Les Misérables - teenagers wow in BSPA senior youth performance at The MAC

It’s an audacious undertaking to rehearse and stage Les Misérables with children aged 12–18 over a three- or four-week period. As a sung-through musical, it’s not the most forgiving of shows for the cast, even with the cuts made to the newly available official School Edition. There are a lot of emotional beats to hit. And there are a lot of time shifts that require characters to quickly show signs of aging. Yet BSPA’s Saturday matinee performance at The MAC was a triumph.

Released from prison into an unforgiving world where he can’t quite shake off the long arm of the law, years later Jean Valjean takes founding Cosette under his wings when her mother Fantine dies. The action switches to the student barricades on the eve of revolution. Cosette is now caught up in a love triangle, unwittingly battling with her former guardians’ daughter Éponine for the affections of student leader Marius. All the while police inspector Javert doggedly pursues Valjean to bring him to book, and Éponine’s pantomime parents keep popping up to demonstrate that they are among the true villains of the story.

Over the three hours of the show (including the interval) the pace rarely slowed. Large scale scene changes – with tables and chairs being carried on and off the stage – must have looked messy in the bright light of the rehearsal room but disappeared into the dim behind spotlighted actors singing out front. Strategic colour in costumes popped characters into the foreground. The bluish lighting reflected the troubled times. The two-level set was versatile … although the ladders looked nearly as perilous as the steps up and down the barricade! The choreography constantly propelled scenes and lines of actors forwards (mere centimetres away from the first row of audience members) and suited the relatively shallow stage.

But the magic didn’t come from the intelligent light or the set design. It was from the quality of the performances that director Peter Corry, musical director Ashley Fulton and choreographer Sean O’Neill had drilled into the talented cast. Jack Cairns shone as the central Jean Valjean, striding around the stage with purpose, conveying his character’s growing sense of justice and mercy, despite the best efforts of Javert (Michael Nevin) to shut him down. Bring Him Home had real presence and demanded the sold-out audience’s full attention.

Jackson Allen and Grace Conroy (at Saturday afternoon’s performance) played the musical’s comedy sidekicks – the Thénardier family – a kind of Mr and Mrs Fagin, delightfully over-the-top at all times, and particularly superb in Master of the House. (Their wit and jesting behaviour also underlines the English language version’s Cockneyfication of the truly French story.)

Rebekah Devlin impressed as the impoverished Fantine, as did Grace Woodward who played Éponine at Saturday’s matinee, looking truly heartbroken by the end of Act One when she realised she’d become the third wheel to Marius (Sean Carron) and Cosette (Blanaid Hughes). Éponine’s death and the singing of A Little Fall of Rain with Marius was eye-wateringly emotional.

There was a maturity to performances right across the cast. Everyone in the ensemble was in the moment, concentrating on their part in the scene and no one looked lost. The eyes of the actors told the story of their characters’ feelings and motivations. Some solo singing was occasionally a bit pitchy at key moments, but overall the musicality was excellent. The slow-motion death scene at the barricades worked well, and the simple staging of the Valjean’s death was very effective. Such is the talent at BSPA’s disposal that four girls shared the roles of young Cosette and Éponine, while four boys played Gavroche and there were two Madame Thénardiers across the six performances.

While the cast motioned towards backstage during the bows, it wasn’t clear to me until afterwards that a 14-piece band had been hidden behind the black backdrop. A real shame they hadn’t been able to rush out with instruments in hand to be seen by the audience at the end. While the cast may have found being on stage quite intense, the rich music never stopped with one song often running straight into the next. Bravo to the band.

Les Misérables is familiar territory to director Peter Corry who spent three years performing Javert on the West End and UK Tour, and staged a concert version – the show’s Northern Ireland premiere – in The Odyssey Arena back in 2001. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, when the wealth gap seems to be widening and social disadvantage deepening, the themes of social justice and redemption and looking out for the vulnerable seem very apt in 2023.

Photo credit: Neil Harrison

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