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Review: ‘Les Miserables’ @ the Fox Theatre
THEATER REVIEW "Les Miserables." Theater of the Stars, Fox Theatre. Through Sept. 28. 404-817-8700, ticketmaster.com. Grade: B+
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Les Miserables,” the hit 1980s pop-rock opera — that glorious, melodious, moralizing behemoth — is back at the Fox Theatre, this time in a new production created by Atlanta’s Theater of the Stars.
And this time former UGA thespian-athlete, Rob Evan, has the lead role. Coach Vince Dooley, who was planning to attend Sunday, and University of Georgia football fans everywhere must be overjoyed.
Gone are the original production’s big (and big budget) barricades and revolving stage machinery that whirled us through the flee-and-chase saga of sinner-turned-saint Jean Valjean and his fanatical pursuer, Inspector Javert.
The new incarnation is less visually awe-inducing while remaining much the same for the huge cast, with the innovations up on screen: projections of prison and shabby old streets and sewers heave us back to the decrepit poverty of Victor Hugo’s France in the early 1800s, a society of filthy injustice, a cesspool for insurrection. The show’s producers clearly have an eye on economy and ease of touring — it premiered in August in West Point, N.Y. and has already been to Wolf Trap in Virginia and Kansas City.
If it does brisk box office, expect it to become the regional-theater standard — since the evergreen vitality of Claude-Michel Schonberg’s music suggests the show’s appeal goes much deeper than that old whiz-bang stage architecture, or even Alain Boubil’s sentimental and plot-thin lyrics.
It’s Schonberg’s songs, sketched within Hugo’s sturdy frame, that gives “Les Miz” its power. Like opera, everything is sung throughout. The tunes are sticky on the ear, made potent by clever harmonies and drawing a visceral charge from brawny ’70s classic rock and drawing depth from that other “classic” art form, including Renaissance madrigals and Bizet and Puccini opera and — a clear forerunner — Kurt Weill’s 1930s pop cabaret “Threepenny Opera.”
Like Weill’s output, the “Les Miz” songs are best served by idiosyncratic singing. Actors who look the part, sing in key and ooze personality can make it work handsomely. That’s mostly the case in the Fox’s current run, stylishly directed by Fred Hanson.
As Valjean, Rob Evan has the required strongman’s physique plus a confident, anodyne tenor voice. You wish his pleasing singing for “Who Am I?” wasn’t larded by “American Idol” mannerisms, such as pumping up the last note of a phrase. (You won’t hear that sort of schmaltz on the 1980s London original cast album; recent commercial culture seems to be steering pop vocals steadily down-market.)
His partner in life, if not romance, is Javert, a sadistic policeman who illogically chases the hero through time and space. Rob Hunt delivers his act one soliloquy, “Stars,” effectively, although it’s one of the few glaring inconsistencies in the score. Here’s the self-righteous, self-denying fascist whose song is accompanied by synthesizer twinkles and a melody so weirdly child-like that, almost camp, it evokes Tinker Bell more than shimmering lights in the night sky.
What to make of it? One wonders how a “Les Miserables” would play where Javert chases Valjean (both unattached single men) for overtly homoerotic reasons, just as some Shakespeare productions find Iago’s illogical vengeance against Othello explicable only if it’s fueled by unrequited love. It’s an angle that, once explored, is difficult to later reject.
But I digress. Others in this “Miz” cast were just as fine. With energy to spare and a pure, light voice, Nikki Renee Daniels (a former Atlantan) sings Fantine’s “I Dreamed a Dream” — the simple girl reduced to prostitution — yet wasn’t quite a singer of hair-raising star potential.
Two songs linger in the memory longer than the others. “Castle on a Cloud” conveys the bittersweet torment of a child (Carly Rosse Sonenclar, angelic as Young Cosette).
The very next number is a raunchy innkeeper’s song, “Master of the House.” Laurent Giroux and Cindy Benson, as the annoying but compelling M. and Mme. Thenardier, know they’ve got the show’s best material. Like “Les Miserables” as a whole, they play it to the edge of, and maybe a little beyond, all it’s worth — and it’s that songful exuberance that makes the show a reliable wonderful evening.
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Comments
By Edward A. Cutler
September 21, 2008 9:18 PM | Link to this
This was the nineteenth time I saw Les Misereables and the second time I have seen it other than on Broadway.
Les Miserables has always been one of my favorite shows because it portrays lives not unlike my patients in the poorest area of Columbus, Ohio known as “The Bottoms.” Though I am a pediatrician, I have 200 patients in prison, fifteen of whom are serving life sentences for murder, and at least eight of my patients have been murdered. Sometimes I feel that life in The Bottoms is like living the musical.
Rob Evans did as good a performance of Valjean as any I have heard. In no way was he reminiscent of American Idol. He simply applied his own style to the musical and did a superb job.
A current Broadway show tainted by the style of American Idol is Grease, an amateur-like performance that many high school musicals would put to shame. We would have left Grease at intermission is we had not paid so much for the tickets and had unfulfilled hopes of a better second act.
The production of Les Miserables at the Fox was as polished and perfect as any that I saw during its sixteen year run on Broadway and was far better than the weak revival that briefly appeared on Broadway last year.
The weakest part of the Broadway revival was Daphne Rubin-Vegas weak portrayal of Fantine, whose performance raised the hopes of many an audience member that she would die soon. The Broadway revival would have beedn better if Nikki Renee Daniels had been in it.
Though some might think Les Miserables is an outdated relic of the past, the audience on Saturday night certainly thought otherwise. I doubt any negative critique of the show could undermine their enthusiasm.
The images projected on the walls were well done and gave this touring version an air of authenticity. I thought I would miss the big turntables, but I didn’t, and I don’t think many of the audience who had seen the show before missed it either.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Woman in White used a similar technique but didn’t last long enough on Broadway or in London to test that technique.
I think the film projections are here to stay at least in the touring versions of Les Miserables.
By Karen Ferrell-White
September 30, 2008 6:07 PM | Link to this
At my best guess, this was the 14th time I have seen Les Miserables, and as far as I’m concerned, the producers have sacrificed the show’s greatness to the exigencies of cost. The absence of the turntable made several scenes almost ridiculous in the extent to which they ask for the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Having created a linear (rather than circular) presentation reduces the energy and immediacy of the show; it also nearly destroys the high emotional peak that the old revolving barricade created. Javert’s blocking—crossing right to the “sewer entrance” and then inexplicably running to the stage left entrance to “pursue” ValJean—makes no sense whatsoever. Enjolras’s previously heroic sacrifice is now robbed of almost all its meaning. This show has been, since its inception, my favorite show of all—but it has fallen significantly in my evaluation. The fact that many of the actors—including that of Rob Evan—gave good to great performances is undercut by the fact that the staging has made the show almost prosaic, and that is just a pity.