First up in my series on analyzing why musicals make such great adaptations is Les Misérables. Before I begin, I’m going to be working with the assumption that if you’re reading this, you’ve seen the musical (or at least listened to it.) If you haven’t, you’re welcome to keep reading but this may not make sense to you (and there will be spoilers.) Let’s talk about benefits of being a musical, cut characters, the two sides of Éponine Thénardier, and more!
The Benefits of The Musical Format
First off, the length of the complete experience is a factor. The musical can be enjoyed in one sitting (or rather one sitting with an intermission in the middle) the book cannot (there’s no way it can be read in full in one day, let alone one sitting. Any read of it that takes less than a week would be comparatively quick for the length.) Part of the reason the musical was able to accomplish this was cutting a lot of fluff, but we’ll get to that.
Secondly, in the format of musicals, more is able to happen faster and more comprehensively than in books. The recording of the “Love Montage”, which includes “I Saw Him Once”, “In My Life”, and “A Heart Full of Love” clocks in at 5 minutes and 18 seconds and tells the audience:
Cosette is in love with Marius.
Cosette feels lonely.
Jean Valjean hasn’t told the whole truth about himself and his fugitive status to Cosette.
Cosette has asked questions he isn’t willing to answer and is curious.
Valjean is a protective father to Cosette.
Marius is in love with Cosette.
Éponine and Marius are good friends.
Éponine is in love with Marius.
Marius is unaware of Éponine’s love for him.
Cosette and Marius’s love affair takes off in full force, and Éponine despondently witnesses it.
Important information about four major characters, their existing relationships to each other, and develops these relationships further while setting up motivations for future drama.
Additionally, by putting all this information so clearly and shortly, the musical is cutting out the chapters upon chapters of Marius longing for Cosette before he knows her name, of him finally meeting with her, of Marius and Éponine interacting on the streets of Paris, etc. Reading all of this in the book takes much longer than five minutes.
“One Day More” takes this even further. In three and a half minutes 8+separate characters outline their motivations and plans for what’s to come, and one character (Marius) makes a major decision.
In a nonmusical medium, Les Mis wouldn’t be able to get away with having so much happen so quickly.
Another point in this musical’s favor is the music itself.
I won’t get into the symmetry of Les Mis’s music because I’m not qualified and much more knowledgeable music people than I have already covered that, but I will say that the well-crafted songs do a good job of replacing one of the strengths of the novel. That is, Hugo’s flowery elegant prose.
There’s no way for any adaptation, musical or not, to be able to use that beautiful prose directly. At least not without heavy narration. But with its powerful score and poetic lyrics, the Les Misérables musical manages to slot in a replacement.
The passion that the characters are feeling in so many scenes is captured so well through song. In the book, we have Hugo telling us how the emotion a character is feeling permeates down to their soul, has changed them forever, etc. In a more visual medium, we can’t have that. But the act of singing to convey their thoughts also conveys more intense emotion than could be conveyed through speech.
Cut Material and Restructuring of the Story
The structure of the story is made better for the musical format. Musicals like Les Mis are most often split into two acts. The two acts aren’t completely equal, but in the case of Les Mis, the first act is a little over half of the show.
The barricade is setup shortly into act two, not long after the midpoint of the show. That similar point in the story is about 75% into the book.
The fact that this takes place so much earlier in terms of the overall plot is because the musical skipped over a good deal of material to get here faster. Much of what it skips is things that can be inferred by the audience to happen in between songs (for example, an extended sequence of scenes showing Valjean traveling with Cosette and bonding with Cosette after taking her from the Thénardiers is cut). Some of the other cut material is backstory (like Marius’s troubled relationship with grandfather.)
Other cut material has little to nothing to do with the story at all. Hugo drones on a lot about tangents that aren’t contributing anything overtly meaningful to the plot. It takes pages and pages and pages to even meet Jean Valjean, let alone get to his decision to break parole. The musical cuts out the fluff and gets straight to the good stuff.
This allows the story to be simpler. It lets the show focus on the action at the barricade. In turn, because a greater amount of focus is devoted to it, the barricade scenes are given more importance.
The Thénardiers
Here’s a question for you musical fans: how many children do the Thénardiers have?
