Les Misérables at the Pantages!

Photos credited to Pantages Theater

Ms. Youngblood’s class has a lot of field trips to plays and musicals, and one of them that took place this year was Les Miserables at the Pantages. It was a great privilege and experience. Les Miserables follows characters such as Jean Valjean, Cosette, Javert, Marius, and more. This play was amazingly executed, telling the story of the French trying to take a stand against the monarchy. It had many great songs and amazing special effects for the battles. 

The story is about a convict, Jean Valjean, who was sentenced to 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. He eventually gets let out on parole. He wanders around the countryside looking for a job, but is denied due to his criminal record. He eventually resorts to stealing a pair of valuable goblets(?) from a bishop, leading to him being wanted again. Javert, a police officer, vows to capture him himself.

Time skips forward to several years later, where he is living under a fake name to hide from Javert. In the meantime, he had become a successful businessman. He finds a woman (named Fantine) who is about to get arrested, and takes her to the hospital where she dies. He then adopts her daughter, and raises her as his own. Several years later, they get involved in a student rebellion in Paris, which leads to a confrontation between Javert and Valjean.

There were a lot of unique songs in Les Miserables, not all of them being catchy but they were composed very well. It was a great experience to hear Fantine sing “I dreamed a dream” which is one of the most famous songs from Les Miserables. Sometimes, I couldn’t tell what the characters were saying because of the fact that they pretty much sang every line that they said, but it sounded good and I could use context clues, so it wasn’t a big deal. At different parts of the play, characters sang in different ways depending on how they felt and what was happening in the scene. When the scenes were more dramatic, the characters would sing louder and vice versa. The music and singing was really well executed and the play would have not been the same without it.

The acting was good, with a lot of body language, tone, and movement in what the characters were doing. If you couldn’t understand what they were saying because of the fact that they were singing all of the time, the acting made it so that you could still follow the story through their body language. The characters also used the set for when they were doing things, as well as using different expressions to convey emotions. Another thing with the acting was that there were a lot of side characters that really enhanced the show. They would just be doing whatever they wanted in the background and sometimes the main characters would interact with them. A lot of them didn’t have any lines, but I think it made the play a lot better and more realistic.The special effects, especially the battles, were amazing. At a part during the show, Jean Valjean had a gun pointed in the air, and when he pressed the trigger it actually made a loud gunshot sound, which surprised a lot of people in the crowd. During the big fight towards the end of the show, there were flashing lights, sound effects and music, and many more things that made the scene actually seem high stakes and real. Another thing was that when characters died in the play, a spotlight that represented a gunshot flashed through them that made it look like they were glowing. The background and sets looked extremely well done, with vibrant colors and things that made it fun to look at. 

Overall this was a very fun play to go to, and especially for free, this was truly a once in a lifetime experience.