Just what we want from theater

For a start, this “Les Miz” is one rip-roaring, entertaining, heart-rending and inventive show with a lot of persuasive actors, and many appealing, characters.

Take Javert (Justin Patterson), for one. The bad guy, the cop who tracks Jean Valjean for breaking parole after release from 19 years in prison for stealing bread for his starving sister’s child. (Yes, we have a lot of exposition here — not a so-called information dump, more like an information flood — but that’s what you get when you turn a French, 19th-century historical novel about crime, power, love, politics, class, rectitude, justice and redemption into musical theater.)

Patterson occupies a stage the way running water fills a glass: right to the top. He is tall and adroit with an attractive singing voice and great diction. And though his character is hell bent on meting out his notions of justice on the pitiful Jean Valjean (Brian Calì), who is “no worse than any man,” that character tells us, it’s awfully difficult to dislike this Javert. That’s not much of a problem though, because we are not seeking sense, here. We are seeking theater. And we get lots of that.

Then there is Calì’s Jean Valjean, a tough little guy striving for forgiveness by doing the right thing, like bringing up Cosette (Katie Nicole Weiser), the daughter of Fantine (Sarah Cline), a worker in his factory who died by his inattention.

Next, somehow, Valjean becomes the mayor of a town and obtains wealth, nice clothes and the company of his charge, Cosette, who is grown-up, now, and in love with Marius (Patton Chandler), a sweet, soft, aristocratic, fichu-wearing-under-fire fellow who joins students at the barricades in the June Rebellion of 1832.

And there’s more. Eponine (Kalli Siringas), a poor, tough street girl, is in love with Marius, too, hopelessly, which gives Siringas, a gorgeous, skillful actor with a beautiful voice, ample opportunities to air her heartbreak on stage.

And, finally, we get the unscrupulous, larcenous, tongue-wagging, hip-swinging, vaudevillian pair, the Thenardiers (Travis Mitchell and Jamie Nelson), who give little Cossette a mop head for a doll, strip corpses of anything worth taking and, hilariously, squeeze into the upper classes now that France has battled its way into an interesting state of egalité.

What makes this extravagant piece of theater work with its four-square melodies and sticky plot — that includes an escape into the sewers of Paris, a suicide into the Seine and the resurrection of a lot of people who died early in the show — is director John Simpkins’ breakneck pace and dynamite staging. Crowds surge and melt away and characters leap up stairways that carom about the stage in fog-suffused light while the orchestra pounds away.

So, yes, the music is mostly klunky, people expire on stage and walk away for the next scene, Fantine marches over to her death bed right before she succumbs, and somewhere near the end a singer loses his high notes.

Well, that’s life.

No. That’s theater. Which is just what we wanted.

“Les Misérables,” directed by John Simpkins with Eric Kang, music director,

runs at the Sharon Playhouse through June 29. For tickets and information, call 860-364-7469 or go to www.triarts.net.