The Harlem River Dispatch: The Power and the Glory of Les Misérables

SPOILER ALERT: Footage of Hugh Jackman as Valjean and Anne Hathaway as Fantine filming the Finale of the new musical adaptation of Les Misérables

Hugh Jackman as Valjean

After decades in "development hell," a movie adaptation of the world-wide megahit musical Les Misérables is finally in production. Working off a screenplay by William Nicholson (Shadowlands, Gladiator), award-winning director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, HBO John Adams miniseries) is helming the production and has assembled an all-star cast featuring Hugh Jackman as escaped convict Jean Valjean and Russell Crowe as his relentless pursuer Inspector Javert. Currently shooting in and around Pinewood Studios in England, Hooper is said to be having the actors sing live on set in order to capture emotionally raw performances, and the film is currently on track for a December 14th release in the states.

For a musical whose future once seemed bleak at best, the global impact that Les Misérables has since had is undeniable. Although several adaptations of Victor Hugo's classic novel had previously been produced, none ever came close to capturing that sacrosanct essence which empowers certain works of literature to move the hearts of nations. After being produced in thirty-eight countries and translated into twenty-one languages, it would be almost futile to argue that Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's musical adaptation, however flawed it may be, had not succeeded in doing so.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

- W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

A few months ago, I was watching the NBC show "Parenthood" (which ended on such a supremely tidy note that cancellation of the show is almost guaranteed) when I heard a familiar phrase being sung in the background: "a good man's hard to find."

The song - a short acoustic number by The Fling - is by no means the first to use the saying. There have been countless songs with this same title centered on romance and heartache for almost a century now - and at the heart of the phrase's evolution is a short story by a southern gothic writer who had a knack for delving into the "grotesque."

The God of "Carnage"

Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. 

- GK Chesterton

Carnage, starring Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet, and Christoph Waltz, is a powerful new film that, despite its brevity, packs a lot of punch. Based on the play God of Carnage by French playwright Yasmina Reza, it follows two couples as they meet to discuss how and why one couple's son has injured the other couple's son with a stick. What starts out as a dull, polite conversation soon devolves into vomit and vitriol.

Reza has said that "theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society." So what does Carnage reflect back at us?

"Freud's Last Session" - The Lewis and Freud Expedition

Pop quiz, hot shot: what famous atheist once said, "all religions, that is all mythologies, to give them their proper name, are man's own invention...Christianity came into being [as] one mythology among many...superstition of course in every age had held the common people, but in every age the educated and thinking ones have stood outside it."

Your first instinct might've been Richard Dawkins, or the late Christopher Hitchens - but based on the title of this article, you probably guessed Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.

If you guessed Freud you were close - these words were written by C.S. Lewis, who in the first half of his life professed an atheism firmly grounded in Freud's writings. Lewis would later reject atheism and go on to become one of the modern world's most well-known apologists for Christianity.

If you're in or around New York City or Chicago, we highly recommend that you go see Freud's Last Session, an off-Broadway play that imagines a meeting between these two gargantuans of thought after Lewis' conversion. It takes its inspiration from a fantastic book by Harvard's Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., titled The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life, which asks the question: what made such an intelligent man throw himself onto what Freud thought of as the "wish fulfillment" of "fairy tales"? And what do these men's lives reveal about their views?

The Inexhaustible Poetics of Sonseed

Writing for By Way of Beauty often yields some incredible discoveries. Sometimes this takes the form of mining out some gem of philosophical truth and/or spiritual wisdom from films, songs, books, or shows we've long been familiar with - other times, it means coming across an unfamiliar artist whose words are stunningly and unexpectedly insightful.

The curious case of Sonseed is certainly the latter.