Review of Les Miserables

Review of Les Miserables

October 7, 2017

Bushnell Theatre, 166 Capitol Avenue, Hartford, CT 06106

Produced by Cameron Mackintosh

Directed & Adapted by Laurence Conor & James Powell

Nick Cartell as Jean Valjean

Josh Davis as Javert

Melissa Mitchell as Fantine

Matt Shingledecker as Enjolras

Phoenix Best as Eponine

Joshua Grosso as Marius

Jillian Butler as Cosette

Les Miserables is the musical which adapted by the book, Les Miserables, that is written by Victor Hugo in the 19th century.  Base on the June Rebellion in Paris in 1832, the story talks about an ex-convict from Bastille, Jean Valjean's experience of redemption.  In Valjean's life journal, he adopts a girl, Cosette, from a poor woman who dies in syphilis and brings her up.  When Cosette becomes an adult, she meets Marius, and they fall in love with each other.  However, the rebellion happens right away after they confess to each other.  Marius joins the ABC rebellion team and almost dies there.  Valjean comes and saves him in time.  The rebellion fails, and many people die in the event, but Cosette and Marius still alive.  Cosette and Marius get married after many years, and Valjean dies in peace.  Back to the story, there is another character who is as important as Valjean, Javert, a captain of the army.  Javert devotes himself to arrest Jean Valjean to keep the society in order according to his faith.  However, when he sneaks into the ABC team and is captured by the people in the team, Jean Valjean let him go.  Javert then starts to doubt his faith.  Afterward, he jumps out of the bridge, drowns and dies.  The reason that I would love to go back to the story and point out Javert's experience is that the story can be mainly about the faith, which is the theme of Les Miserables.  Relate to the class about Single Story I had last year, if there is no Javer's monologue, we can easily judge that what a justice that revolution has, and we can criticise the first class's abuse on people.  However, Javert's monologue made me think the problem deeply.  Under a chaotic society, every person is so small and powerless, but when each of them believes in something, such as a faith or love, everyone is great and remarkable.  Although there is someone who seems negative and opposite to justice, they might have their own standard of justice.  Moreover, it is difficult to find out the right and wrong in the chaotic society.  As a conclusion, there is wars and many terrible ugly deeds in the society, but there is also passion, love, and kindness around people. 

The musical was played on the Saturday's sunny afternoon.  The day was warm and a little bit windy.  We went to the Bushnell theatre right on time.  Our sits were on the second floor so we saw the full view of the musical and the music pool in front of the stage.  The stage was different from the stage of Romeo and Juliet that we saw in the park last time.  The stage is regular and common like every other stage.  However, when the musical began, the stage managing started to surprise me.  The stage is like separated to two parts: frontstage and backstage.  There was a thin screen that can be raised up and dropped down, and there were also two apartment-like structures and the doors moved from the right and the left sides of the stage to separate the entire stage to two parts.  The background that in the behind the stage might be a LED screen, which can make the scene more real and change the picture quickly.  Secondly, for the stage managing, the musical had a lot of huge props, such as a building, a fence, a huge ladder, and the chairs pile for the attack scene.  The props came to the stage surprisingly quickly and slid away from the stage without any sound.  In addition, there was no people to move the props.  This is the most perfect stage managing I have not ever seen before.  Firstly, the props built up the environment to let the audiences go deep into the story so that even people cannot understand the lyrics or not interested in the songs in some part, they can understand the plot by looking to the setting on the stage.  Secondly, the efficient props managing make the musical more solid.  If the props change slowly, it can definitely slow down the speed of storytelling.  The efficiency connected the plots tightly, which made me cannot move my eyes from the stage.  

A good musical should have a good sound effect.  Les Miserables in Bushnell Theatre did an excellent job on the sound effect. The actors' voices were full of emotions, and the voice brought a huge influence.  The music played in the pool was clear and bright, the quiet and sad parts of the play used a lot of harp solo (or guitar maybe), and for the strong and furious scene, all instruments played together to push the scene to a climax.  The music worked with actors well.  The light for the stage was basically dark, sometimes warm.  The most impressive light using for me is the song Who Am I sang by Jean Valjean.  When Jean struggled in his identity, two orange warm lights projected from the two sides of the stage instead of projecting directly above the character.  The result of the lights was that it made three Jean. One shadow was back of Jean, and one shadow was in front of Jean, and Jean himself was between the two shadows.   Jean was an ex-convict but also an administrator of the city, so the shadows were like his two identities.   The light using was so smart because it revealed the struggling inside Jean clearly.

In the musical, I love all actors.  Everyone acted our their identity perfectly with strong passions.  I cannot find out which one I like better so I would love to say I really appreciate the little young actors who act the little boy.  He was also an important character because he pushed the plots forward.  The little boy was in the ABC team, he was a smart and brave boy.  The little young actor acted out the intelligence of the little boy while shows the energy and naive characteristic that only belongs to a little boy.             

I love the musical so much.  I watched movie version in China when I was 12 or 13 years old, and this is the second musical I saw.  Therefore, I did not understand what the plots were mainly about because the topic is too heavy, but I remember that it is the movie I watched with my parents and my aunt in the midnight.  I was so sleepy, but I had a strong sympathy for the poor people who suffer in the unfair society.  One day more is the most impressive song for me because it shows the strong connection between all characters in the movie, and make me feel a strong passion of expecting tomorrow.  Therefore, I remembered the song since that day, and I saw the musical four or five years later when I was a high school student.  The same content was played in different ways, and I saw in different place with different people at a more mature age.  Les Miserables will be a remarkable and unforgettable musical for me.