If you’ve loved Les Mis here or on Broadway, on stage or on screen, through Tonys and Oscars, you will love this majestic production as well.
“It is, it is, a wiz of a mis, if ever Les Mis there was.”
Sorry, wrong score.
The musical juggernaut with the grand historical sweep and the cute little nickname, Les Miserables has returned to the Des Moines Civic Center and will be there through Sunday — its eighth such engagement in less than three decades.
People love it, and if you’ve previously loved it here or on Broadway, on stage or on screen, through Tonys and Oscars, you will love this majestic production as well.
It is one of those “more is more” experiences, overflowing with larger-than-life emotion. Handsome staging on the current tour has all the bells and whistles, lights and shadows, along with a superb cast.
It has the brutality of a slave ship beating against the waves. It has a fancy wedding. It has revolutionary youth storming barricades that look like an elaborate piece of contemporary sculpture. Inventive use of film then moves the play through a valiant rescue and its revelatory climax. The production pushes toward three hours, with the opening-night audience giving the cast multiple ovations, and the cast applauding the audience in response.
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There are a lot of moving parts to the plot, and any newcomers are advised to read the playbill’s synopsis before the opening act (and then again at intermission and perhaps after the end as well). At its thematically purest, it concerns the transformation of prisoner Jean Valjean from hardened parolee into borderline saint. The part requires and receives a bravura performance from Nick Cartell, a feral outcast at the beginning, a redemptive force as a much older man by its end. His “Bring Him Home” showstopper wrenches every last ounce of pathos from the ballad and the audience.
The stirring orchestral score and the deft lighting — glimmers of spiritual illumination amid the darkness and shadows — keep the production from becoming entangled in its narrative complexities. After Valjean has been transformed by a compassionate and forgiving bishop (Andrew Maughan), he spends the rest of the play transforming the lives of others, proving that a man can truly change.
Among those he transforms is Fantine, sung with subtlety and grace by Mary Kate Moore, a seemingly virginal worker harboring the secret of an illegitimate daughter. She is revealed as a fallen woman, hounded and persecuted, and Valjean, who is keeping a secret of his own, recognizes a kindred spirit and another soul worthy of redemption. He pledges to care for her daughter, Cosette (with Sarah Cetrullo appearing as unannounced understudy opening night), who will mature to play Juliet to a young idealist’s Romeo (Robert Ariza plays her smitten pursuer, the student Marius).
Josh Davis booms with baritone authority as Valjean’s relentless nemesis, Inspector Javert, the embodiment of law-and-order rigidity. And J Anthony Crane all but steals the show as the conniving Thénardier, who reduces sin and degradation to slapstick, providing comic relief from the protagonist’s nobility.
As the various plot strands intertwine toward their dramatic epiphany, the musical questions God’s very existence amid the persistence of human misery. Can true love survive the onslaught of history? Will mercy triumph over retribution? Can even death stop these characters from singing?
If you have to ask, you’re at the wrong play. And if you miss it this time, you can almost guarantee that it will be back in a few years. By popular demand.
