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Hadestown-Adjacent Obsessions
May. 7th, 2019 12:52 pm'Hadestown-adjacent' in that I started listening because Amber Gray, and then fell in love with the story and everyone else, and then decided I might as well go ahead and try to read the source material, since I've been kinda-sorta meaning to read it for years...
Anyway! Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812! It's a musical based on a teeny section of War and Peace, and it's lovely and funny and sad and hopeful and sweet; I love it a lot and hope it gets a Broadway revival at some point, because the fandom seems like it's not completely inactive but smallish, at least right now. But there are fics, and a lot of them look pretty good, and now that the semester's over I should (theoretically) have time to go through and read them all.
Amber Gray, by the way, played Hélène, Pierre's wife off-Broadway and during the Broadway run. They don't get along, and they aren't reconciled by the end of the musical (or ever, she eventually dies in the book) but I kind of wish they would reconcile, because I've never met a canon angsty couple that I didn't like. And Hélène is so charmingly poisonous in a way you can't help but love ("God, to think I married a man like you!"), and there's the implication that, even though she doesn't love her husband (and probably never did) she at least doesn't want him dead, which...I mean, there's room for growth there! Maybe not a lot, but at least a bit!
So, after bingeing the original cast recording on Spotify I decided I might as well try to read the book. I have a kind of iffy relationship with classics; some I really love (Wuthering Heights! Jamaica Inn!) and some I really want to love but just can't get into (Les Miserables!). War and Peace is actually a lot easier to get into than Les Miserables--though they're both extremely long, War and Peace feels more focused (to me, anyway) and from what I hear Tolstoy saves most of the plotless philosophical rambling for the end, which is nice. Of the characters so far, I adore Pierre and Princess Mary, love Hélène and Natasha and Marya Dmitrievna (and even Anatole, if I'm being honest--he's awful but the way the narrator just rips into him is a lot of fun), and...kind of couldn't care less about Andrei/Prince Andrew? He is growing on me slowly but surely, though.
Since War and Peace is so ridiculously long, my plan is to hopefully have it finished by the end of this summer. I'm not sure how well that'll end up working out, especially with my summer class, but I do want to have a goal in mind, otherwise I'll probably end up sort of trailing off. My Russian lit class last semester did leave me wanting to read more Russian classics (we stuck mostly with books written after or during the Soviet period), so that's another bit of motivation.
Anyway! Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812! It's a musical based on a teeny section of War and Peace, and it's lovely and funny and sad and hopeful and sweet; I love it a lot and hope it gets a Broadway revival at some point, because the fandom seems like it's not completely inactive but smallish, at least right now. But there are fics, and a lot of them look pretty good, and now that the semester's over I should (theoretically) have time to go through and read them all.
Amber Gray, by the way, played Hélène, Pierre's wife off-Broadway and during the Broadway run. They don't get along, and they aren't reconciled by the end of the musical (or ever, she eventually dies in the book) but I kind of wish they would reconcile, because I've never met a canon angsty couple that I didn't like. And Hélène is so charmingly poisonous in a way you can't help but love ("God, to think I married a man like you!"), and there's the implication that, even though she doesn't love her husband (and probably never did) she at least doesn't want him dead, which...I mean, there's room for growth there! Maybe not a lot, but at least a bit!
So, after bingeing the original cast recording on Spotify I decided I might as well try to read the book. I have a kind of iffy relationship with classics; some I really love (Wuthering Heights! Jamaica Inn!) and some I really want to love but just can't get into (Les Miserables!). War and Peace is actually a lot easier to get into than Les Miserables--though they're both extremely long, War and Peace feels more focused (to me, anyway) and from what I hear Tolstoy saves most of the plotless philosophical rambling for the end, which is nice. Of the characters so far, I adore Pierre and Princess Mary, love Hélène and Natasha and Marya Dmitrievna (and even Anatole, if I'm being honest--he's awful but the way the narrator just rips into him is a lot of fun), and...kind of couldn't care less about Andrei/Prince Andrew? He is growing on me slowly but surely, though.
Since War and Peace is so ridiculously long, my plan is to hopefully have it finished by the end of this summer. I'm not sure how well that'll end up working out, especially with my summer class, but I do want to have a goal in mind, otherwise I'll probably end up sort of trailing off. My Russian lit class last semester did leave me wanting to read more Russian classics (we stuck mostly with books written after or during the Soviet period), so that's another bit of motivation.
