We were supposed to read it in French in my senior year French class in high school. I think I got through two pages.

My senior year French teacher was much less ambitious- we read La Petit Prince!

Now I am earwormed with ABBA's Waterloo!

My French teacher was completely burned out. I cut his class all the time, and if there was a quiz and he saw me in the hall, he'd say, "You might want to show up today!" He gave not one fuck about teaching at that point. So for the Les Miz tests, all you had to do was write a grammatically correct French sentence about whatever you wanted to pass.

Gratified to hear all the good Les Miz reviews!

I am not a big fan of musical theater but went to see Les Miz live. Twice, I think, in my late teens. The songs are a part of cultural repertoire by now. I would think even the folks who have never seen the show or read the novel would feel at least a bit of familarity after hearing the first few lines of "On My Own" or "I Dreamed a Dream" sung. Whassaname -- Susan Boyle? The one who won that British singing competition and was in all the presses. Her big song was I Dreamed a Dream, right?

I have never seen the stage production - either live or on tape. I've never heard the full soundtrack and I probably couldn't pick out any song from this before I saw the trailers.

But watching the trailer I really want to see it. I'm also trying to read the book, I think I need to go back to the beginning now that Ive read a summary and have a better idea of what is going on.

Now I find myself wondering if it's usually abridged in English like Count of Monte Cristo.

Abridged version of Les Miz (the novel) can be okay -- there's a lot of extraneous stuff there. But read the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo -- the abridged version is basically a "cleaned up" version for squeamish American audiences and leaves out a lot of the plot. Including a barely-veiled lesbian relationship.

But read the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo

Yes! Yes! The discussions on gardening, the political nuances. I'm going to have to re-read, I can't remember if the old man is M. Nortier or not.

I have both of those on the Kindle, free version. but I'm thinking maybe a version with footnotes would be a good idea.

Wow 'Suela, that was probably the clearest most pithy description of Les Miz I have ever read. Mad props.

This was me as well. Though the lyric changes bothered me more than the different singing (though the later irked as well.) Really, American production, you seriously need Javert to sing about putting Valjean "safe behind bars"? Ugh.

This cracks me up since the whole thing was translated, but I understand since it still bugs me that they translated the English in Harry Potter.

The only song I distinctly prefer in the French version is "Mon prince est en chemin" ("Castle in a Cloud") just because the lyrics are so much better and are integrated later on in songs with the older Cosette. Plus, the whole thing calls back to "Someday My Prince Will Come." Gavroche's song "La faute à Voltaire" is pretty witty too.

Otherwise, I think they did a pretty good job and they made some excellent structural choices such as fleshing out Javert's role and moving the "Air de la misère" originally sung by Fantine to be Eponine's "On My Own" (although this means Fantine disappears pretty quickly).

Replace "And a bad haircut?" with "And someone steals bread?" and you have me

If there is bread, they're not as poor as I was thinking.