"Les Misérables," the hit 1980s pop-rock opera — that glorious, melodious, moralizing behemoth — is back at the Fox Theatre, this time in a new production created by Atlanta's Theater of the Stars.
Gone are the original production's big barricades (and big budget) and revolving stage machinery that whirled us through the flee-and-chase saga of sinner-turned-saint Jean Valjean and his fanatical pursuer, Inspector Javert.
The new incarnation is less awe-inducing visually while the size of the cast remains much the same. The innovations are up on screen: projections of prison and shabby old streets and sewers heave us back to the decrepit poverty of Victor Hugo's France in the early 1800s, a society of filthy injustice, a cesspool for insurrection. The show's producers clearly have an eye on economy and ease of touring.
If it does brisk box office, expect it to become the regional-theater standard — since the evergreen vitality of Claude-Michel Schönberg's music suggests the show's appeal goes much deeper than that old whiz-bang stage architecture, or even Alain Boubil's sentimental and plot-thin lyrics.
It's Schönberg's songs, sketched within Hugo's sturdy frame, that gives "Les Miz" its power. Like opera, everything is sung throughout. The tunes are sticky on the ear, made potent by clever harmonies and drawing a visceral charge from brawny '70s classic rock and drawing depth from that other "classic" art form, including Renaissance madrigals and Bizet and Puccini opera and — a clear forerunner — Kurt Weill's 1930s pop cabaret "Threepenny Opera."
Like Weill's output, the "Les Miz" songs are best served by idiosyncratic singing. Actors who look the part, sing in key and ooze personality can make it work handsomely. That's mostly the case in the Fox's current run, stylishly directed by Fred Hanson.
As Valjean, Rob Evan, a former University of Georgia football player, has the required strongman's physique plus a confident, anodyne tenor voice. You wish his pleasing singing for "Who Am I?" wasn't larded by "American Idol" mannerisms, such as pumping up the last note of a phrase. (You won't hear that sort of lily-gilding on the 1980s original cast album.)
His partner in life, if not romance, is Javert, a sadistic policeman who illogically chases the hero through time and space. Rob Hunt delivers his act one soliloquy, "Stars," effectively, although it's one of the few glaring inconsistencies in the score. Here's the self-righteous, self-denying fascist whose song is accompanied by synthesizer twinkles and a melody so weirdly childlike that, almost camp, it evokes Tinker Bell more than shimmering lights in the night sky.
Others in the cast were just as fine. With energy to spare and a pure, light voice, Nikki Renée Daniels (a former Atlantan) sings Fantine's "I Dreamed a Dream" — the simple girl reduced to prostitution — yet wasn't quite a singer of hair-raising star potential.
Two songs linger in the memory longer than the others. "Castle on a Cloud" conveys the bittersweet torment of a child (Carly Rosse Sonenclar, angelic as Young Cosette).
The very next number is a raunchy innkeeper's song, "Master of the House." Laurent Giroux and Cindy Benson, as the annoying but compelling Monsieur and Madame Thenardier, know they've got the show's best material. Like "Les Misérables" as a whole, they play it to the edge of, and maybe a little beyond, all it's worth — and it's that songful exuberance that makes the show a reliable, wonderful evening.
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