"TO LOVE ANOTHER PERSON IS TO SEE THE FACE OF GOD...."

Last night I went to see my first regional theater production of Les Miserables at the beautiful Miracle Theater in Coral Gables (itself a converted cinema).  I was excited to see how the company would stage the musical.  In regional theater, for obvious cost reasons, you cannot make the whole stage a turntable, like in the Broadway version.  I wanted to see how the director would reimagine the staging without all the actors looking like homeless people that stepped out of a revolving door to sing.

Les Miserables was the musical that ignited my love of musical theater.  When it opened in 1980, I was 10 years old.  I remember reading about it and hearing about the London and Broadway versions.  Broadway and London were so exotic and so far away from where I lived in tiny Amesbury, Massachusetts.  At that time, the American musical was dead on Broadway and so began the rush of the British musical onto the American theater stage.  The invasion started with Cats, and continued with Les Miz, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon.....I rememeber that because of Les Miz and Phantom, I had to see these shows on Broadway.  That also began my love affair with New York City and my very fond memories of visiting Manhattan and seeing a Broadway show with my beloved Nana Pike.  In my lifetime, Les Miz is the musical I have seen at least 20 times, followed closely by Phantom at 15 times.  I have a real emotion connection to Les Miz.

Now imagine my utter disappointment when director's "reimagining" was staging the exact same version as the Broadway show, only WITHOUT the turntable.  And that's where the whole  production started to fall apart for me.  The "small furniture and pools of light" scenes work when Les Miz is staged with the turntable.  But the small furniture/pools of light version begin to show the flaws of the musical when it's performed on bare stage.  First of all, the actors were great singers and performed a very difficult musical flawlessly.  But the directing was so flat and unimaginative, that it was distracting.  The director just copied the Broadway show, down to the silly slow motion running to open scenes, Javert's suicide off a bridge, the cart, and even a scaled down version of the barracade.  (The barracade is crucial to the show, so I understand that there's not much dramatic license you can take with that, but the rest of show screams for a more interesting version).  Copying isn't directing.  And the poor set design didn't help either.  Any piece of musical theater can be restaged in a different form and still work for the audience.  Director John Doyle is completely reimaging musicals such as Sweeney Todd and Company with brilliant results and whole new take on an old Broadway musical.  Let's hope that other directors and other companies take some risks with a standard and remake, not redo Les Miserables.

I would love to see what the UMass Musical Theater Guild would do with the show.