We recently visited London for the first time and caught a performance of Les Mis at the Sondheim theater. We were very lucky to have landed some excellent seats where we were able to see not just the actors’ performances up close, but also the entirety of the orchestra, much of the stageworks, etc.
It was my first musical theater experience (well, outside of school plays) and I was absolutely blown away by the quality of it all — the vocal performances, the acting, the lighting, the fog and smoke and pyrotechnics, the set pieces, the mechanical wizardry of moving things around between sets, even the background projections (that subtly added to, rather than detracting from, the performance), and the intermingling of all of the above into one seamless, sumptuously surreal performance. I was flabbergasted. I’ve long loved Les Mis since I first heard the music, and own a few copies of the movie (which I know is considered by theater types to be sub-par, musically). Seeing in person was a life-changing experience, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it in the days since.
But I have no other musical theater experience, whether “classical” Les Mis or otherwise, to compare it to. Is all (professional) musical theater this good, or typically better/worse, both in terms of performance quality and production values?
And is musical theater generally better at any specific theater and/or country (e.g. Broadway vs London vs elsewhere)?
Take the following with a grain of salt, since I haven’t seen all that many musical theater productions in absolute terms.
Anyway, I actually saw Les Misérables at the same venue in London way back in 1993. I’ve seen a few musicals before and since (including Les Mis itself on Broadway and again just last year on tour in Hartford, Connecticut), and think that the show I saw in London was the best musical theater production I have ever seen. So maybe it’s a high bar you have set for yourself.
With that said, I have seen other musicals that have come close, like Phantom of the Opera.
I’ve seen Wicked, Phantom, Cats, Book of Mormon (traveling), The Lion King (traveling), Miss Saigon, and maybe something else.
In general, I’d say that in terms of stage production, Les Mis and Phantom are at the top. You’d need to go watch O or something in Vegas to have a higher production value.
In terms of the storyline, the number of memorable songs, and how much you buy into the story, Les Mis is the best. Maybe something will come out to top it at some point but I don’t know it, at least.
But, that said, the other shows are all still fun and worth watching (except Cats - go ahead and skip Cats). You’re not going to get the magic but you’ll still get a good show.
Tangential, but I’ll add that one of the best shows that I saw - many years ago - was The Woman (Lady?) in Black, a simple 2-4 actor, ghost story, stage play with probably no set that was Off Broadway. Still not as good as Les Mis, but it does say that the stage production and singing is still only a small part of the puzzle.
I’m a big fan of musicals. I’ve seen a few on Broadway (including Les Miserables) and at our local theater which features national tours.
Broadway is tops, but a national tour can be pretty damn good. (They couldn’t have a helicopter on stage for Miss Saigon, for instance.)
Tours are best for smaller musicals. The ones that stand out for me are The Drowsy Chaperone, The Band’s Visit, Waitress, Peter and the Starcatcher, Jekyll and Hyde, Something Rotten, Book of Mormon, Come from Away and classics like The Music Man, Caberet, and Chicago.
(I’ve had that one on DVD since the late 1990s because I ordered the 1998 movie and they accidentally sent that instead. I never did see the movie version, but I was almost certainly better off.)
So did I, in 1996 - although apparently, you and I saw it at the Palace, not the Sondheim. In my case, we had nosebleed seats, and I was far more focused on the pair of female Australian backpackers who had invited me to the matinee anyway, so I don’t remember much off the performance. I remember it was good, though.
I think Les Mis is a certain kind of production, and is definitely at the top of the pile of shows in that big production/big music/big story style.
So, is all professional theatre “that good”? Well, no… there’s a huge range of professionals out there, and just like in any other business, some will be better than others, and the gamut can range from great to awful. And, there’s professional theatre that goes through months of auditions and even more months of rehearsals. Then there’s professional theatre that has one weekend of auditions, and then two weeks of rehearsal. And things in between.
Tours can be excellent, but also consider that tours design their productions to be truck-mobile, and for all the stages on their tour. They’ve got to be able to load in in X hours, and load out even more quickly. Tour sets and tech will be a very different experience than sets and tech that are built to (and into) a specific venue.
There’s plenty of professional theatre happening in cities (and non-cities) other than London and New York, but budgets will be smaller. Which doesn’t mean it can’t be great theatre. Just different. If you want to see the most amazing and complex technical wizardry and sets, stick to Broadway/West End, and maybe long-term residencies in other major cities.
Hamilton didn’t do much for me. I felt like I only picked out most of what happened because I already have a fairly strong background on the guy, already. And then you’re still left with it being the story of a guy’s life. And there, I think they missed a lot of the most interesting elements.
