anything it takes to climb the ladder of success

armand de good, armand de kind

BAILEY’S 3K CELEBRATION —👀 (make me choose) + yellowjackets or stranger things for @stars-bean

"I really am very grateful that your hobby seems to be figuring out how to be a perfect serial killer." "Why does everyone keep saying that to me?"

(First off: Marianne, please let me know if you have any problem with me copy-pasting one of your Abaissé posts from ‘06 and I’ll take this down.  I was trying to rephrase the stuff you covered re: Fenton and lyrics, but you said it all better than I could restate it.)

Many Les Mis fans know Herbert Kretzmer as the musical’s English-language (and therefore arguably most important) lyricist, but fewer are aware that he wasn’t the first man to attempt the job.  The first guy was one James Fenton, who was fired for being unable to keep to the show’s schedule.  Not much of his work survives but his song “Ten Little Bullets” was returned to Gavroche’s death scene for the Broadway revival.  As Marianne reported at the time (link goes to Abaissé):

So, for those who haven’t been following news of the revival as obsessively as I have, one of the changes has been to cut “Little People” entirely and have Gavroche sing a song called “Ten Little Bullets” in his death scene. Ten little bullets in my hand ten little snipers neat and clean— one for the king of this great land two for the aristocracy three for the bishops and the clergymen four for the prefects of police— give me a chance, I’ll take the lot of them— ten little chances to be free Close your eyes, I’ll say when, count to ten. It was written back in the early 80s by James Fenton, the original lyricist for Les Mis, who was fired in 1984 for taking forever to finish and replaced by Herbert Kretzmer. As far as I know, none of Fenton’s lyrics are in the present incarnation of the show, except of course “Ten Little Bullets” in the revival. It’s sung to the same tune as Gavroche’s part in “Look Down.” The only other surviving example of Fenton’s lyrics is another Gavroche song, entitled “You” and presumably set to the tune of “La faute à…” You thought you wouldn’t notice we had nothing to eat You thought we wouldn’t mind we had to sleep on the streets You thought you wouldn’t bother if we drank from a ditch You thought we wouldn’t wonder what had made you so rich You made up all the rules You must have thought us fools… You kicked us in the gutter and you laughed in our face You dragged us through the courtroom and you taught us our place You preached at us on Sunday looking solemn and sleek You cheated us on Monday and the rest of the week We saw the coaches passing on the way to the ball I wonder if you noticed we had nothing at all We smelt you coming out again with brandy for breath I wonder if you noticed we were starving to death Be careful as you go You don’t know what we know You drove us to despair You thought we didn’t care Based on these two samples, which are much more clever and socially relevant than Kretzmer’s sentimental dreck, I would give my right arm to see the rest of Fenton’s lyrics for Act I. (He never made it to Act II, apparently, though he sketched bits of it out.) Behr’s “Les Misérables: History in the Making” goes on to say that Fenton’s lyrics were more poetic than singable, and thought to be too allusive and esoteric for general audiences. Which really only makes me want to see them more.

I heartily agree (but such are the wages of being an incurable fandom hipster).  Fenton, if Wikipedia is pointing me to the same Fenton, is a poet, journalist, and critic who used to teach poetry at Oxford and appears to be a pretty darn acclaimed English writer.  He’s also still alive.  I’m just going to sit here and sigh at the thought that it might still be possible for someone to hunt him down and wring whatever is left of his LM work out of him (assuming that Les Miz The Musical Sensation hasn’t somehow sworn him to silence).