It’s difficult to put into words the experience of the Les Misérables 40th Anniversary Arena Spectacular. Getting to the Rod Laver Arena was stressful enough: between setting up the children with their sitter, missing a train and navigating Melbourne’s horrendous inner-city traffic, we were staring down a 15-minute lockout if we were late. Thankfully, my wife and I slipped through the doors with only minutes to spare. To miss that opening would have been tragic.
There is a lot to recommend the ‘arena spectacular’, including an experienced and well-loved international cast. The parts of Valjean and Javert may have their best renditions yet with the performances of Alfie Boe and Michael Ball. While the whole performance was astonishing, the gravitas of these two men is unmatched. While not exactly a full stage production, the show wants for nothing thanks to the sheer force of the music and the passion of the actors. It was an overwhelming experience, honestly, with every number leaving us almost reeling. And I’m man enough to admit that it induced the most tears I’ve shed within a three-hour timeframe.
Beyond its technical brilliance, there is also the beautiful surprise that the story of Les Misérables, so explicitly Christian in its themes, can still draw hundreds of thousands of people, even millions from around the world, to enjoy it.
When I first heard that the ‘arena spectacular’ had additional rock-and-roll elements, I was hesitant. However, given the size of the venue, it makes sense to lean more into that aspect of the production, and the original stage production, adapted from Victor Hugo’s epic novel by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, was inspired partly by the success of Jesus Christ Superstar. The two French artists sensed that a rock opera would be the best way to bring this story to life, and the additional elements that are included for this tour don’t distract from the music but add a depth that helps carry the whole production.
Beyond its technical brilliance, however, there is also the beautiful surprise that the story of Les Misérables, so explicitly Christian in its themes, can still draw hundreds of thousands of people, even millions from around the world, to enjoy it. The arena production broke ticket records in Sydney and no doubt it will continue to do so elsewhere.
One could argue that the secret of the show’s popularity lies in the music, and that’s true. But music that lacks substantial themes would not endure the way Les Mis does.
In a sense, this question begs a larger question about how, or why, any work of art stands the test of time. Why does Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings resonate across cultures and historical distance? Why do Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Hemingway or Austen or Shakespeare transcend their historical contexts to speak to people whose circumstances may be completely different from their own?
Part of the answer comes down not only to excellence in craft and the quirks of history, but also to the universal nature of the themes being wrestled with.
Genuinely good art contains the whole of life, refusing to reduce the world to caricatures.
‘Christian art’ has rightly earned something of a bad reputation, largely because it often views certain art forms or genres—like literature or film—merely as a means to deliver a blunt message (although, to be fair, this isn’t solely a Christian problem). But genuinely good art contains the whole of life, refusing to reduce the world to caricatures. Michelangelo’s Pieta, for example, is an explicitly religious work of art, depicting the death of God, but this sculpture of a mother holding the body of her dead son remains profoundly human.
Jean Valjean’s redemptive arc is the through-line for the whole plot of Les Mis, a story of a man who, quite literally, converts from his own hatred and resentment to become an arm of God’s mercy in a suffering world. Several of the songs in the play are genuine and sincere prayers. But other stories orbit around Valjean’s story: stories of tragedy and friendship, of revolution and death, of love and justice and despair.
The way the story ends does point in a clear direction, and that’s because—if we are being honest—to leave God out would be to leave out something essential to human life.
The story doesn’t content itself with a single ‘argument’. Those who view religion sceptically, or even those who cannot imagine a Jesus who cares for them in their misery, genuinely wrestle with the man who did find God. In other words, the plot contains the whole of life, and while some characters do act as archetypes of certain universal themes, they always avoid caricature.
The way the story ends, however, does point in a clear direction, and that’s because—if we are being honest—to leave God out would be to leave out something essential to human life.
In one of his addresses (delivered, quite aptly, in Paris), Pope Benedict XVI reflected on the influence of the monastics on Europe’s culture and heritage. Although the monastics did not set out to renew the culture of their time, that was what they ended up doing because their foundational impulse was, in his words, quarere Deum: the search, or quest, for God. Any genuine culture, he said, begins with this:
Our cities are no longer filled with altars and with images of multiple deities. God has truly become for many the great unknown. But just as in the past, when behind the many images of God the question concerning the unknown God was hidden and present, so too the present absence of God is silently besieged by the question concerning him. Quaerere Deum—to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times.
The works of art that stand the test of time also tap into this quest. They tend to deal with what is universally human in the ebb and flow of history, and there is nothing more universal, more (quite literally) timeless nor more human than God. The best artworks draw the reader or audience into a powerfully imaginative and emotional experience of this search for God, leaving nothing genuinely human out.
Boublil and Schönberg, with their deeply Jewish backgrounds and sensitivity to such themes, no doubt allowed this to influence the musical they created. The Bible, after all, is sprawling with the same themes, and their own family histories of survival amid the horrors of the Second World War helped shape what they chose to include or emphasise in the play.
With the ‘arena spectacular’ world tour, the organisers have brought not only a brilliant musical but also the deeply human quest for God to thousands in Melbourne and many more around the world. It is refreshing to see ‘the present absence of God’ not only ‘silently besieged’ but gloriously besieged by the question concerning him, and with all the force of a good rock opera.
The Les Misérables 40th Anniversary Arena Spectacular is playing at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena until 25 May. You can find out more, and book tickets, here.
Banner image: ‘Cosette Sweeping’, illustration from Victor Hugo, Les Misérable (1862), translated by Isabel Hapgood, New York, 1887. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons.)