If you’ve only seen the musical, you probably think one. Or maybe you’re a bit more in tune with the deeper lore, and you know that in the books, Gavroche is a Thénardier too. But if you’ve read the books, you know the answer there is five.
So the correct answer is five in the books, and arguably one or two in the musical.
I say arguably because while in the book, Gavroche and Éponine are siblings, in the musical it’s never confirmed or denied. This leaves it so it’s up to your personal interpretation. Honestly I think it’s also left up to the specific production too, because I think the actors playing Gavroche and Éponine can choose to play it in a certain way to lean toward or away from the idea of them being siblings.
Now, I tend to prefer to interpret them as still being siblings, because if they’re not, then where does Gavroche come from?
Of the other Thénardiers, only 1 has a name: Azelma, the other Thénardier daughter. There are two other sons, both much younger than Gavroche, and unrecognizable to him as siblings. What the musical did is look at what this family did that mattered to the plot, and kept only that.
Gavroche being a Thénardier doesn’t actually influence the plot. The closest it does is remind the audience that the Thénardiers are awful-he ends up on the street because they kick him out because Madame Thénardier only loves her daughters, and her husband doesn’t care about his kids. But we already know that they can be cruel to children because of their treatment of Cosette.
Additionally, the musical is much shorter than the book, so they have less time to explain the whole situation of how Gavroche was neglected and came to live on the streets and so forth. His plot relevance is through his interactions in the barricade. The musical prioritizes this and as a result his character is simplified. That by itself might not always be a good thing, but since it’s happening to a minor character in a huge cast, it makes the story stronger without extra clutter.
And if included, the cut Thénardiers all would be clutter. The cut Thénardiers all contribute nothing. Azelma offers nothing to the story that Éponine doesn’t already provide. The two unnamed sons only contribute to their own subplot, a tangent to the main story that there was zero time for (and even if there was, it wouldn’t be worth the hassle of including such young actors when their roles could be written out instead.)
You may have noticed I’ve barely mentioned arguably the most famous Thénardier. Let’s talk about Éponine.
Éponine
Éponine isn’t cut, but she is changed. Musical Éponine isn’t necessarily better than book Éponine, but she is better suited to a musical.
What do I mean by that?
Well, Éponine is more straightforwardly nice in the musical. Book Éponine leads Marius to the barricade to die because he won’t love her back. (She also takes a bullet for him,She’s more troubled overall, and complicated, but that kind of nuance isn’t easy to get across properly in the musical stage. Musical Éponine is easier to root for from the get go without thinking deeper about the situation she’s grown up in and the struggles she's dealing with.
Both Éponines are, I think, valid and sympathetic characters. But the musical doesn’t have time to delve into the grayer morality of book Éponine and the unfortunate life circumstances that help to make her sympathetic. The more romantic musical version not only fits better with the time restrictions of the musical, but the overall tone as well.
One of the biggest changes is the relationship between Éponine and Marius. In the book, they barely know each other. Éponine is still in love with him, but he doesn’t really care for her. In the musical, she is his best friend. The implication is that they’ve been good friends for a while before Cosette shows up. This stronger relationship makes the viewer more invested. Being in that friendship with Marius makes Éponine’s yearning more compelling.
More importantly, this relationship means that Marius cares more when she dies.
It’s still sad in the book when Éponine dies. But Marius isn’t nearly as upset and affected as he is in the show. It’s like the difference between the kid across the street that you babysat once or twice dying, versus the best friend you’ve known since third grade. Book Éponine’s death is more of a tragedy because she was so young, and troubled. Her whole existence was one long tragedy. Musical Éponine’s death is a tragedy because she was his best friend, and loved him, and he loved her but not in the way she wanted, and we rooted for her.
Conclusions
Les Misérables the musical is a strong adaptation of Les Misérables the book because it isn’t afraid to cut things to keep the overall plot more focused, it uses songs to convey emotions in a way spoken word can’t, and takes care to consider what made the book such a hit in the first place along with the strengths of the musical medium. You can prefer the book or prefer the show, but the musical is as good an adaptation as any book could hope for. (Especially a book as long as Les Mis!)
That’s it for Les Misérables. Next Thursday I’ll be talking about The Little Mermaid. But in the meantime, let me know if you agree or disagree with me or if you have a suggestion for a musical to cover in the comments below.
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