Orestes Fasting
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Silly continuity questionsI realize that the standard staging exists in this nice fluid free-of-space-and-time universe where the stage is light when it is convenient and dark when it is night in the characters' souls, etc. But the tour attempted a more naturalistic staging and ran into some NASTY continuity issues, namely making it appear that everything between Look Down and the final battle takes place within the space of one night. So I am just throwing this out there: if you attempted to subject that middle part of the musical to real-world continuity, when would everything take place?
Libretto references to time frame/time of day:
"Had you been there tonight, you might know how it feels..."
"On his funeral day they will honor his name"
"A night bright as day"
"You remember, he's the one who got away the other day"
"You wait my girl, you'll rue this night"
"A cry in the dark"
......all of One Day More
"There's danger in the streets tonight"
"Can it be only a day since we met"
I think it's safe to assume that OMO is in the middle of the night
"I have overheard their plans, there will be no attack tonight"
Night of Anguish
"The night is falling fast"
"They won't attack until it's light"
Dawn of Anguish
From this we get...
- Look Down, Stars, Eponine's Errand, and Red and Black are all in the same evening ("Had you been there tonight")
- Everything from In My Life to One Day More is on the same night (and if we're going to go with the blocking where Eponine drags Marius away from the revolt, the second half of DYHTPS must be on this night)
- The Letter scene and On My Own both happen in the middle of the night
- First Attack is near sunset ("the night is falling fast") and everything between then and Dawn of Anguish happens on the same night, then everyone gets shot at dawn
On the tour it seriously looked like all this was on the same night. Look Down in the early evening, revolutionaries plotting, revolt breaks out, Marius gets led off to a moonlit idyll with Cosette, Valjean freaks out and decides to move the next day but gets a letter like two hours later, they build a barricade sometime in the middle of the night, Javert gets back from his spying mission and is unmasked by a strangely nocturnal Gavroche, Eponine gets shot at like three in the morning, the army attacks at four and is pushed back because they can't keep their eyes open, the barricade boys sit around drinking the wine of friendship and have time for, what, a half-hour catnap? Because dawn in June in the northern latitudes is going to be like five-thirty.
Personally I think there must be a significant time gap in the middle of DYHTPS, between students singing in a caf� and students out there rousing up revolution on the street. Because 10pm is not the time to go around stirring up the populace, because Eponine needs time to find the rue Plumet so she can drag Marius away from the party, because of that cut line about "the one who got away the other day," and because they are after all waiting on Lamarque's funeral. Either the dude got embalmed really quick, they gave up on the whole funeral idea and just started rioting, or there's a time gap.
So, going with the idea of Marius getting dragged away from the party to go to the Rue Plumet, we've got insurrection breaking out late-ish on the day of Lamarque's funeral and Marius going and being a googly-eyed teenager with Cosette that evening. This all works up through the end of One Day More, which happens sometime late that night.
So. Upon These Stones. Middle of the night? Or sometime the next day? It has to be after One Day More since Marius is there rejoining the furniture-wall-building party. And he sends Eponine off with a letter, which she delivers in the middle of the (same? next?) night and goes wandering around. Has to be the same night or we have a whole day unaccounted for. So Upon These Stones has to be the middle of the night, and I guess they spend the wee hours of morning building the barricade. Marius says it's been only a day since they met and the world was reborn, it's actually only been a couple hours, but I suppose he can be forgiven a bit of hyperbole in a less than rational state of mind. (Or we can go with the theory that Upon These Stones really is the next day, OMO is purely metaphorical and Eponine is walking around in broad daylight, and Enjolras & company... what, whipped the populace into a state of open revolt and then slept on it so they could be fresh for barricade-building? Okay, going back to the "Upon These Stones = middle of the night" idea.)
How much time does Eponine spend wandering around? How much time has elapsed when we start the barricade scenes in earnest? The next temporal indication we get is in Javert's arrival, "there will be no attack tonight." Again, same night? Next night? It's followed by "the night is falling fast" (i.e. "it is not dark now, but it will be soon") after the first attack, so I'm guessing it's the next night. Which means At the Barricade, Javert's Arrival, Little People, ALFOR, and First Attack happen in daylight the day after the revolt kicks off, and Night of Anguish (coming as it does somewhere between ALFOR and First Attack) is somewhat deceptively named.
After the first attack we know it's all happening in the same night and they get shot at dawn. The only possibly remarkable thing is that they spent the previous night building the barricade and this night singing about (and ostensibly consuming great quantities of) the wine of friendship, so it's a wonder they even manage to wake up when the army comes back. No wonder they lost, they're all sleep-deprived and somewhere between drunk and hung over when dawn rolls around.
