By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Hearts will be broken. Blood will be shed. That’s inevitable when the show is about love and revolution. Bright red is the color of the revolutionary flag, and the revolutionary’s blood. It is also the color for love.
Yet even with the title is “Les Misérables” a happy, or happy-ish, ending will be wrest from a sprawling plot. Against all odds, the viewer will leave with a glow.
That’s the power of music.
The Perrysburg Musical Theatre is staging “Les Misérables: School Edition” Thursday, Aug. 10, Friday, Aug. 11, and Saturday, Aug. 12 7 p.m. with a Sunday matinee Aug. 13 at 2 p.m. in the Juliet Beck Auditorium inside the Commodore Building, 140 E. Indiana Ave., Perrysburg. Julie Bermudez directs with musical direction by Nicole Spadafore, choreography by Brittany Kupresanin, and fight coaching by Marshall Kupresanin. Technical director and set designer Dave Bermudez gets credit for wrestling this panoramic epic onto the modest school auditorium stage.
Tickets are $17 presale and $20 at the door. Click to purchase tickets. The musical by Alain Boublil, composer Claude-Micheal Schonberg, and lyricist Herbert Kretzmer is based on the 900+ page novel by Victor Hugo.
This is an ambitious undertaking. The sung-through show is operatic in its scope and in some cases its vocal demands. Yet the young cast rallies to present an excellent rendering of what’s become a musical classic. They absorbed themselves into the milieu and give voice to their characters’ inner lives as their dreams collide with harsh reality.
That’s especially true of Lucas Patterson as Valjean. Strong throughout, his rendition of “Bring Him Home” is stunning, a heart-felt reading, that ends on an improbably high sustained pitch. It’s one thing to belt out that note, but to caress that note as he does with a longing ache is a marvel.
Valjean is at the center of the tale that bulges at the seams even with a close to three-hour run time.
We meet Jean Valjean as an inmate working at a quarry. He’s been sentenced there for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread, not for himself but for his sister’s son.
Now he’s told by the superintendent Javert (Abe Nixon) he will be paroled. He can leave but is not free. He must carry a sheet of paper so everyone he encounters knows he is a convict, and that they can exploit or abuse him. Through the generosity of a cleric (Liam Close), he is emboldened to tear up his papers and shed his identity. Yet Javert pledges to bring him back.
A man like that cannot change, Javert believes. Yet the society is rigged so reform is near impossible.
This pursuit takes them through the world of early 19th century France, through the villages, the factories, and gutters.
As we follow them, we meet a panoply of characters, many of them victims of judgments of a rigid society.
Fantine (Ellasyn Brookens) is an unwed mother laboring in a linen factory to support her daughter who lives with a family of innkeepers. These “caretakers” constantly demand more money.
She loses her job because she rebuffs the sexual advances of the foreman (Lucas Schimmel). Her dreams are gone. She resorts to prostitution before Valjean befriends her in her last days. As she dies, Fantine dreams of her daughter Cosette (Adelaide Jurack), and Valjean promises to find and help the girl.
Little Cosette herself is dreaming of her mother as an escape from the cruel Thenadiers, who use her as a servant, and use the money Fantine sends to spoil their daughter Eponine (Nora Nelson).
Thenadier (Clayton Snyder) and his wife Madame Thenadier (Ella Orr) are truly vile characters. Immoral, avaricious thieves, who steal from their guests. Snyder and Orr give energetic, highly entertaining performances as these venal fools in “The Innkeepers Song.”
As the story’s path winds to Paris, we meet the revolutionaries who would overthrow this system.
They are led by Enjolras (Isaac Bermudez) and Marius (Alan Jimenez) and represent a rowdy mix of the intelligentsia, the working class, and street people, including the savvy urchin Gavroche (Grayson Williams) who is aware of everything that’s going on.
Their hopes and ideals are put to music in the rousing anthem “Do You Hear the People Sing?”
Marius is distracted having fallen for a now grown Cosette (Lila Brighton). Eponine, who like the rest of her family, has a tumbled down the social scale and is now living on the street. She is in love with Marius. He sees her as a friend, and she serves faithfully as his go between with Cosette, and warns Valjean and Cosette when her father and other ruffians are on their way to rob them.
This tangle of politics and love resolves itself when the revolutionaries take to the barricades. And is so often the case, this does not end well for the revolutionaries.
But Valjean’s paternal feelings toward Marius expressed in “Bring Him Home” leads him to save the wounded Marius.
And his sense of humanity leads him to spare the life of Javert, who is caught thanks for the vigilant Gavroche committing espionage against the revolutionaries.
Javert feels that Valjean may have saved his life but killed him spiritually by demonstrating that his own rigid morality was wrong, and that maybe he, not the convict, is the evil one. This uprooting of his beliefs is more than he can live with.
The Thenadiers, though, continuing thriving in their blissfully amoral manner, even though their daughter is dead – the musical’s sad commentary on the persistence of human predators.
“Les Misérables” speaks more strongly, though, about the persistence of love, and the undying desire for freedom and equality.
