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Sombre Les Mis has sadly current echoes

MUSICAL
Les Miserables 3.5 STARS
Directed by Laurence Connor and James Powell
Crown Theatre
REVIEW DAVID ZAMPATTI

Back in 1987, when we were young and unafraid, we sprang a leak as Debbie Byrne dreamed her dream and foundered completely as Normie Rowe brought it home. We were amazed as the barricades clicked into place like a massive Transformer toy and Javert hurtled down through a torrent of stars. We were sure that we'd seen the standard-bearer for the return of the musical, and that it all meant something profound.

Could Les Miserables have survived all the years intact? How will this production measure up to its famous forebears? Most revealing, will it still pass the Old Grey Sniffle Test?

The answer to all three questions is "yes", albeit with real reservations.

This is a muted, sombre, Les Mis (designer Matt Kinley worked from Victor Hugo's own paintings and drawings), evoking the gloaming and the hour before dawn, bathed in sepia light (precisely marshalled by Paule Constable), smoke and mist. It's a Les Mis stripped of much of its glamour; unhealthy, ominous and feverish.

There's a febrile vehemence to much of the singing as well, especially Simon Gleeson's Jean Valjean, that sometimes muddies the emotional waters. It's fine for his tortured Soliloquy, or for Who Am I? but overloads Bring Him Home, his apotheosis on the barricades.

It was a problem for the students as well; none of them is given an internal life. Their job is to be beautiful, and sincere, and doomed, and make us care enough to mourn them. But all of them, Chris Durling's Enjolras no exception, were hectic and indistinctive - you were tempted to hope they'd get a life rather than fear they'd lose the one they had.

The story's weakest link has always been Marius (Euan Doidge) and Cosette (Emily Langridge), the romance it has to have but doesn't quite know what to do with. It's afforded the show's two weakest songs, In My Life and A Heart Full of Love (a pale imitation of West Side Story's One Hand, One Heart), and even then the lovers have to share them with Valjean and Eponine (Kerrie Anne Greenland).

The great love story, and the great tragedy, is Eponine's unrequited, fatal adoration of Marius. Greenland flies away with the role, and the show. Her On My Own does its best song proud, and the feisty intensity of her performance matches the character perfectly.

Les Mis' other big solo, Javert's stern rhapsody Stars, with its wonderful "doorway to paradise", is given a fine reading by Hayden Tee, who is potent throughout. The Thenardiers (Trevor Ashley and, especially, Lara Mulcahy) are irresistibly repulsive, the children (this night Olivia Swinton as Little Cosette and Harry Herbert as the artful Gavroche) splendid, and the ensemble singing stirring and meticulous.

Javert's death, spinning amazingly into the void, is the climax of a marvellous sequence of live action and animation that plummets us down into and through the Paris sewers. It provides the signature visual “wow” factor so long provided by the great, spinning barricade missing from this production.

The show has a sense of homecoming to it. Half the cast are WAAPA graduates, including Gleeson, Patrice Tipoki (a heartfelt Fantine), Mulcahy, Greenland and Langridge among the principals. Indeed, the whole show feels very like one of WAAPA's annual Regal Theatre musicals - and that is no criticism at all.

We came out from the opening night performance to news of gunfire and slaughter in the streets of Paris. A reminder that Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité always have their foes, and that we should save our tears for when they are truly needed.

Les Miserables is at Crown Theatre until February 22.