On My Own...

Uh oh. It looks like the French are trying to reinact the barricade scene from Les Miserables...AGAIN! They don't seem to 'get' that the more organized, more heavily armed law enforcement will always overpower the rabble. And kill them every time. Empty chairs at empty tables, anyone? And think of all the Eponines who are going to throw themselves in front of their Mariuses and die for unrequited love!

Ah, Eponine. Now there's an interesting character if ever there was one. Everybody loves her and hates Cosette. Why? Oh, that's easy. Because Cosette has all her dreams come true. She's pretty, she has a secret fortune thanks to her protective and studly adoptive daddy, Jean Valjean. She's kind, she's virtuous, she's pure and innocent. Generally speaking, she's Less Miserable than anyone else in the book.

Meanwhile, Eponine took a swan dive off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. She's got nasty parents, not a dime to her name, maybe like two teeth in her nasty mouth, has serious codependency issues and tries WAY too hard to get Marius to like her. She lies, she steals, she throws hissy-fits, and stalks the man she's obsessed with. Generally speaking, she's the Most Miserable of anybody else in the book. Save for maybe Fantine. But who cares about her, right? She wasn't in love with a hot young stud who didn't love her back.

But all the girls like Eponine more than Cosette (or "That [expletive] Cosette" as someone from my high school days remembered her). Let's break it down. Let's say you're in the middle of the French Revolution. You don't have a toothbrush. You don't have make-up. You don't have clothes. You live in filth. You're destitute.

You'll probably look a lot less like this:

Eponine's hot!

and a lot more like this:

Eponine's not!

But give toothless, nasty Eponine a song like 'On My Own' and suddenly every girl in every high school show choir across America not only wants to be Eponine...she thinks she is Eponine. You know the type. They're the ones who made the Jekyll and Hyde such a hit. They look around their high school and purposely develop impossible crushes on the star quarterback just so they can wander around outside in the middle of the night and sing "On my own...pretending he's besaaaaahde muuuueeeeee..."

Fortunately for Broadway, they've figured out that unrequited high school-style romance is a goldmine. Wicked was in serious trouble until they started marketing the show to teeny-boppers. Now it's a huge hit. And the secret to the show's success? Not one unrequited love song...but an entire score of 'em! Everybody's running/flying around the stage singing ballads about how nobody loves them. And audiences pay out the nose to see it every time.

I'm tellin' ya, fill a show with a bunch of girls who love guys who don't love them back and you'll have a hit on your hands. And you can take that to the bank.