So, in summary: some evening in the beginning of June 1832 we have Look Down, the Robbery, Stars, Eponine's Errand, Red and Black, Lamarque is Dead, and possibly a bit of revolutionary-anthem-singing in the back room of a caf�. A few days later (the day of Lamarque's funeral), rioting breaks out in the afternoon and everyone goes around singing revolutionary anthems in the street, and that night Marius goes to stalk Cosette and we get AHFOL, the Plumet robbery and One Day More. That night, barricades go up, Eponine delivers her letter and wanders around, Valjean tries to decide what to do, and many dashing young Frenchmen are sleep-deprived. At the Barricade, Javert's Arrival, Little People, ALFOR, and First Attack all happen the day after the funeral. That night, Javert is released, the wine of friendship does not run dry despite everyone's best efforts, Valjean gets his prayer on, and it's obvious that nobody else in Paris gives a crap because when dawn hits they're abandoned. Everyone's hangover comes to a not-so-merciful end when they get shot, Valjean drags Marius into the sewers, and the sewer chase + final confrontation + Javert brooding must take another whole day, because it's night again when Javert jumps off the bridge.
This does mean the revolt stretches out over three days (Lamarque's Funeral Day, Barricade Day, and dawn on Everyone Dies Day), and Night of Anguish is more like Late Afternoon of Anguish, but even that causes me less brain pain than trying to imagine everything from Look Down to the Final Battle taking place over the course of a single night. On the other hand, if it does take place in a single night and Enjolras is dense enough to say "the night is falling fast" at four in the morning and think they won't attack until it's light when they just attacked at four in the morning, that is a very good explanation for why they lost: massive sleep deprivation and a Fearless Leader who doesn't have two brain cells to rub together.
......yes, I realize that attempting to apply logic to the timeline of this musical was never exactly going to yield brilliant results, but it is fun in an obtuse sort of way. Like trying to apply logic to the lyrics of On My Own and figure out why the trees are full of starlight when it's raining buckets, and whether there is anachronistic pavement or whether the mud-and-sh*t-encrusted Parisian paving stones are somehow managing to shine like silver.
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riverdawn
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Very interesting way of looking at it.
I admit in my head it was always more like this, although I am now realizing there are some flaws with this:
The robbery etc. takes place in the late afternoon of Day 1, Marius meets Cosette, falls in love and having sent Eponine for her and having nothing better to do, goes to meet his friends at the Cafe (say, around 6-7 pm). "Had you been there tonight" assumes a rather more fluid definition of "tonight", I admit, considering it's summer in France and the sun doesn't set until rather late, but I'm assuming that late afternoon-early evening could still fall under "tonight".
So, Marius does his annoying "oh, I'm so in love thing", get's chastised by Enjolras, they get the news that Lamarque died, and they go out into the streets to celebrate/arouse revolutionary spirit, at, say 8ish PM.
Marius is called away from said celebration and talks to Cosette rather late at night, because otherwise it wouldn't make sense for the attack to take place (surely they would attack late at night when they thought the household would be sleeping?). Scream, Marius leaves, Valjean arrives and decides to leave Paris on the next day.
The revolutionary part of One Day More is, in my head, more of what the students are thinking after having spent the evening spreading pamphlets, notifying people of the revolution, etc. etc.
The next day (start of Act II), is the day of Lamarque's funeral. They build the barricade, during which Marius sends Eponine to deliver the letter and she talks to Valjean. After which she gets back to the barricade and everything else ensues (so that the students really die sometime after dawn the next day).
The problem with this logic is, of course, that for it to work, Eponine would need to be delivering her letter and doing "On My Own" sometime in the late afternoon, whereas OMO has much more of a late at night feeling to it. I suppose going by the descriptions in the brick, we could pretend that the streets are deserted and the windows are shuttered because of the upcoming revolution, but that still doesn't quite work, I'll admit that.
The other problem is why Valjean and Cosette haven't left yet, considering in One Day More they seemed to suggest they were leaving the next morning.
Option two, I guess, is that the beginning of Act II and the building of the barricade is done really really late at night (even though it doesn't quite look like it) on the night *before* Lamarque's funeral day (so, immediately after "one day more", late that night, for secrecy, maybe?). Eponine goes to deliver the letter, sings On My Own, and when we see the barricade it's already Lamarque's funeral day and the students are barricaded because the revolution has started, with all the various events taking place starting from the afternoon of that day.
