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When Les Misérables opened in London in 1985, the critics gave it a cool reception; they thought it too lightweight and too commercial to warrant the attentions of the Royal Shakespeare Company. They were right on one score. It is commercial - spectacularly so. The London production is still running. A New York production opened earlier this year. Now Sydney has joined the ranks, with further productions listed for Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Athens, Barcelona, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Reykjavik, Toronto, and Paris, where it all began back in 1979.
Like Cats, which also bears the stamp of director Trevor Nunn, it should go on minting gold for Cameron Mackintosh and his backers for many years to come, for Les Misérables is vivid and engrossing theatre. It grabs its audience in the opening scene, in which the convict hero, Jean Valjean, is given his conditional ticket-of-leave after 19 years in a chain gang, and hardly lets go for a moment during the next three hours.
Cats, although amiable enough, is lightweight by comparison - it has plenty of style but little substance. Les Miz, as it is affectionately known, has both. Although unabashedly sentimental in places, it is not afraid to address itself to some of life's deeper issues, including institutionalised injustice, cruelty and oppression. Moreover, it does so in an epic work which, being through-composed, is much closer to opera than to conventional musicals.
Its central theme, as defined by Victor Hugo, on whose huge, sprawling novel it is based, is that people reduced to the extremities of need will resort to corrupt and desperate measures to stay alive. In the process, though, they become degraded, and wind up as the outcasts and underdogs of society. Hugo was writing about post-revolutionary France, when living conditions for the poor were at least as bad as they were in Dickensian England. But he could just as easily have been writing about some Third World countries today. The parallels are there.
In the story of Jean Valjean, sentenced to a chain gang for stealing a loaf of bread to save a sister's dying child, Australian audiences will also find parallels with our own convict past. In that sense, the production makes an interesting, if unscheduled, addition to the Bicentenary program.
Valjean's story provides the central plot. It is the story of an essentially good and noble man haunted by his past. As he says, the "mark of Cain" is on his papers. Even when he assumes a false identity and becomes a respectable and model citizen, he finds himself pursued at every turn by the ruthless police officer Javert, for whom a criminal is a criminal to his dying day.
Intertwined with this are three subplots; there is the story of Cosette, the illegitimate waif whom Valjean rescues from cruel servitude and exploitation; there is the story of the grown Cosette and her love for the student Marius; and there is the story of the abortive student uprising of 1834, which anticipated the second revolution of 1848.
Nunn and the two authors, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, and the lyrics writer Herbert Kretzmer, have welded all this complex detail into a piece in which the plot is always clear, in which the words are always audible, and in which theatrical effects are achieved with the maximum economy.
The scenes move rapidly, with the help of a revolving stage, from the prison at the beginning to the cavernous sewers of Paris at the end, against a backdrop of inns, brothels and sweatshops. In the second act, two towering heaps of junk come together to form the street barricades behind which the students stage their brave but futile protest. It is a triumph of the stage designer's art.
Against this background, Hugo's ragged underdogs act out their lives of misery and degradation. It is not all gloom and doom, however. There are humorous interludes, most of them involving a scheming Dickensian pair, the innkeeper Thénardier and his wife.
There are tender scenes of romance, too. There is the action-filled battle of the barricades and, threading his way through the narrative, there is Javert, the hunter in relentless pursuit of his quarry. When Javert, outwitted by Valjean's goodness, throws himself into the Seine, it seems we are in for a Brechtian-style ending. Instead, we are treated to a romantic beyond-the-grave reunion between the ill-fated but ever-noble Valjean, the woman Fantine, whom he befriends early in the piece, and her daughter Cosette and husband. It is tear-jerking stuff, and it left more than one member of Friday's first-night audience moist-eyed and reaching for a handkerchief.
Claude-Michel Schonberg's music is simple but intense.
Former pop star Normie Rowe may be a surprise choice for the part of Jean Valjean. But he turns in a sturdy and thoroughly workmanlike performance, using his husky voice to advantage.
Philip Quast makes a superb Javert - a man of commanding presence and evil to the core. Of the many other good performances, I would single out Debbie Byrne's briefly glimpsed but touching Fantine, Marina Prior's equally touching Cosette, Brian Rodney's cheeky young Gavroche, Anthony Warlow's noble and impressive student leader Enjoiras and Simon Burke's romantic Marius.
The moment it finished on Friday night, the audience leapt to its feet and began applauding. The ovation was thoroughly justified.
(Thanks to D. for sending over this review!)
