Skip to main content
Les Miserables has been running for 40 years. It’s toured all over the world and has been seen by just about everyone including last summer by the president, VP and some drag queens at the Kennedy Center. There’s now a (mostly bad) movie that came out more than a decade ago. Do we need Les Mis? There are lots of other, newer shows.
To bring you up to speed: Les Mis was adapted from an 1862 Victor Hugo novel about the June Rebellion of 1832, and while almost every character dies (spoiler!), the mood is oddly hopeful. Still, the point is less to root for or mourn these tragic characters than to bask in the epic music and production of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical. The current touring, begun in 2022, was brought to the Keller last week by Broadway in Portland, for the the eighth time since 1991.
Apart from the fact that people still enjoy it, yes, we still need Les Mis. It’s still relevant. “Do you Hear the People Sing?” If only that Kennedy Center audience could either learn from or be afraid of the message of that song. Portlanders were ready for it though: played to full theatres and huge applause during its run at the Keller last week.
The performances in this production are so stellar, we almost forget we’re in the presence of excellence because we’re awash in familiar melodies being sung with expert precision until Valjean (Anthony Festa at the April 5 performance) holds out a high note in “Bring Him Home” so soul-crushingly forlorn that we find ourselves pushed back into our seats. When Fantine, played by Portland’s own Lindsay Heather Pierce, sings to the rafters, we realize how much the Oscar-winning performance Anne Hathaway gave in the film version was lacking in scale. Yes, the movie had sweeping shots of 19th-century Paris, but the voices, in general, weren’t allowed to reach the same heights. I’ve heard “I Dreamed a Dream” a bazillion times, but Pierce filled the space and gave me chills.
The staging of the new touring production is reminiscent of the original, with some notable—and disappointing—changes. The boys still fight on the barricade and Jean Valjean still takes a trip to the Paris sewers. The big flag is big. Notably, however, there’s no turntable, which wouldn’t be so offensive if so much of the blocking and lyrics didn’t invoke circular motion. When, in act two, the female ensemble sings, “Turning, turning, turning through the years,” they stand on the stage. Still. Unmoving. If you hadn’t imprinted the original tour on your teenage theatre kid psyche like me, maybe you won’t feel that sense of motion is missing in the new iteration. And my personal grudge aside, Les Mis live is just as overwhelmingly gorgeous now as it ever was.
The show ended with a reprise of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” and the gravity of those words hit the Portland crowd hard. The cast sings, “Do you hear the people sing? / Say, do you hear the distant drums? / It is the future that we bring when tomorrow comes,” and the audience was on their feet. The inspiration that eluded the D.C. audience is alive as we continue to take to the waterfront and bridges for No Kings protests.
While the press release for the show threatened that this was the final time Les Mis played in Portland, like the ghosts of Valjean’s past that appear at the end of the show, never say never when it comes to Les Mis.
CHECK IT OUT: Les Miserables ran at The Keller Auditorium March 31–April 5. To learn about future Broadway in Portland productions, visit portland.broadway.com.