The advantage of a fictional tale is that you can craft a story with properly placed highs and lows, moral lessons, characters to interest everyone, etc. When you’re just giving a (relatively) factual and straightforward telling of a set of true events, there’s a limit to what you can do in terms of drama. And that’s before you start deciding whether to focus your view on a small part of the puzzle or try to cover an entire life.
He was instrumental to the creation of our nation and did, regrettably, die too young. But if you’re not gung-ho for the Federalist Papers, that only takes you so far. Once you start adding in some fictionalized elements, like Amadeus did, and you can crank up the drama.
It’s worth noting that even amateur productions, like at schools, have much higher production values these days. Like, say, the production of Les Mis I saw at the local high school, this past spring. Or Six, at my own school.
I believe that they also made one called Martin Guerre, which I saw.
I’ve seen a couple of Martin Guerre movies. Adding in the musical, I can’t say that I’ve yet seen a version that was very interesting - even before you know the reveal. I’m not sure what it is that keeps drawing directors to the story.
A filmed performance of Hamilton was available on Hulu this weekend. I think it’s also available on Disney+. And this was with the original cast, which is not possible to see any more.
Yeah, I saw Les Miz in a quonset hut on the Port Hueneme Naval Base as performed by high school age kids. It was stripped down and edited, but still excellent entertainment. The girl who played Fantine was outstanding and heart breaking.
I once did a backyard projection of this when I lived in Chicago. It was a nice evening out, and I wanted to watch it outside, so we just projected it onto our garage wall. Ended up attracting a bunch of neighbors. We turned on the Spanish subtitles, ordered some pizza and beer for everyone, and had a blast
I caught exactly zero percent of the story — it still confuses me to this day — but the singing and dancing were fun enough to watch. There’s only a couple of truly memorable songs, IMO, compared to Les Mis’s endlessly repeatable tunes, many of which share similar melodies and motifs and thus are easier to remember.
Apparently the current Sondheim production is a brand new one, somehow updated for the modern era. I’m not 100% sure what that means since I never saw the previous ones, but for example there are a bunch of projection effects and animations that connect to what’s happening on-stage. When Javert jumps into the Seine, for example, seamless wire-work combined with clever projection angles made it look like he was falling/flying backward into a whirlpool. (Do I really need to spoiler a 160-year-old story?)
I definitely wasn’t expecting that sort of effects in theater; it was more like a theme park ride, reminding me of Waterworld at Universal Studios.
Beyond that, what I really appreciated was the updated score, a lot more epic and orchestral (like the movie). While I had never seen the previous musicals, I listened to their recorded album versions… the singing is much better than in the movie (sorry, Wolverine), but the background instrumentals were terrible. Compared to the movie’s epic orchestral pieces, the previous musicals sounded like poor MIDI renditions from the 90s. Thankfully, the new Sondheim production had the best of both worlds… an amazing orchestra in the pit, a much more “epic” score, and still excellent singers all around. There was so much nuance they brought out in their performances that Wolverine and Russell Crowe couldn’t quite deliver to the same extent in the movie version.
The original production is viewed as “iconic”, epitomized by a turntable set that was central to the original production, and I believe innovative at the time, though now is a little old hat. It was so central to the staging, that many other productions followed suit: if you’re putting up Les Mis, you need to at least talk about whether or not you’re going to build a turntable. Apparently they changed that staging in 2019, but I’m sure there are other elements that also remain “iconic”. It is not uncommon for specifics about a production to become vital calling cards for the show itself, and so changing original choreography, staging, lighting, etc can be a big deal.
As in… the sets and actors themselves sat on a huge turntable…? Why? Was it to faciliate set changes (one side will show one scene, then it’d rotate to the other side for the next scene)? Or was the rotation somehow used within a scene to give some illusion of movement, etc.?
The Sondheim production I saw definitely didn’t have that. There were some buildings permanently installed into the sides of the stage, and the stage itself was divided with several layers of curtains. In between scenes, clever lighting and fast curtains would hide the transition, set pieces would roll in on rails in the stage floor, and the next scene would magically appear in a few seconds. For more dramatic transitions, the fog machine would be on full blast and a lone character would often walk in from the back, combined with fog and lighting for a really dramatic, Batman-like appearance.
To a first-time theater goer, it was all quite seamless and mind-blowing. I wish that escape rooms, for example, would have similar production values.
But now I’m curious about the turntable performances… wonder if there’s a good recording of one somewhere.
I think that, after Les Mis, a lot of theater spaces installed turntables, and then figured out how to use them in whatever show they happened to be doing in that space. The Cleveland Playhouse had one, too, before their standalone building was shut down, and they never had the same show for more than a couple of months.
