e., Passion or The Light in the Piazza)? How about a sweeping, romantic score (i.e., A Little Night Music or Titanic)? Or, heaven forbid, an old-fashioned musical comedy score? Absolutely not – the story being told is an enormous, larger-than-life tale, peopled for the most part with fairly cut-and-paste character cutouts. The story is center stage, and not the characters.
Even though the characters are pretty much window dressing for the story, Boublil & Schonenberg still manage to find the time to go through and flesh them out. The way they accomplish it is straight out of Sondheim's playbook: they use the music. They still manage to unearth some absolutely gorgeous melodies, a la Lloyd Webber, but almost all have some sort of dramatic context. An over-riding vamp signals the beginning of "Work Song", but after one or two repetitions, it is suddenly and forcefully undercut by two jarring bass notes (listening to the score, it sounds like it's a sharp and a natural right next to one another), thus establishing – even out of context of the show – that the scene is a prison where the inmates are little more than slaves. Fantine's "I Dreamed A Dream," is an innocent-sounding aria rendered ironic by its not-so-innocent lyric. The song encapsulates her character, an innocent-looking young woman who really isn't all that innocent. Even the big, show-stopping numbers reaffirm character or dramatic assessments. When "One Day More", the big Act One finale, splits into five separate parts, Valjean – the character around whose story the show revolves – anchors the Act One finale "One Day More" when it splits into four or five contrapuntal sections with the extended phrase "one day moooooore", which is set on two individual notes.
Reprises play an important dramatic function in both their sung and underscored forms.
