Monster Theater Doing Its Job Entertaining Audiences To the Core

If the punishment fit the crime, where would theater be, or at least drama-drenched, heart rending, over-the-top theater like “Les Miserables”? It’s too long, too turgid, too predictable, this musical. But “Les Miserables” at the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, NY, is a hit, just as “Les Miserables” anywhere usually is. This is the musical that opened in London in 1985, and is still selling tickets. On Broadway, it ran for 16 years and won a slew of Tony Awards. Now it’s the Mac-Haydn’s turn to grab audiences. So, it may be one tarted up, lavish and impossibly extreme entertainment based on Victor Hugo’s sweeping novel rumbling around on politics, philosophy, justice, religion, redemption and romance. But it does its job. It entertains. Hugely. The opening scene is a stunner, with imprisoned oarsmen, chains clanking in unison, singing Claude-Michel Schönberg and Herbert Kretzmer’s lament by forgotten men. Among them is Jean Valjean, jailed for stealing a loaf of bread. And also trying to break out of the big house. Played by James Benjamin Rogers, Valjean is big-voiced, robust and tender. He grabs the audience, wraps it up and takes it with him every step of the way. This Valjean, as it turns out, is one lucky fellow because somehow, a decade later, he is the owner of a factory and the mayor of a town full of scoundrels and prostitutes. Among those prostitutes is Fantine (Sara Sheperd), abandoned by her lover and forced these days to make money in her sleep as the song says, after losing her job in Valjean’s factory. And so the saga begins with Fantine singing the heart tugging “I Dreamed a Dream” before she expires, leaving little Cossette, her daughter, in Valjean’s care. The story is set in early, 19th-century France where the Revolution has failed to tumbrel away all those wicked, abusive aristocrats, leaving in its wake lots of touchy university students, masses of impoverished women, characters like Thenardier (the beguiling Monk Schane-Lydon) who steals from everyone, and Javert, the cop bent on capturing Valjean who paid for his crimes but broke his parole. The cast is huge: and the actors here, gifted. Gabe Belyeu as Javert, the cop bent on following the law, no matter what, is fierce and pathetic, too. All of the miserables — the revolutionaries, the progeny, the gang members, the hookers, the little boy who breaks from the ramparts to supply the students with ammunition and is killed for his courage — carry this tale. But it’s the actors who have bought unreservedly into this monster piece of theater, who make audiences raise their faces to the light and suck it up. “Les Miserables,” with music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, book by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, and lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, is directed by John Saunders. It runs at the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, NY, through Aug 4. For tickets, call 518-392-9292; for information, go to www.machaydntheatre.org.