Spontaneous Violent Love Series 25 :: 25 years ago today, May 13, 2001, the Fellowship of the Ring celebrates the premiere of the Cave Troll scene from the film at the Cannes Film Festival (and the hobbits and Peter indulge in a proper rendition of the Drinking Song which eventually appeared in the extended version of the film). Showing up and showing out were Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Ian McKellen, Sean Bean, Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, Liv Tyler, and Peter Jackson; they were later joined by Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne of New Line Cinema as well.
Spontaneous Violent Love Series 25 :: 25 years ago today, May 11, 2001, the Fellowship of the Ring cast attends their photocall at the Cannes Film Festival, before the premiere of an extended scene from the film a few days later. In attendance were the full fellowship of Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Ian McKellen, Sean Bean, Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, and John Rhys-Davies, plus Liv Tyler and of course, Peter Jackson.
Spontaneous Violent Love, series 25 :: The Reckoning. Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, and Sean Astin for Empire magazine's 25th anniversary celebration of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
According to Know Your Meme, on August 18th, 2005, Erwin Beekveld brought forth this work into the world. HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD.
every august 18th my notifications break and i go, fuck, tumblr has failed me once again, but it hasn’t. it hasn’t failed me. it’s just the taking the hobbits to isengard-iversary. happy 12 years
I just watched that smidge of a video of Potato doing the end of BHH on the LM twitter and ... dear god. What has the combined exposure to Boe, at least four wretched resident directors, and ... whatever else done. Send the cavalry. Send Thaxton. Send me and six boxes of Barry's tea and multiple sweetly phrased threats and a teleportation device to 2010 or jfc even June 2017, because my god.
If you had told me 13 years ago that Jamie Muscato would end up nominated for an Olivier, I probably would have ... believed you, actually. Well done to the most camerasexual meerkat alive, wow.
21 January 2000 :: 20 years ago, portraits of the hobbits and other members of the Lord of the Rings cast are taken in New Zealand for two articles in Vanity Fair: a first glimpse of the hobbits, which would appear in the April 2000 issue of VF, and a slightly longer piece with full character portraits which appeared in the September issue.
Happy 39th birthday to the London production of Les Misérables (which officially opened on 8 October 1985 at the Barbican Theatre, though previews began at the end of September)! By way of celebrations, scans from the 1985/86 / 1986/87 Royal Shakespeare Company Yearbook, which honoured the success of the Barbican production and its transfer to the Palace Theatre by making Colm Wilkinson and Michael Ball during 'Bring Him Home' its cover stars.
The annual RSC Yearbook summarised productions in all of the company's (at the time five) theatres and on tour with production photography and critical commentary from newspapers and other media. Text from the pages above is under the cut below, with bracketed extra information to clarify some references.
Not since Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd back in 1979 has there been a score which soared out of the pit with the blazing theatricality of Les Misérables, and to those of my tabloid colleagues already in print with feeble and fainthearted objections to the show, I have but this to say: remember the demon barber. Sweeney, too, we were once told; was too dark, too savage, too downbeat a theme for a musical. Six years on, that show has won more awards and been acclaimed to more opera houses than any other in the entire history of the American musical. Les Misérables, in a brilliantly intelligent staging by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, will achieve a similar kind of long-term success …
[The Times’/Punch’s Sheridan] Morley went on. ‘… The greatness of Les Misérables is that it starts out, like Sweeney and Peter Grimes, to redefine the limits of music theatre. Like them it is through sung, and like them it tackles universal themes of social and domestic happiness in terms of individual despair.’
[The Financial Times’ Michael] Coveney talked of the allying of ‘Nickleby*-style qualities of ensemble presentation to a piece that really does deserve the label ‘rock opera’, occupying brand new ground somewhere between Verdi and Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was not, he thought, a company celebration like Nickleby, ‘but an appreciation of those values along with the musical experience gathered by the team (Trevor Nunn, John Caird and David Hersey) on Cats and Starlight Express.’ To that extent, he went on, the show was an important one, ‘bridging gaps between musical and opera, and subjecting rock musicians to RSC tutelage while last year’s Clarence [in the RSC 1984 production of Richard III], Roger Allam, is unveiled in the role of Javert as an outstanding performer in the musical idiom.’
[*The RSC's landmark 1980 production of an adaption of Charles Dickens’ The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby]
[The Guardian’s Michael] Billington posited that if you fillet any great nineteenth-century novel, ‘you are left with melodrama.’ Les Misérables, he said, jointly produced by the RSC and Cameron Mackintosh at the Barbican, becomes exactly ‘high class melodrama.’ It was staged ‘with breathtaking panache by Trevor Nunn and John Caird. It is impeccably designed by John Napier. It has a lively score by Claude-Michel Schönberg. But it is three-and-a-half hours of fine middlebrow entertainment rather than great art.’ Billington claimed to have ‘conned’ the novel sufficiently ‘to realise that it is a towering masterpiece about social injustice, redemption through love and the power of Providence.’ What the musical offered, he went on, ‘is the hurtling story of Jean Valjean, the paroled prisoner who becomes a provincial mayor, who is relentlessly pursued by the policeman Javert and who achieves heroic feats of self-sacrifice at the 1832 Paris uprising. What you don’t get is the background of moral conflict that makes this more than a classy adventure story.’ In this he thought, Hugo’s novel was infinitely more dramatic than the musical.
