Oh boy. This is going to be a doozy.
Yup. You saw the title right. I saw Les Mis today at The Straz in Tampa and, well, I just don't get it. I just don't get how this can be considered one of the most popular musicals of all time.
Operas, maybe. 'Cause Brotha, don't get all musical theater major technical with me and tell me it doesn't qualify as such because of this, that and the other. If you ask me, the freaking thing had maybe three or four words total spoken as un-sung dialog, so as far as I'm concerned, it's an opera. And there's part of the problem, for my tastes.
I tried opera. Twice. Both times I liked the music and enjoyed some of the spectacle but as a story, it was impossible to follow. I thought it might be because they were in Italian and I shied away, by choice, from diverting my attention from the action on stage to read the overhead projected subtitles. Plus, as I mentioned in this post, when I occasionally did, I found them to be stupid, trying to be "humorous." But that's the story of that. What about this? Wasn't it in English? Well, for the most part, but I'm a person who has trouble making out sung lyrics and interpreting them readily. I always have. It's probably why if I like a song, it's because I like the melody. I'm far less concerned about the lyrics since if I do learn the lyrics, it's usually after MANY listenings or reading along while listening. And with the operatic, overly-melodramatic tones with which many of the artists sang in Les Mis, it really muffled the message for me. Not to mention I was way up in the nose-bleeds and The Straz, like my good old Bob Carr in Orlando, was built a long time ago* so the acoustics...not so great.
*Their website says they "opened" in 1987 but I'm pretty good at identifying architecture and let me tell you, this place was definately designed in the early 1970s, it has all the familiar features. And it hasn't been much updated either. Oh, the clear-glass globe spherical lights lining the atrium areas are LED rather than incandescent but look at the glass banisters with brass railings, the Brutalist concrete slab walls, those dated Shoji-esque windows, the Escher-like-multi-level Logan's Run staircases and landings. And I love this style, but late '80s? Well, maybe for Florida, I guess.
So this venue played its part in my summation of this performance I'm sure. Aside from what's mentioned already, the seats, like the aforementioned Bob Carr, were likewise tiny and very stiff. And for the duration of this show. And I do mean DURATION, my ass and lower back were screaming. Of course it was my cheap-ass choice to buy low-cost gallery seating, but I didn't realize how high up I'd be, and with my seat right on the edge, my acrophobia was off the charts. Much worse than when I sat in those box seats at the Steinmetz Hall for Hello, Dolly!
Then there were the late-comers. Though both the website and the ushers I talked to said that no late-comers would be allowed to enter the theater to disturb the performance once it got underway...they lied. People were flashing their cell phone flashlights all over the place pretty much throughout the entire thing! I couldn't believe it.
But what about the show. Enough already about everything else. Okay. Here's the thing. I had of course seen the Les Mis movie version years ago and though it too was sung-through like this, I guess there's something to be said for seeing characters act up close and personal. I especially remembered Anne Hathaway's performance, it was awesome. Now that's not to say these guys weren't up to the same stuff, but from my three miles away vantage point, I really couldn't tell. I'm never getting cheap seats again. Doesn't do any good. Unfortunately, I have a show I'm already bought into for February also in the cheap seats but at least it's the Walt Disney Theater at Dr. Philips in Orlando and I know those are a bit better than here.
Songs were great, I always liked the music, can't go wrong there. Though please shoot the little fucking brat who played Gavroche. (Oh they did...No I mean in real life, not just the show.) He can't sing. Let him down now before he learns it too late and he ruins his young, talentless life with booze and drugs. Rocco Van Auken, you suck. I know you're like nine years old, I don't care, just stay away from the needle, 'kay. Become a plumber or something.
The main crawdad in my gut about this whole show though is the unbelievable hype it gets. Kinda reminds me of back in the 1980s when my friend Michelle and I went to see "Ran" the Akiro Kirosawa film after hearing such rave reviews from critics like Siskel and Ebert. Especially Roger Ebert who hyped it up as if it were the best movie in all of moviedom not only on his show but any talk show he was on at the time. RAN! RAN! RAN! It's all he could fucking talk about for the whole fucking year it seemed. And after we saw it...we were like "Meh." It was okay, but we just didn't get what all the hype was about. And we were two educated youngsters. We knew it drew from Medieval Japanese folklore as well as Shakespeare's King Lear, and we could see the art that went into it, but at the end of the day, it was very long, super melodramatic and way too full of itself.
And that's the problem with Les Mis.
So go ahead, hate me. Say I don't know what art is. But just like "Ran" wasn't the best that the silver screen could ever possibly offer the world, so I say "Les Mis" isn't even, in my opinion, one of the top ten best musical theatrical performances ever.