The mighty Mis is still revolutionary
AT 35 years old, Les Miserables struck me as an odd choice to signal a new future for a refurbished West End theatre reopening under a new name.
Formerly called the Queen’s Theatre, this grand old dame of a playhouse on a corner of Shaftesbury Avenue is now named after the great American musical composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. So shouldn’t the theatre’s new show be something er… new? Perhaps something by, er… Sondheim?
Incidentally, Mr Sondheim was unable to make it over for the official relaunch this week, ahead of his 90th birthday in March. He had a fall at home in Connecticut, but is recovering well.
All that’s as maybe, but this ‘new staging’ of one of the world’s longest-running musicals remains fit to burst the seams of the mightiest of stages. Laurence Connor and James Powell’s rendition of Boublil and Schonberg’s musical reinvention of Victor Hugo’s novel is an absolute blinder.
Even as the tumescent score moves towards middle age, it provokes the febrile atmosphere of a Britain’s Got Talent final. Matt Kinley’s set packs in more scenery than the French Alps. There’s not just huge barricades, tumbledown tenements and gated chateaus, no: it’s augmented by projections inspired by Victor Hugo’s own Turner-esque paintings.
MEANWHILE,
the long (and, let’s be honest, tiresome) barricade battles in the second half get extra whizz and bang with 3D sound effects.
Best of all, in Jon Robyns they have a splendid, square-jawed hero — Jean Valjean. He makes his Christological journey from recalcitrant prisoner to hero of the (failed) Paris revolution of 1832, before establishing himself as a living saint, then ascending into heaven. Pavarotti would have been proud of his volume (vocal, not physical), but Robyns has range, too. Sometimes he shakes the masonry, other times he offers a tender whisper.
Bradley Jaden is a steadfast obsessive as Valjean’s nemesis Javert, and Carrie Hope Fletcher despatches I Dreamed A Dream with airy grace as tragic single mum Fantine. There are great caustic turns from Josefina Gabrielle and Ian Hughes as the blackmailing innkeepers, too.
But as the mountingly rapturous score continues to break over the stalls, I’m convinced we could still do with a reprise of I Dreamed A Dream at the end — perhaps even with Susan Boyle. Why not? It would only blow the bloody roof off.
UNFORTUNATELY for the comparatively petite musical Rags, it lives in the shadow of Joseph Stein’s far more famous work: Fiddler on The Roof.
After debuting on Broadway in 1986, the show about Eastern European Jews struggling in new york in the 1900s struck everyone as a sequel to Fiddler — so it never quite broke free of its over-performing parent.
Even so, it’s a fine show, and it’s been given a feisty — and wholesome — revival by Bronagh Lagan at north London’s Park Theatre (first seen last year at Manchester’s Hope Mill).
Musically, it’s very much in Fiddler’s ‘klezmer’ tradition of squealing violin, woody clarinet, wheezing squeezebox and plinking piano. There are lots of jaunty tunes, but no really big number in the mould of If I Were A Rich Man. Instead, the title tune has a little angry edge, while Children of The Wind adds a touch of sadness.
What David Thompson’s updated story has in spades is characters: mostly lovable Jewish stereotypes, toiling in the sweatshop rag trade.
Carolyn Maitland carries the show as the talented seamstress with her gorgeous apricot voice (soft, sweet and a bit fuzzy).
She fights to establish herself and her son in the Lower East Side, only to be caught between her devious capitalist boss (Sam Attwater) and Alex GibsonGiorgio’s charming, operasinging Italian, who organises resistance among the workers. you may guess how that ends. The clue is… it’s a musical!