Playwright: book by Alain Boublil & Claude-Michel Schönberg, based on the novel by Victor Hugo, music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer
At: Broadway In Chicago at the Cadillac Palace, 151 W. Randolph St.
Phone: ( 312 ) 902-1400; $27-$80
Runs through: April 24
Nineteen years since its United States premiere and you haven't seen it yet. Oh, you've seen it spoofed in comedy revues—the marching-in-place chorus, the six-yard flag, the Rembrandt-lit tavern tableau vivant, the mad-Max wagons that robot themselves—wow! looka THAT!—into the rebels' barricade. If you're a student, you've used the libretto as Cliffs Notes. And if you're an actor, you've been warned not to audition with anything from its score, no matter HOW it shows off your vocal range.
So you don't have to have read Victor Hugo's novel to know the story of Jean Valjean. An ex-convict turned respectable citizen, his long-ago parole violation dooms him and his adopted daughter to a life on the run, pursued by the relentless Inspector Javert. When the fugitive's beloved Cosette falls for Marius, a youth who joins his dissident comrades in a protest demonstration—civil disobedience that could meet with armed resistance—a crisis is precipitated, and Valjean risks recapture for the sake of the lovers' happiness.
The Cadillac Palace's high-proscenium stage tends to dwarf the players, diminishing the authority required of Robert Hunt's boyish-faced Javert, and Randal Keith, a veteran Valjean, is more accomplished as a Heroic than a Lyric tenor ( albeit still coming through with a heart-stopping 'Bring Him Home' ) . But Tonya Dixon's throaty Fantine delivers an 'I Had A Dream' to make us sorely regret the character's first-act demise—that is, until the second, when Marissa McGowan's Eponine belts forth an 'On My Own' steeped in adolescent anguish. And comic respite is supplied by David Benoit and Jennifer Butt, merrily trashing it up as the greedy Thénardiers.
It's easy to underestimate the impact of 'Les Miz' on the American Musical genre, departing from vaudeville tradition to spawn a wave of opera-weight spectacles extending from Sweeney Todd to The Lion King. This is alleged to be the Broadway production's last tour, and with shoebox stagings by Porchlight, Marriott, and Light Opera Works inevitable in the future, you might want to remember having experienced it in all its romantic, big-voiced, over-the-top glory.