Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Back to Les Miserables

This:


is the very nice, comfortable and acoustically great theatre at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, where my wife and I saw them putting on the ever popular Les Miserables today. 

I see it's been 6 years since I wrote my extensive post on the show (and Victor Hugo), after seeing it in for the first time in its movie version.  (I'll pat myself on the back - it's great reminding myself sometimes of what I found out in previous research on a topic.)

After that, I saw the show live at QPAC, and noted that I found it more moving in parts than the movie.

Well, increasing familiarity seems to be making it worse for me, as now I feel on the verge of tears every (I don't know) 10 minutes of this show. One song*, particularly well sung, did cause tears, but I think it was manfully hidden from knowledge of everyone in the theatre, wife included.

I could just be succumbing to the tendency of older men to cry more easily, although that's not exactly an idea I welcome.  I was thinking often during the show of the Hong Kong residents singing Do You Hear the People Sing as a protest song over recent weeks, and was very much hoping I would not come out of the theatre to hear news of major military against them.   Maybe these thoughts kept me more emotional than normal.

In any event, as you imagine, a show put on by enthusiastic young music students should be pretty high quality, and it was.  Tickets were about half the cost of the cheapest seats in a professional show too.  I must watch out in future for what other musicals they put on each year.

Update:  don't think I previously linked to this blog summary of the real life events the second half of the musical is based around. 

* not that anyone's asking, it was Bring Him Home in the second half. 

No comments: