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Saturday, May 7, 2011
Les Misérables
Les Misérables is one of those shows that pretty much everyone knows at least some of the music from. It’s standard Broadway fare. It’s also one of those epic musicals. And it’s one of the ones that, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get into. That’s hard when your best friend has a particular fondness for it. (Not that it’s her favorite musical and I hate it or something, but I want to be excited about things which excite her, you know?) It was part of the Broadway series at Playhouse Square this year, so we decided to get Smart Seats ($10/seat) and finally see it live. I’d heard that it had more impact live than on the album anyway.
From the get-go, this show is EPIC. The music is loud and sweeping, and I’ll be honest, from our seats in the rafters, it was hard to understand what people were saying. I’m sure they have decent diction, but the Palace is a large theater, and with such a sweeping score, wordy lyrics don’t travel as well. Not to mention, the ushers were letting people in through the full first scene. It meant that I missed a lot of went on. It’s kind of a big deal when you have no idea why the eff Jean Valjean is being persecuted or what he even did because people were standing in front of you and making noise as they clamored into their seats, five full minutes after the show started. Dudes. Not cool.
I know a lot of the music from this show. More than I realized, actually. That made some of the scenes easier, as I was able to process all of the lyrics that had flown in one ear (and ostensibly right out the other, in some of the scenes). It was nice to have context for the music that I did know. The show did give me that, since of course only the show-stoppers are played. Nobody needs the set-up when the rest of the world presumably knows where the song came from and why it is being sung.
We had some problems with talkers, and then there was a long period in which I was mesmerized by the enormous shadow of the conductor that was on the wall. It was at that point that I realized that the show was simply not holding my interest. I think part of the problem was that it started out with such high drama that it was hard to keep my interest. The high drama became the norm, and then it had to top itself to make things that much better. And it didn’t. So perhaps Les Mis is just not the show for me. The songs that everyone knows are, of course, sweet and nice and sweeping.
I got through the show with a minimum of heavy sighing and foot-tapping, which makes it better than some of the movies I saw at the film festival this year, so there’s that. Les Mis is a little too overall epic for my taste. I like variety in my shows – give me slower, lower moments to temper the more dramatic moments. Not a fan.
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