primeideal | Les Miserables--pandemic edition

The high school I went to (years ago) did a filmed "concert-style" version of Les Mis as their musical, despite quarantine, and streamed it online. Despite the whole cast being high schoolers they had both a young Cosette and a grown-up Cosette (actually the "young Cosette" is a senior, the "grown-up" is not), and they can both really sing! Some of the men kind of struggled with the switch between sung and recitative parts, it was kind of a mix of both, but under the circumstances it was pretty impressive. They tried to get the pit orchestra to do it, too, but they weren't able to pull that together so they had piped-in recordings. But then at the end of the stream it was like "here's a montage of our instrumentalists rehearsing because they worked really hard to try to make it happen, enjoy," which was sweet.

There are several scenes that don't really work when it's just soloists at microphones not interacting: "The Confrontation" was abridged for the school version, which was probably for the best. And they had digital captions of the changing scenes, like "The Barricades: Paris" or "A Bridge over the Seine" which felt unnecessary. But Grantaire and Enjolras hugged after Grantaire's verse of "Drink With Me" which is pretty big under the circumstances. And awkward Marius is like "a heart full of love..." *steps forward into Cosette's virtual bubble, steps back* "I'm doing everything all wrong!!" which was amusing. And made me think cursed thoughts about 2020 AUs.