|
STILL MISERABLES AFTER ALL THESE YEARS - Rich in
sentiment, song and set, musical returns to Toronto
The Globe and Mail
July 22, 1998
THEATRE REVIEW
LES MISERABLES
You'd think with all the money they've made they might have cheered up by now. After 13 years and 40 million tickets, the box office could provide a national budget for some lesser
republic, but those famous French revolutionaries are still unjustly persecuted, pathetically down-trodden and just plain miserable.
It is an enduring musical that returned to Toronto last night as a largely American touring company of Les Miserables opened at the Princess of Wales Theatre with Colm Wilkinson reprising the lead role he created in London and New York.
The reasons for the massive success of Les Miz are not that hard to fathom. First, there is Victor Hugo's great pot-boiler of a novel, its sprawling plot successfully condensed by French writer Alain Boubill without losing any of the melodrama. Across 17 years packed with incidents, the merciless policeman Javert pursues the ex-convict Jean Valjean as he tries to remake himself as an honest citizen. They meet for the last time on the barricades of the ill-fated Paris street revolts of 1832.
Then there are the memorable pop tunes, sometimes pretty, sometimes stirring, composed by Boubilil's creative partner Claude-Michel Schonberg, with smart and efficient English lyrics added by Herbert Kretzmer. From a cheery ditty like Master of the House to a martial air such as Do You Hear the People sing?, the music is always enjoyable.
This strong pairing of story and song is then superbly staged by the British directors John Caird and Trevor Nunn, driving narrative and conjuring spectacle on a revolving set created by designer John Napier. Les Miserables is the classic megamusical, offering both stunning crowd scenes and intimate moments with a sophistication that remains unmatched except by Ragtime, and reveals that shows like Miss Saigon and Sunset Boulevard are merely bloated.
As Napier's vision of the barricades--it looks like some great piece of Russian constructivist sculpture--provides the backdrop for tableau after tableau worthy of the Napoleonic painter Jacques-Lois David, you can admire the stagecraft of this mighty entertainment machine.
Perhaps because it is such a machine (and one recently retooled by the directors who have done some nipping, tucking, tidying and refreshing) it is also a show that has been consistently well performed often with voices of operatic quality.
Here, a cast with strong principals is led by Wilkinson, who is joining this company only for the Toronto stop. He succeeds in making Valjean's unending sacrifices heroic without being cloying and lends some plausibility to the ever-increasing burden of his pursuit by Javert, the obsessive villian made powerfully present by Todd Alan Johnson.
Wilkinson seems to have picked up some mannerisms along the way--a drawl and a grimace that aren't particularly useful in the role--but his voice is the star here, a rich tenor that is simultaneously mellow and light.
Indeed, the chief reward of this particular cast is vocal, from the tiny voice of Eleni Alexis Anderson as the child Cosette to the ample modulations of Susan Gilmour's Fantine and the pleasing duets of Regan Thiel and Tim Howar as the older Cosette and her lover Marius. (The last three are some of the few local actors who have joined this cast.)
In the more minor roles of the revolutionary leader Enjolras, the girl Eponine and the urchin Gavroche, Kurt Kovalenko, Jessica-Snow Wilson and Jason L. Mays all suffer from the same problem: they are visibly and audibly North American youngsters no matter how much supposed mud the makeup department daubs on their faces. There's also occasionally a lack of articulation from the chorus, but overall this production is a fine example of Les Miz at work.
What the machine delivers is sentiment, never emotion: Les Miz is often stirring but it can also be exhausting to experience, for there is no depth or subtlety of feeling or character to provide respite from relentless plot and spectacle.
Hugo packed this frantically melodramatic story with acts of unmotivated evil and heroic charity and killed off four sweet and innocent people including a selfless mother and a spunky street urchin. It would have been pure pap were it not for the crusading social agenda that originally drove the novel and the humanist theme at its core.
In Wilkinson's hands that theme does emerge intact: give him an even break and man will prove himself perfectible.
However, for an audience safely removed from some long-forgotten episode in the history of a foreign country, the politics of the novel are now meaningless. Some guy who looks like he just stepped off the beach at Fort Lauderdale waves a red flag and we all go home feeling tearfully inspired to do absolutely nothing. Hugo wrote in his preface "...as long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless." But today, a musical Les Miserables has kept its entertainment value but lost its utility.
For a limited run at the Princess of Wales Theatre
By Kate Taylor
|
