Brisbane Courier-Mail Newspaper

Theatre Review August 3rd 2005

Revolt resisted

Les Miserables

Schonell Theatre, until Saturday

Reviewed by Emma Cox

The works of famous playwrights from
Shakespeare to Beckett to Stoppard are subject to endless interpretations and
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 latter
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 easy 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 excellent. Jack
Bradford (as Jean Valjean) and Christopher Thomas (as Javert) are astonishingly
good, both individually (Bradford’s
performance of Bring Him Home is haunting) and in lyrical dialogue.  Michael Corcoran and Sara Reynolds-Sly
are crowd favourites, providing uproarious comic relief as the Thenardiers.

The set design for this production 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 appearance
of a social-realist painting by 10th – century French artist
Gustave Courbet.

The live musicians, with only 22 members
in their ranks do a good if slightly uneven job. The society’s production
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.