An audience of mostly friends and family greeted the debut of ‘Les Miserables’ on Saturday evening with a well-deserved standing ovation.
LOGAN – The school edition of Les Misérables by the Utah Festival Conservatory of the Performing Arts isn’t just another high school musical.
The play debuted on Aug. 13 at the Utah Theatre, directed by the conservatory’s Stefan Espinosa, with a cast of made up of student participants of the 2022 Utah High School Musical Theatre Awards competition.
It’s a showcase for the “best of the best” and a preview of talents that will likely soon be gracing stages throughout Utah as these young performers move on to collegiate and community theater shows.
In their hands, Les Misérables is really something extraordinary.
For starters, all these kids have got pipes like nobody’s businesses. You’d expect exceptional voices in the play’s leads, but when the entire company tunes up for “One Day More,” the Act I finale, the result is a thunderous choral experience.
There also isn’t a bad stage performance in the entire cast of this sung-through musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s complex 1862 novel of French history.
Espinosa says that the cast that only one week of practice before beginning dress rehearsals, but you’d never know that based on their performances. This show is beautifully sung and acted and the staging is thoroughly professional.
More importantly perhaps, this production of Les Misérables superbly delivers those signature, goosebump-raising solos that we’ve all come to expect from this show.
Young Hayden Henderson is impressive in the lead role of Jean Valjean, the former convict who jumps parole to re-invent himself in post-Napoleonic France. His crystal-clear tenor voice is strong enough to fill every corner of the intimate Utah Theatre during his brilliant solo of “Bring Him Home.”
Preston Hansen is cast Valjean’s nemesis, the relentless Inspector Javert. Hansen’s performance is at times bombastic, but his suicide scene is touching and carefully staged to avoid triggering any sensitivities in the audience.
Millie Hall poignantly plays the doomed Fanine, a young mother desperately struggling against all odds to care for her child Cosette, played by Ivy Combe as a child and Gracie Burton as an adult. Her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” was heartfelt.
For comedy relief, Espinosa gives us the Thènardiers, a corrupt innkeeper and his drunken wife. AJ Slee appears as the husband and Aubrey Taylor delivers a thoroughly memorable performance as the wife. They brought down the house with “Master of the House,” an Act I drinking song.
Elena Shill from Mountain Crest High School appears as the street waif Eponine. Seemingly worldly, she reveals a sensitive vulnerability in her gorgeous solo “On My Own.”
One of the few criticisms of the original production of Les Misérables was that the show portrayed all of its female cast members as victims. Espinosa has solved that problem by making the Paris Street Uprising of 1832 an almost all-female affair.
Claire Francis plays Enjolras, a formerly male role, as the revolutionary leader of a band of ill-fated female student patriots. Her vocal contributions to the anthems “Red and Black” and “Do You Hear the People Singing” were sensational.
The exceptions to that gender shift were Mckay Clemens as the street rat Gavroche and Luc Faucette as the student Marius, who becomes infatuated with Cossette in the midst of a failed revolution.
Faucette get his own solo moment while singing the lament for fallen friends “Empty Chairs and Empty Tables” and he makes the most of it.
The school edition of Les Misérables has the show’s plot unfolding at breakneck speed, thankfully reducing the show’s normal three-hour run time by 30 to 45 minutes.
If you tried, you could pick holes in any production of Les Misérables. Yes, it’s terribly sentimental and illogical.
But as a vehicle for these young talents, I can’t think of another production as challenging –or as successful — as Les Misérables.
The Utah Theatre sold out for the opening night performance of Les Misérables on Aug. 13 and tickets are going fast for other performances on Aug. 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20, according to the Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre box office.
Tickets for Les Misérables can be purchased by calling 435-750-0300 or online at http://utahfestival.org
The Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre’s box office is located in the Dansante Building at 59 South, 100 West in Logan.