The French musicals: the dramatic impulse of Spectacle
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The appellation increasingly applied to French musicals is spectacle. French musicals differ from their contemporary English and German language cousins in that their techniques and artistry come not predominantly from theatre, but from show business. In a culture that has been critically antagonistic to the musical genre over the past decades, les spectacles musicaux1 have nonetheless had extraordinary success in Europe and Canada. While the blockbuster musicals, globally produced, including Les Miserables (1985) and The Phantom of the Opera (1986), which seemed ubiquitous in the 1980s and early 90s, found no substantial audience base in France; at the turn of the century there is evidence of a substantial musical theatre originating in the French language. In this article, I focus on two of the most successful of the recent musicals, Notre-Dame de Paris (1998) and Romeo & Juliette (2000). Both are spectacles, as at home on the stage as on MTV, DVD, or CD. The term, spectacle, is itself applied to divergent styles and genres of entertainment. A close translation is simply “show.” The appellation is not in consistent use and the musical theatre described has also been referred to as operarock and comedie musicale, as rock opera and musical comedy are used in English. The English use of “spectacle” actually approximates spectacle, but is often used in specific reference to the mise en scene of blockbuster musicals, defined by the complexity and expense of sets and special effects. The emergence of les spectacles musicaux has defined a specific trend in French musical based largely on the tension between mise en scene and popular music. The majority of writing on theatrical musicals, and indeed on film musicals, has centred on America, particularly the “golden age” dominated by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, excluding those European composers and lyricists who have had international success over the last three decades. Furthermore, from the late 1960s, rock music began to influence tangibly the theatrical musical with Jesus Christ Superstar (1970), Hair (1968), The Who’s Tommy (1969), and
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it