To musical theater producers at least, nothing screams holiday
cheer like the French Revolution.
That’s right, everyone’s favorite three-hour
sung-through musical about poor people and empty Parisian cafes,
“Les Misérables,” based on the Victor Hugo novel,
opened last week in the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood for a
month-long run through Jan. 1. The play, which originally opened in
New York in 1987 and ran through May 2003, became a symbol of the
mega-musical movement that swept Broadway through much of the
’80s and ’90s. “Les Misérables” now
survives in national tours like the one that just arrived in Los
Angeles.
To critique the musical itself would be rather silly,
considering the play’s fame and lasting popularity, evidenced
by the impressive ticket sales for the limited engagement. The
production, rotating stage, barricade, big red flag and all, is as
prominent as it has ever been, and the cast succeeds in getting
through the now cliched moments without making them seem too much
like cliches. The bigger question is why we’re still watching
this play at all, considering the mega-musical movement has
died.
The answer isn’t entirely clear. It seems like works of
art created before Sept. 11, 2001, are now judged by how they hold
up in a post-9/11 frame of reference, and through this lens,
looking at “Les Misérables” again after a
multi-year absence just makes the story all the more confusing.
One of the major plot holes in the first act is the way in which
Javert (Robert Hunt) claims to be constantly searching for Jean
Valjean (Randal Keith), but their meetings only seem to occur when
Valjean decides to make himself known. Is their relationship a
before-the-fact metaphor for the way in which the United States
searches for Osama bin Laden?
Probably not. That metaphor breaks down in the second act, and
the play ends in exactly the same way you remember it ending the
first time you saw it. But if, as the media would have you believe,
so much has changed in our lives in the new, postlapsarian America,
“Les Misérables” quickly and efficiently brings us
back to that old frame of memory that says that musicals can be
sad.
The fall of the mega-musical and the recent rise of the musical
comedy has been linked to 9/11, as audiences filled with tragedy in
real life want something diverting in the theater. But judging by
the audience’s reception to “Les Misérables”
on opening night, there’s a soft spot somewhere for those
tragedies we used to love. People can find solace in simply
remembering something pre-9/11, regardless of what that something
is.
In this case, it’s a musical in which every major
character but four are dead by the final curtain. Sometimes we have
to remember tragedy to forget it.
““ Jake Tracer