Delicately Rendered: Tenuous Illusions Onstage with the Skylight

The Skylight Music Theatre continues to show considerable prowess in bringing huge musical productions to a relatively small stage with its latest--Les Misérables. The mega-successful dramatic works of any kind in history. There have been numerous stage productions over the years and then there was the huge budget film adaptation. It's a giant machine. Skylight brings it to the stage quite well.

With a talented array of voices, the musical aspect of this show is quite well-executed. Luke Grooms has an intense tenor powering through the heroism of Jean Valjean. Andrew Varela has quite a bit of gravitas in a high-gravity tenor as Inspector Javert. The orchestra conjures the music behind the voices with a sweeping sense of importance. The musical end of things is really, really well-executed.

The dramatic thing end of things is kind of difficult to hold together, however. Any musical about bloody revolution and human misery is going to run the risk of being kind of absurd to modern audiences. Molly Rhode does an excellent job of bringing it to the stage in all of its many parts. I had the opportunity to sees the show from a balcony seat that gave me an interesting perspective on things. 

From an elevated perspective, the illusion that the musical is bringing to the stage can fade in and out. It's a beautiful set by Peter Dean Beck, who also designed the lighting. The two work together quite well, giving the production a feel of immensity on a small stage. It's interesting to see what that immensity does to the action prior to the intermission. The set is huge, but the cast is performing on a stretch of stage that feels only marginally bigger than the area in front of the box office. One wouldn't necessarily notice sitting in the orchestra section, but everything feels so cramped when seen from elevation. That makes the revolutionary France in question feel very, very cramped. Everyone seems to be falling over everyone else. 

Of course, once the revolution breaks out, everything opens up. We have the barricade bringing a sense of the ragged masses fighting against oppression filling the stage. Fight captain Christopher Elst has experience capturing violence onstage. His presence is felt here in the physicality of the aggression  seen onstage. It's really quite vivid without breaking with the overall grace of the production--a difficult balance to attain. 

There are some beautiful moments in here. At one point a character jumps from  a bridge to his death. (Okay…not that everyone doesn't already know that story, but I won't mention who.) Anyway . . . the jump to his death was really cleverly sliced into the drama near the end of the play. I found myself wanting to see it happen again right after they did it. It was a smart bit of staging. There are little moments where the illusion drops, though. At some point that barricade gets rotated enough to look like kind of a comic rotisserie of actors pretending to be dead. There's a really clever big of scenery  that Beck designed for the sewers that can look very sharp and moody when looked at from one angle. Blink and let things go out of focus for a fraction of a second and the thing looks rather absurdly like actors performing amidst giant metal hula hoops. Look--its Valjean jumping though the hoops like a trained dog. Of course, this is picking at minor details, but in a production of some three hours' length that blows things over the top dramatically throughout, there's bound to be something that comes across as being kind of silly in places. That being said, Rhode did an excellent job of juggling the many elements of the dramatic end of the massive production. 

The Skylight Music Theatre production of Les Misérables runs through December 29th at the Broadway Theatre Center's Cabot Theatre. For ticket reservations, call 414-291-7811 or visit the Skylight online. 

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(It's interesting seeing this so close to the Greendale Community Theatre production of Les Misérables. There's a stigma of low-quality attached to community theatre. I might have agreed with that until I started going to these shows years ago. There's some great stuff out there. Quite a bit of it is quite a bit better than the professional stuff. My feelings on comparative performances of "Master of the House," illustrate this. The Skylight has the talented Eric Mahlum in the role of innkeeper Thénardier. His performance here is solid and professional. Really there's nothing specific to criticize about his performance. It's great. The Greendale Community Theatre had Robby McGhee in the role. McGhee did as well as Mahlum in the role in all the technical aspects. As it was a community theatre production, he likely had less time to rehearse, but McGhee has a brilliant sense of humor onstage and it illuminated the role in a way that Mahlum didn't manage. McGhee's sparkling sense of subtle, roguish wit can bring something to the stage that no amount of rehearsal can develop.  That's why I love going to the smaller productions. There's that sense of brilliance an inspiration that can come from anywhere. It doesn't matter how small the production is. Really. Don't let the name "community theatre," throw you. There's some remarkable stuff out there if you look for it.)