Les Miserables - London's West End

I walked into the Queen's Theatre very nervous that I wasn't going to like Les Miserables, because I had heard some of the music before and it didn't capture me, because I didn't like the synthesized sound of the orchestra, and because my father, whom I love, fell asleep watching it. Compounding my nervousness was my ticket, for a seat in the second row on the main floor. Gosh, I thought, I'd better not get drowsy like I did that time I saw Hedda Gabler from the third row! How terribly horrid would that be?

I walked out of the Queen's Theatre with the program and the souvenir booklet, which together cost £8 (roughly fifteen dollars) (yes, I had to pay for a program - cheap British bastards), and a huge grin on my face. There's still a lot of things that I don't like about Les Mis, but I'm very pleased that I saw it, and there were some songs that I have come to like a lot more, and at least I understand what all is going on when I'm listening to it (or parts of it).

The ending, however, still perplexes me. Most of the show demonstrates the plight of Paris' poor after the French Revolution. They're starving, they're fighting for every penny, and yet the end of the show leaves them behind as one lucky girl gets to move into High Society. Actually, the poor get into the wedding celebration, with the Thenardiers in costume. The Thenardiers are hardly the best the poor has to offer, nor are they, I would argue, representative of a huge class of people just trying to make an honest day's wages; no trickery, no deceit. But that's what the Thenardiers embody, and they (and the rest of the poor too) get their come-upances in the end - when they crash the party.

What a message! Look at these people, feel their pain, know their sorrows. Then leave them in the gutter. How dare they disturb the First Estate!

Such is what I felt at the end. Where are those poor? Dead. Oops. That didn't mean to happen. Honest. Just sort of works out that way, conveniently.

This is typical of the disjointedness of Les Mis. It tries so hard to cover thirty years that it fails to cover a single plot. Is it a love story? Is it a hero story? Is it about redemption? Revenge? I don't know. It tries to be so many things to so many different people.

The show is a product of a bygone era in musical theatre, when the major shows were British exports, with huge, revolving sets and lots of high-tech props. The theatre market has become more tailored now. While shows like The Producers and, most recently, The Drowsy Chaperone, continue to hold their own, other shows are aiming at smaller groups. The Color Purple, co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, targets black audiences. Sweeney Todd goes for Sondheim cult members (myself included).

Like the guy once said, the times they are a-changin'. Musical theatre has left Les Miserables and the shows like it (Cats, Phantom of the Opera) behind (it actually started to do it around the time that Sunset Boulevard flopped). Les Mis is a relic, and I'm glad that I got to see it, before it too disappears.

On a side note, there's no sign that it will close in the near future. Cameron Macintosh proudly proclaims that it will become the "longest running musical in history." Well, perhaps British history. But out in the rest of world (the one that isn't Anglocentric), that honor proudly rests with The Fantasticks, which ran for forty-two years in a little theatre in Greenwich Village. I haven't checked the math, but I believe that forty-two is greater than Les Mis's mere twenty-one. So move over, Macintosh; you ain't all that.