But yeah, I see what you mean about some continuity issues.
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Eppie-Sue
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| riverdawn wrote: | | The problem with this logic is, of course, that for it to work, Eponine would need to be delivering her letter and doing "On My Own" sometime in the late afternoon |
As she sings "And now the night is near", that would be completely fine.
Honestly, I don't have a big problem with the time frame in the musical, and while there are things like "Can it be only a day since we met..." that always seemed a bit "off" to me, it's neither of great importance nor of concern.
For example, most of the solos can not be taken at face value, i.e. "Stars" is not actually happening right there and then but more something that's going on in Javert's head, just like Fantine doesn't sit down on the pavement and sing "I dreamed a dream" the second she's thrown out of the factory. "One day more" is just a summary of everyone's journeys coming together, etc.
If you leave all these moments in a blackbox - the way it has originally been staged - then the audience won't see a problem with it at all. However, if you have to give them a setting, it becomes an issue, another reason why I can't see a musical movie getting it across very well.
Edit:
Furthermore, there are so many scenes that I just see as general scenes that are supposed to give the audience an idea of that particular scene and environment that they've just entered.
For example:
Until Javert's entrance, the Work Song is a symbol for the time in the chain gang. The beggars and unemployed are not actually standing outside the factory's gates the very day that Fantine gets sacked. The whole "Lovely Ladies" sequence is taken out of the timeframe, only interrupted by Fantine's episodes. "Who Am I" doesn't belong into a certain setting, hence the quick switch to The Trial. "Master of the House" represents the Thenardiers' inn on every day, not just the day that Valjean turns up there. "Look Down" is a representation of Paris in general. From "Lamarque is dead" on over "Do you hear the people sing" it's a rather symbolic scene that could easily stretch over hours, even a whole day. "A heart full of love" takes longer than just three minutes of looking at each other... etc. etc.
It's a symbolic and maybe also realistic but not a naturalistic frame that's applied to the original production of the musical. I believe that taking it out of this frame creates a discrepancy between the way it's structured in terms of time and place/the way solos and the chorus work and the staging.
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Vanessa20
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I agree with pretty much everything you guys are saying. I agree with Orestes that DYHTPS probably covers a time skip, because of Montparnasse's line saying that Valjean "got away the other day." Of course, when that line is cut, we can just as easily assume that everything from "The Robbery" through "One Day More" takes place on the same night. I've also always assumed what Riverdawn has, that "Upon These Stones" takes place the next day, not the same night.
I'd love to see a production some time where OMO was lit so it seemed to take place around sunset. That would be more consistent with "And now the night is near" and the later "The night is falling fast" than the standard middle-of-the-night lighting, though I suppose it would be less atmospheric. But of course, there's always Riverdawn's idea that the barricade scenes actually take place the day after OMO, which I had never considered until now.
While we're on this subject, does anyone have any ideas about the timeframe of "Lovely Ladies" through Fantine's death? I mentioned this in another thread once: it's always bugged me. Does Fantine become a prostitute on the same day that she sells her hair, or is there supposed to be a time skip? Is Bamatabois really only her second customer? Does the cart crash really happen immediately after Fantine's arrest? Does she die just hours after being taken to the hospital? Then how could she have been strong enough to be out working and fight Bamatabois? I want to assume that several time skips take place, and that it actually covers roughly the same amount of time that the events in the Brick do (with the exception of the cart crash and the Champmathieu trial taking place on the same day). But then we get Mme. Thenardier's line "Ten rotten francs your mother sends me!" implying that the Thenardiers have only just received Fantine's hair money on the day Valjean arrives for Cosette! Though as Orestes has pointed out, it's not necessarily the same ten francs, it could be from her time as a prostitute.
Oh well. Even Shakespeare made continuity errors (remembers Sparknotes' analysis of "Othello" and their observations about the inconsistencies in the play's timeframe). Heck, even Hugo did!  I'd love to ask Boublil, Schonberg, Kretzmer, Trevor Nunn, et al, these questions about the musical's timeframe, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even have straight answers for everything.
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riverdawn
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| Eppie-Sue wrote: | | riverdawn wrote: | | The problem with this logic is, of course, that for it to work, Eponine would need to be delivering her letter and doing "On My Own" sometime in the late afternoon |
As she sings "And now the night is near", that would be completely fine.
