't improved by the extra material. He's so much more thuggish in the book, just a mindless brute. He is devoted to the law not because of any deeply held philosophical beliefs, but just because he is constitutionally incapable of doing anything else. It made him a lot less compelling, for me.
So, yeah. If you're going to read Hugo, I strongly recommend Les Mis over Hunchback.