Theatre Review August 3rd 2005
Schonell Theatre, until Saturday=
Reviewed by Emma Cox
The works of famous playwrights f= rom Shakespeare to Beckett to Stoppard are subject to endless interpretations a= nd adaptations; It is almost a directorial duty to = mould and manipulate well known plays anew every time they are produced for the stage. This is not the case with famous musicals. Audiences come to the lat= ter with the implicit expectation that certain generic conventions (in staging, costume and orchestration) will remain the same. Brisbane’s Ignations Musical Society makes all the right moves in its production of Les Miserables, delighting full-house audiences with what they have come to expect from this stage favourite.
Director Simone de Hass has no e=
asy task
on her hands; being at the helm of a cast of more than 40, including several
children must pose some creative and logistical challenges. Despite this, de
Hass has drawn some marvellous performances out of her cast of talented but
non-professional artists.
The leads are uniformly excellen=
t. Jack
Bradford (as Jean Valjean) and Christopher Thomas (as Javert) are astonishi=
ngly
good, both individually (
The set design for this producti=
on of Les
Miserables is hardly what you would call stark; The=
famous revolving barricade in particular does not lend itself easily to low
budget replication. Yet the Schonell stage is successfully transformed, so =
much
so that the carefully posed mise-en-scene occasionally takes on the appeara=
nce
of a social-realist painting by 10th – century French arti=
st
Gustave Courbet.
The live musicians, with only 22= members in their ranks do a good if slightly uneven job. The society’s produc= tion doesn’t introduce anything new to the performance history of Les Miserables, and few would want it to. This heartfelt and accomplished presentation of one of the world’s best loved musicals is a winner. <= o:p>