‘Les Misérables’ becomes ‘The Arena Concert Spectacular’

Come September, “Les Misérables,” surely the greatest musical of the latter half of the 20th century, will have been gone from Broadway for a decade. But to quote Victor Hugo, “aimer, c’est agir,” or “to love is to act.”

That probably explains better than anything why the singular impresario Cameron Mackintosh couldn’t just let Victor Hugo’s immortal Prisoner 24601 gather dust as we all go turning, turning through the years, aging, aging all the way. Better to bring Jean Valjean home — and Monsieur le Maire has acquired a bunch of pieds-à-terre around the globe.

Including now the Radio City Music Hall in New York. Valjean has popped up again along with his pals Javert (he of the rigid policing), Fantine (she of the maternal sacrifice), Éponine (she of the tragic ballad) and, of course, the hearty student idealists with their handsome looks, their Zohran Mamdani-like idealism and their awakening understanding not just of the painful personal costs of revolution, but of the complexities.

As its millions of US fans well know, “Les Misérables” has its prologue and then the famous Claude-Michel Schönberg chords start to cascade one after the other, enough to thrill me once again despite having seen the various incarnations of this show at least 20 times.

I hardly am alone. A great roar rose up Friday night as several huge video screens announced the “Les Misérables: The Arena Concert Spectacular,” as if we did not know what we were attending. The point, of course, is to thrill the show’s fans by implying that everything had been kicked up a notch: the company of over 100 performers, the full orchestrations, the lasers shooting through the house, far beyond the barricades. And, of course, the audience. Seeing “Les Misérables” in the company of 6,000 comrades is a fundamentally different experience from that of a Broadway theatre.

This touring production, which evolved from the various British concert performances of the title slated for its 10th and 25th anniversaries, was built for bigger numbers and has hitherto been seen all over the world before the U.S. (Mackintosh has told me that he’d like to bring the piece to the Auditorium Theatre, his Chicago venue of choice.) You should know that you are not getting a full theatrical staging. I am deeply fond of the last US tour, which I thought to be the most exquisitely sung version of all of them, and there’s no question that some intimacy is lost. Inevitably. That said, there are pluses too: a bigger orchestra, the ability to double and triple cast, ensuring that audiences are getting peak vocal performances in these demanding roles and an increase in scale that inarguably fits a show based on a 2,738-page novel — one of the greatest ever written, that does not just tell a story but dwells at length on moral points of view. It asserts the vital imperative of being open to personal and political change even as it details the painful price it demands.

But that novel made such a great musical because it also comforts us with the thought that the world only spins forward and that there is reward (and a good rest) awaiting us in heaven, however we define it. Of course, Hugo enjoyed a big assist from Alain Boublil and Herbert Herbert Kretzmer, never mind the romanticism of the music.

“Les Misérables” is old enough now that it has created its own international stars, mostly but not exclusively British, the variances in whose interpretations are well known and appreciated by the show’s fans.

At Radio City, I saw Alfie Boe, a veteran of both the London production and the concert-style stagings alongside Bradley Jaden’s Javert but you might see the Irish tenor Killian Donnelly, who has his own fan base, working with Jeremy Secomb’s Javert. Jean Valjeans have become younger over the years, a consequence of the music becoming so popular and casting directors often are seduced by their vocal chops. But Boe is not just a bravura tenor, he comes with the moral maturity the role demands. Jaden is a punctilious foil. Samantha Barks, an actress who once played the title role in“Pretty Woman” in its Chicago tryout and has risen from there, is a lovely Fantine, coming replete with worry and the note of deep sadness this iconic role needs.

Tribune News Service