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Hmm... that's true, although I have to say I always considered OMO to be a song that takes place throughout a night. Meaning, it starts just as the night begins ("and now the night is near"), but ends as the night ends, with the "dawning" of the realization that no, she's not with Marius after all. Obviously the song (like all the songs) is symbolic, but in my head it was always symbolic of Eponine wandering the streets all night long.
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Furthermore, there are so many scenes that I just see as general scenes that are supposed to give the audience an idea of that particular scene and environment that they've just entered...
It's a symbolic and maybe also realistic but not a naturalistic frame that's applied to the original production of the musical. I believe that taking it out of this frame creates a discrepancy between the way it's structured in terms of time and place/the way solos and the chorus work and the staging. |
Of course. I agree with you in principle that the songs are all just symbolic and that this should not be taken as a naturalistic time frame. But I do think it's at least interesting to think about the time frame of the action from the Paris scenes onward, because they do seem to be depicting a series of events happening in conjunction with one another.
Re: Vanessa's question about Lovely Ladies: I always assumed that it was depicting things happening over a period of time. I.e - it starts with her selling the necklace. Then, a few days/weeks later when she realizes she has no money and still needs to help Cosette, she sells her hair. Then, when that isn't enough, she becomes a Prostitute. And certainly the events with Bamatabois seem to me to happen after she had already been a prostitute for a while, because the changes in her costume seem to indicate that she's now working regularly as a prostitute, and the little sips from the flask, the coughing etc. suggest that she is sinking more and more into drinking and is also becoming more and more ill. So I always figured that stretches over a period of time.
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Quique
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| Eppie-Sue wrote: | | riverdawn wrote: | | The problem with this logic is, of course, that for it to work, Eponine would need to be delivering her letter and doing "On My Own" sometime in the late afternoon |
As she sings "And now the night is near", that would be completely fine.
Honestly, I don't have a big problem with the time frame in the musical, and while there are things like "Can it be only a day since we met..." that always seemed a bit "off" to me, it's neither of great importance nor of concern.
For example, most of the solos can not be taken at face value, i.e. "Stars" is not actually happening right there and then but more something that's going on in Javert's head, just like Fantine doesn't sit down on the pavement and sing "I dreamed a dream" the second she's thrown out of the factory. "One day more" is just a summary of everyone's journeys coming together, etc.
If you leave all these moments in a blackbox - the way it has originally been staged - then the audience won't see a problem with it at all. However, if you have to give them a setting, it becomes an issue, another reason why I can't see a musical movie getting it across very well.
Edit:
Furthermore, there are so many scenes that I just see as general scenes that are supposed to give the audience an idea of that particular scene and environment that they've just entered.
For example:
Until Javert's entrance, the Work Song is a symbol for the time in the chain gang. The beggars and unemployed are not actually standing outside the factory's gates the very day that Fantine gets sacked. The whole "Lovely Ladies" sequence is taken out of the timeframe, only interrupted by Fantine's episodes. "Who Am I" doesn't belong into a certain setting, hence the quick switch to The Trial. "Master of the House" represents the Thenardiers' inn on every day, not just the day that Valjean turns up there. "Look Down" is a representation of Paris in general. From "Lamarque is dead" on over "Do you hear the people sing" it's a rather symbolic scene that could easily stretch over hours, even a whole day. "A heart full of love" takes longer than just three minutes of looking at each other... etc. etc.
It's a symbolic and maybe also realistic but not a naturalistic frame that's applied to the original production of the musical. I believe that taking it out of this frame creates a discrepancy between the way it's structured in terms of time and place/the way solos and the chorus work and the staging. |
Absolutely agreed. I don't think I've agreed to a post more than I do this second. Personally speaking, most of the solos never feel like they happen literally at the time they occur. It's more like, let's take a break to give this character a platform to introduce their backstory.
"Lovely Ladies" is obviously over a much longer period of time. The way the revolve moves slowly the entire time suggests the passage of time. But that's just me.
It's disconcerting to know they are attempting to fit everything within a specific time-frame in the tour. They should save those concerns for when they shoot the film. In the meantime, somebody should tell them this is theatre.
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Quique
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I agree, Riverdawn, that it's very interesting trying to place a time frame. In fact, I've been thinking about it non-stop since I first read this thread (late last night).
It does bring up concern regarding a possible film version though. There's no question that it works on stage but it might mean some lyrics will have to be altered for the film. Or maybe not, to be honest, I haven't really sat down and tried to map out a time frame. For all I know, it can be done just as it is. But I didn't realize just how many references there are to time in the lyrics. Almost makes your head spin, lol.
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