Les Miserables at Northern Stage: A Review

If musicals were planets, Les Miserables would be Jupiter.

It’s the largest, stormiest giant in the theatrical solar system.

Les Mis, as it’s familiarly known, is a bellowing melodrama that’s become the world’s longest-running musical.

Debuting in 1981, it’s played to more than 50 million people worldwide.

For those who haven’t seen it, Les Mis is really an opera.

Almost every word of it is sung.

It’s a rambling, extended tale of social unrest and personal redemption set in early 19th century France.

Northern Stage has to sacrifice quite a bit of the play’s sheer size to make it fit the intimacy of its 250-seat theatre.

But otherwise the production is competent, even heartfelt.

Brooke Ciardelli directs with gratifying efficiency.
And that’s a good thing, since Les Mis is almost three hours long.

Ken Goldstein’s excellent set design makes the small theater seem almost cavernous at times.

And Cory Pattak’s infinitely variable lighting and Rachel Kurland’s Dickensian costumes are a big help, too.

The crack band led by Music Director Brett Schrier does yeoman work reducing Les Mis’s ponderous score to manageable size.

As usual, Director Ciardelli has assembled an impressive cast.

Timothy Shew leads the way as Jean Valjean, Les Mis’s Everyman protagonist.

He’s adept at sustaining Valjean’s tortured intensity.

His singing is strong and honest, if a bit shaky now and then in the upper reaches of his falsetto.

David Dewitt is Valjean’s nemesis, Inspector Javert.

He plays it as though he and not Valjean were the hero of the piece.

That’s a superb choice that adds considerable moral complexity to the story.

But Dan Sharkey and the wonderful Mary Gutzi as the unreconstructed villains Monsieur and Madame Thenardier nearly steal the show.

Their gleeful, grasping energy kicks the show into a higher gear whenever they’re onstage.

In spite of all this fine work, however, Les Miserables is oddly unsatisfying.

Perhaps it’s because Northern Stage’s necessary scaling-back of what is essentially an arena-rock opera exposes the play’s dramatic limitations too much.

Unlike the great book musicals, relationships and events do not develop in Les Miserables – they only peak.

Everything is a climax, an endless series of emotional eruptions sustained over the play’s seventeen-year timeline with exhausting sameness.

Its music is built on riffs and crescendos, not melodies, and so takes on a similar generic quality.

Because it’s fixated on emotive effect rather than cause, Les Miserables is remarkably shallow for so passionate a play.

You can sit enthralled for three hours by its grandeur and pathos, yet leave the theater knowing next to nothing about the people whose stories it tells.

C’est la vie.

Les Miserables will play at Northern Stage through January 4.

If you’ve somehow managed to get through the last 27 years without encountering this ultimate uber-musical, here’s a chance to see a remarkable professional production by a company that knows exactly what it’s doing.

Just remember – although the planet Jupiter astounds us with its massive celestial display, a closer look reveals that it’s composed almost entirely of insubstantial gas.

For NHPR News, I’m Kevin Gardner.