It turns out that the question “Do you hear the people sing?” — asked several times in Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s mega-musical “Les Misérables”— has a new answer. The answer is no longer just, yes. It’s, how can you not?
The number of regional U.S. stagings has exploded after the conclusion of the most recent “Les Miz” tour. The show’s licensing company has already approved 107 new productions. If you’re not attending one right now, you may be manning a barricade yourself.
Yet, it seemed surprising, at first, that Hudson Valley Shakespeare would be joining the battle. The theater’s programming sticks close to Shakespeare; this summer’s “King Lear” and “As You Like It” are still in the repertory. And the company’s semi-open-air venue backs onto a lawn-smooth countryside. “Paris is always showing its teeth,” Victor Hugo wrote. How could this paradise-on-a-hill serve his epic about crowds and smoke and squalor?
Well, partly by trusting the audience to know the material. The director Jenn Thompson and her choreographer Rhett Guter use the actors’ movement (eddying like flotsam in a sewer, staggering in a chain-gang) as the show’s main palette. Thompson then relies on us to conjure Paris’s seedy cobblestone streets, even, in her less clear staging moments, the plot. Her only major set piece is a huge French flag, burned with gunpowder. The 21-person company sometimes drags it around by attaching chains to the silk. A nation-state seems as hard to move as a cart in the mud.
There’s a sense of strain elsewhere, too. Even for a theater accustomed to staging sweeping tragedies, “Les Miz” poses a challenge. Schönberg’s score needs a phalanx of singers capable of punishing, octave-leaping parts, and in this outing, Hudson Valley Shakespeare hasn’t found a full complement.
And “Les Miz” itself is massive enough to encompass multitudes. It’s a generation-defining opera-adjacent masterwork with all the stops pulled out, yes, but it also contains goopy pop diversions. These flaws combine in the sometimes repetitive second half: The breakneck pace bottlenecks, and this time, each lovesick ballad suddenly struck me as one ballad too many.
“Les Misérables,” as adapted by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, has two narrative strands. First, the fugitive Jean Valjean (Josh Young) is on the lifelong run from the law, as personified by the coldhearted Inspector Javert (Denis Lambert). They’re a pair of Titans smashing away at each other, forever, as Humanity struggles against Order.
And second, Valjean aids a dying woman, Fantine (Haley Dortch), by adopting her child. When grown, that girl, Cosette (Kiara Geolina), becomes one point on a love triangle with the scrappy Éponine (Haley Rose Ciaramella) and the dishy student rebel Marius (Alex Ross). Marius’s involvement in the June Rebellion of 1832 — Hugo himself dodged bullets in the streets — connects the story’s ideas about civic and personal love. To love the people, you fight for them; to love a person, you fight beside him.
Some of the meatiest stuff belongs to secondary characters. The dastardly innkeepers, the Thénardiers (Nance Williamson and the mischievous David Beach), are criminal Falstaffs; in the night’s best number, “Master of the House,” they steal everything, including the show. And Thompson makes a clever double-casting choice, asking Dortch to also play Enjolras, the rabble-rouser. I thought Dortch’s voice somehow seemed better suited to Enjolras’s commands than to Fantine’s pleas; how interesting that a woman, killed with neglect, comes into her own when she rises again with a cause.
The great and orienting star here, though, is Young. As Valjean, he holds his voice in reserve for long periods, but when he takes it out of its case, it’s absolutely beautiful. The part requires immense vocal power, which Young can certainly provide, but he’s most gorgeous up in the rafters of his voice, singing high, sweet, gossamer prayers. Musicians talk about “placement” in the skull when they sing, but here you can feel Young setting the notes down in our heads.
And it’s in our heads that this show takes on meaning. It may be an accident of licensing and popularity that gave us this flood of “Les Misérables” productions, but I do wonder what we’ll see in the flood’s wake. What does it do to a nation to hear this particular work, again and again? There are plenty of Javerts about these days, for instance, struggling with the moral dimensions of their service.
And Hugo’s vision is bleak: The revolutionaries die; they’re picked clean in the streets by scavengers; the people they try to rally never come.
Yet the musical insists that next time could be different. I still have chills from the image of the company led by Anand Nagraj — seemingly a head taller than everyone — out on the hilltop, waving a red flag the size of a crosstown bus. Everyone else is singing about hope: “One Day More!” But Nagraj looks like he’s signaling to a plane for rescue. Would we help him? The audience shifted in its seats.
Les Misérables
Through Sept. 27 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 3 hours.