[The Times’ Irving] Wardle spoke of the temptation in such circumstances for anyone who has read the novel ‘to quarrel with any adaptation for its omissions and liberties instead of judging the adaptation on its own merits.’ In this instance, he maintained, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg had done a capable gutting job. ‘They present a clear outline of the epic contest between Jean Valjean, the saintly ex-convict, and his implacable pursuer Javert: including Valjean’s defeated attempt to save the wretched Fantine, and his life-long devotion to her daughter, Cosette, only to lose her to a young love, Marius, amid the Paris barricades of 1832.’
The adapters had cut corners with boldness and ingenuity, Wardle believed, and had found fresh situations where Hugo’s are theatrically unworkable. They had also preserved the essential sense that Valjean and Javert are two of a kind, belonging, as Hugo puts it, to the ‘two classes of men whom society keeps at arms length: those who prey on it and those who protect it.’
Coveney maintained that the organization and placement of the continuously revolving stage was ‘beyond praise’, with John Napier’s design doing as much honour to Hugo’s Paris as he lavished on Dickens’s London [in Nickleby]: ‘Two huge trucks rumble on and form a barricaded wall which, just as Hugo describes, seems to contain a city in itself, a fantastic jumble of chairs, barrels, planks and people, a teeming segment of a revolutionary catacomb.’
This alternative society, Coveney said, was presented without sentiment ‘as indeed are its urchin sentinels, the daughter of Thenardier (a devastating waif performance by Frances Ruffelle) and Gavroche … sweetly and surely sung by an admirable child actor and just when you feel the production is slipping by allowing a [writer of Oliver] Lionel Bart-ish point number, he is shot full of bullets and left to sing plaintively on the wrong side of the barricade.’
The music, [The Sunday Times’ John] Peter though, ‘has a fresh, astringent lyricism and a powerful, ballad-like drive: number after number makes robust contributions to character and drama.’ The best performances, in Peter’s opinion, came from Alun Armstrong and Susan Jane Tanner as the ‘horrible Thenardiers', Patti LuPone (Fantine) and Frances Ruffelle (Eponine). But this was, he pointed out, ‘essentially a company musical rather than a star vehicle. If it transfers to the West End where its masterful theatricality would outshine almost anything else on offer, it might show people that success in this genre doesn’t depend solely on expensive star turns.’ The transfer to the Palace, of course, came swiftly after the Barbican opening.
[The Observer’s Michael] Ratcliffe described Schönberg’s score as ‘all tinselly arpeggios, stabbing staccato, pile-driving trumpets and thinly-disguised hymns.’ In polite terms he said, it was ‘electric, trailing a range of references from high-tech Bizet and Massenet to the air-time acceptable, and Celtic Fringe Folk.’
Some scenes, said Coveney, go straight into operatic form, ‘for example the apprehension by Javert of Valjean at Fantine’s deathbed, or a beautiful garden trio for young lovers in Valjean’s garden hideaway.’ There was also a ‘startling thematic echo of Rigoletto as Valjean ponders the son he might have had.’ Colm Wilkinson’s Valjean was in Coveney’s opinion ‘a remarkable study in impassive acquisition of self-knowledge … He [has] particularly fine and lyrical use of his upper register. Above all he transmits palpable goodness without sounding like a prig or a boar [bore?].’ [The Sunday’s Telegraph’s Francis] King thought Wilkinson not only sang the role with eloquence ‘but – far more difficult – brings out the essential goodness of a much-wronged man.’ The outstanding voice of the evening in King’s opinion, was that of Patti LuPone as Fantine.
The band under the stage and the musical direction of Martin Koch include some rumbling brass premonitions of disaster as well as some very fine work on synthesizers, brass and strings. The score also underpins such exciting production movements as the arrival of the barricade, the suicidal leap (done by the bridge flying up as Mr Allam free falls on the spot) and the descent to the sewers with lots of dry ice and naked banks of light not equalled in impact since Mr Hersey did something similar in Evita.
In short, this is an intriguing and most enjoyable musical, fully justifying the mixing of commercial resources with RSC talent and personnel, even if not all that many RSC actors are involved.* Being now acquainted with the demands of the score, I see why that should be so. [Morley]
[* The RSC members who appeared in the Barbican production were Roger Allam, Alun Armstrong, and Susan Jane Tanner. Other RSC members at this time joined Les Mis in later companies, among them David Delve, who would replace Alun Armstrong as Thenardier.]
Les Amis in the 2024–2025 West End cast of Les Miserables: Robson Broad (Enjolras), Christopher Jacobsen (Combeferre), and Matthew McConnell (Courfeyrac); Ben Oatley (Joly), Daniel J Brian (Prouvaire), and Jonathan Stevens (Feuilly); Irfan Damani (Lesgles), Adam Colbeck-Dunn (Grantaire), and Matt Hayden (Bahorel/Montparnasse).
Voila Les Amis in the 2024-2025 World Tour: James D Gish (Enjolras), Jonathon Bentley (Combeferre); Andrew Maxwell (Courfeyrac), Caleb Lagayan (Joly), Harry Grant Smith (Feuilly); Connor Jones and Raymond Walsh (sharing the role of Grantaire); Louis Emmanuel (Prouvaire), Geddy Stringer (Legles), and Abel Law (Bahorel/Montparnasse).
More actors likely to be named later as the tour progresses.
Those who've been on this journey with me for a thousand years know the novel upon which my hands are sitting hard, and how much of it involves Dominic and Bernard's ... Dominic-and-Bernardness, and while I can often be somewhat impatient with Dominic's ... Dominicness (to the catflap with you, my dude) I feel for him here very, very much.
