Twice the fun!
Following on from my last post about the Orchestral course I took part in a couple of weeks ago, its time to tell you about one of the amazing trips we went on... Every year they try to go to see one show and then play some music from the show during the week in preparation for the concert. This year we were treated to not one, but two amazing shows in one day. While both shows are amazing, they are also both quite different so going from one to another was kind a bit surreal but they did not disappoint.
For the first show we trotted up to Bradford for the Matinee performance of Les Miserables at the Bradford Alhambra theatre.
This is the third time I have seen this show, the previous experiences also being with school but we saw them in London. Having seen the show before I had high expectations since I know how amazing the show can be. I was also intrigued to see what they would do with the staging as when I saw the show in London they had a rotating stage and a lot of their staging and choreography was centred around this stage. It would be interesting to see how this was different. I have to say the staging was immaculate and while there was no rotating stage it was just as impressive. I loved how the various bit of staging gracefully moved on and off the stage, my favourite piece of staging had to be Javert's death. It was a stroke of genius. Without giving too much away, the way that the staging disappeared was seamless and the visual effects were perfect for the scene. Dare I say it was the best version of this scene I've seen? I'll let you decide that for yourself.
Having been to see quite a few shows now I feel I can safely say that sometimes not all the cast seem to be putting in the same amount of effort as others or someone sticks out as maybe not great at their role but with Les Miserables that was not the case. Every single actor was completely engrossed in their role and I completely believed them. No matter how small of trivial the role as was it was treated with the respect it deserved and the actors did their roles justice. One actor I was excited to see was Killian Donnelly. I have been hearing rave reviews about him for a while on various medium of social media and I wanted to see it for myself. He played Jean Valjean with the reverence the role deserved and his singing was sublime. He knew just when to push the audience into a particular feeling, or when to pause to give us the space to think with him and his character.
One pair of characters which can make or break your experience of Les Miserables are the Thenardier's. This classic comedic couple are the ones who try to make light of the desperate times within the plot and provide us with some light laughter, as some respite to the heavy nature of the story. I love these two, I mean I love the hilarity they bring but they are kind of the goodies but baddies of the show, that they are trying to do the best fr themselves but it's rarely nice for other around them. Sophie-Louise Dann's Madame Thenardier was so good, her comedic timing was on point and the voice she gave to her was so funny. One of my favourite lines of the show is a Madame Thenardier line, "I used to think that I would meet a Prince, but God Almighty have you seen what's happened since..." and Dann did not disappoint.
As always I can't not mention the amazing pit band. Musically Directed by Ben Atkinson, I was gripped right from those first two notes (BOM BOMMM). Nothing was out of place and every single cue was exceptional. It was kind of sad that as the band were playing their exit music people left, I mean I know it's called exit music but surely the band should be able to have their moment too without the noise of people moving?
Overall I would most definitely recommend seeing this tour of Les Miserables. It lives up to all the expectations and may even surpass them a little. I loved every bit of it and would not change a single thing. It was even given a standing ovation by all of the audience, a definite must see!
Tune in next time to find out which Musical came next...