Movies of War

1 of 1 2 of 1 Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter.When you think about it, it’s kind of baffling that Les Misérables is the world’s most popular musical. Not because it’s boring, or lacks catchy songs, or has a bad message, or anything of the sort. It’s just a weird premise for a musical: what if we made a beloved tragic novel with a bunch of things going on into an amped-up Christian melodrama? Broadway Across Canada’s Les Misérables follows Jean Valjean (an impeccable Nick Cartell), a former prisoner who is really into atonement. He makes a few mistakes: stealing bread for his nephew (which lands him 20 years in prison), stealing silver from a priest (which he gets gifted, and lands him a successful mayor-slash-factory owner gig), and not noticing the mistreatment of his employee Fantine (which lands him an adoptive daughter, Cosette [Alexa Lopez]). Every so often, people notice the marking on his chest that brands him as a former prisoner, so he sets off for a new life elsewhere. Over the course of the 20 years the musical covers, Valjean becomes successively greyer and more morally upstanding as he continues to tussle with Javert (Les Mis veteran Hayden Tee), a hard-nosed cop with a belief in moral immutability. For a while, the plot moves to a gang of schoolboys led by Enjolras (a straight-laced Christian Mark Gibbs) planning a revolution, but that also ends up being about Valjean after Marius (played on opening night by understudy Thomas Beeker) falls in love with his daughter. The musical is certainly a spectacle—if you’ve only ever seen the 2012 movie, it is truly more grand and sweeping than whatever gritty realism Tom Hopper was trying to do. The musical features both intimate, emotional solos (like Fantine’s iconic “I Dreamed A Dream”, or Javert’s thundering “Stars”) and huge crowd numbers that threatened the limits of how many people the Queen Elizabeth Theatre’s stage can hold. Indeed, the bulky set pieces combined with the sprawling cast made some numbers feel almost claustrophobic. The talented cast were clearly used to larger venues, resulting in some action taking place perilously close to the edge of the platform—an extra frisson of tension! Valjean has to do a lot of heavy lifting in any production of Les Mis—both literally (a wagon, a full-grown man) and figuratively (having a huge amount of screentime)—so it makes sense that Cartell is an old hand at the role, having performed as prisoner number 24601 over 1,600 times. He does a great job at carrying along the narrative, though at times he plays the character so earnestly that it’s hard to tell that he has any inner turmoil at all. The cast overall is incredibly strong. Comic relief bad guys Monsieur (Matt Crowle) and Madame Thénardier (Victoria Huston-Elem) do a great job of adding some much-needed levity to the proceedings with a bit of a twist on the regular deliveries of their numbers. Grantaire (Kyle Adams) and street-smart urchin Gavroche (Cree-Silver Corley) have a touching friendship, while unfortunate love-triangle loser Éponine (Jaedynn Latter) has a wide-eyed and cheeky demeanour. The entire ensemble deserves praise, delivering the emotive bluster of numbers like “One Day More” with power and bombast. Perhaps due to the demands of keeping so many singers in check, occasionally the sound mixing struggled in quieter numbers, with some more softly spoken lines getting drowned out by the immense orchestra. Similarly, the lighting didn’t tend to spotlight chorus members during their featured lines, making it sometimes difficult to tell who was having their moment. However, even with these minor technical quibbles, Les Mis retains much of its power. That might have to do with the enduring legacy of its source material. The original novel was written by Victor Hugo in 1862, after the successful 1848 Paris Insurrection, about events from 1815 to 1832. While the plot of the novel is largely a tragedy, we know from history that the doomed students eventually won the demands they fight for.The musical adaptation itself was written in French in 1980 and first staged in English in London’s West End in 1985, with the spectre of high inflation, ballooning oil prices, and the early 1980s recession behind it. As we stare down the barrel of another recession—with global unrest, looming climate catastrophe, growing authoritarianism, and all the other horrors of our present age—perhaps Les Mis strikes a chord precisely because of its audacious hope. It’s a tale of belief and failure and love and obligation, of staying defiant in the face of struggle, of the power of people even in the face of overwhelming odds. Even if the story itself is still a bit baffling. Broadway Across Canada’s Les Misérables is at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre until March 29. Join the discussion Facebook comments not loading? Please check your browser settings to ensure that it is not blocking Facebook from running on straight.com