I may be cancelled for saying so, but the West End’s longest running musical, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, would make Puccini proud
Do you hear the people sing? I only ask because, at last count, over 130 million people have. Pushing 50,000 professional performances in almost 50 countries across the globe, Les Misérables – the West End’s longest-running musical, and the second-longest-running in the world – celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Not bad for an adaptation of a 1500-page 19th-century French novel that includes lengthy disquisitions on the Parisian sewer system, monastic orders, and a play-by-play of the Battle of Waterloo.
So what’s the show’s secret?
As a classical music critic I may be cancelled for saying so, but for me Les Misérables is up there with La bohème, La traviata and all the operatic greats: a wildly ambitious, emotional sucker-punch of a show set to some serious tunes. And I’d go one further: audiences love Les Misérables because they actually love opera – they just don’t know it yet.
Hear me out.
It all starts from the source material. Victor Hugo’s novel may be filleted and focused for the purposes of a two-hour show, but central arcs – a man’s journey to redemption; two nemeses locked in a decades-long battle of wills; love against the odds; revolution – retain all their tragic, epic weight. The plot has been thinned out, but the stakes and emotions have not.
Glance around the West End – frolics and family secrets on a Greek island; four scrappy young men from New Jersey making good (then less good); Mormons being, well, Mormons; anthropomorphic cats (or trains on roller skates) doing it’s hard to say what. Does anyone actually know? – and the difference is clear. Irony will take you so far but no further. That extra emotional gear demands absolute sincerity, a quality that’s out of fashion with producers but has never lost its hold on audiences – just ask Puccini.
For proof of its impact you only have to look at the real-world protests that have adopted the show’s chorus “Do You Hear the People Sing?” as their anthem. Protests in Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea and most recently Hong Kong have all borrowed the song and its revolutionary zeal for their own cause – just as Italy’s independence movement, the Risorgimento, adopted the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco as their hymn 200 years ago.
But while Les Mis’s dramatic axis of exploitative overlords versus idealistic revolutionaries is clear (and who doesn’t love the out-and-out villainy of the Thénardiers, whose “hospitality” bleeds all their customers dry), it’s the moral ambiguity of the show that tightens the screw on the struggle, lends it that killer twist. Prison-guard-turned-police-inspector Javert may be the baddie, but his righteous conviction is never in doubt. His radiant solo “Stars” elevates his pursuit of Jean Valjean into something strangely noble, and his suicide complicates rather than resolves a conflict of equals, with no possible victor.
And then there’s the score itself. Most musical theatre is exactly that – theatre that breaks into song at key moments. But, like opera, Les Mis is sung from start to finish: a musical whole that weaves an intricate web of recurring melodies and themes (Wagner, much?) to create a drama that speaks powerfully before you even add the words. It’s immaculately constructed; just think of that exhilarating buzz when no fewer than five separate musical themes and storylines come together in Act I finale “One Day More” – architecture and emotional unified in a single gesture.
And while amplification requires different vocal skills from opera, those on show here are no less demanding. Solo roles are hugely virtuosic and demanding – from Cosette’s floated top notes to Jean Valjean’s enormous range, Enjolras’s stirring power-anthems and Fantine’s lyrical outpourings – but it’s the chorus that’s the heart of the show, plunging us from prison to Paris’s seedy back-streets, cafes to brothels and, eventually, to the barricade.
Few musicals can survive the stadium treatment, but Les Mis has made a secondary business of concert-spectaculars. Strip away most of the stage effects and props and you’ve still got a formidable product – in some ways more so, because while the West End currently fields a band of just 14, these performances treat the score to the full classical orchestra it deserves: a harp gilding the impossible-fantasy of “I Dreamed a Dream”; brass adding sardonic, sleazy commentary to “Lovely Ladies”, the haunting oboe-concerto-in-miniature after the deaths on the barricade.
Les Misérables offers the best of both worlds: opera’s scope and musical theatre’s punch. It’s a potent alliance; two hours of soul-stirring singing later and this classical critic is ready to pick up her flag and man the barricade. Who’s with me?
