Les Misérables: The Arena Spectacular review – an irresistible, 40th anniversary love letter

The Guardian

02-05-2025

If any musical deserves the arena treatment, it's Les Misérables. Hear me out! Like the best pop and rock music gigs, Les Mis is stacked with emotional bangers, from top to bottom. From almost the very beginning of its life on stage, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil's adaptation of Victor Hugo's brick of a novel has presented its music in concert. The show is sung-through – even the exposition – and when you have a cast of musical theatre performers that are strong as both actors and singers, the emotional connection remains, even in an arena setting.
This 'arena spectacular' version is sung to the back of the house by an international cast from Les Mis productions past and present. There are some cuts to the score to help this famously long show move along (it used to run for over three hours, until cost-cutting in later productions trimmed it down to two hours and 50 minutes), while keeping the glorious numbers the people really want: I Dreamed a Dream, Stars and One Day More. The orchestra, under the direction of Adrian Kirk, sounds rich and full. The concert lighting turns revolutionaries into rock stars. Those leitmotifs and melodies land like gifts. The performers have tears in their eyes. We have tears in our eyes.
There's Jean Valjean (Alfie Boe on opening night, also played on tour by Killian Donnelly), breaking his parole to start life over a free man. There's Fantine (Rachelle Ann Go), cruelly stomped on by circumstance. There's Javert (Michael Ball on opening night, also played on tour by Bradley Jaden), a man who so believes in law and order that he calls stars 'sentinels'. There are the students who fight and die for the revolution – see Enjolras (James D Gish), vibrating with righteousness, and Marius (Jac Yarrow), who takes one look at Cosette (Beatrice Penny-Touré) and falls head over heels. There's Eponine (Shan Ako), longing for Marius and dying in his arms. And of course, the scheming Thénardiers (Matt Lucas and Helen Walsh, stepping in for Marina Prior on opening night), trying to get a little audience participation going.
But look closer, Les Mis super-fans (if you're not one of them, you'll know them at your performance – they're the ones who scamper down to collect the scraps of Valjean's torn-up ticket). The cast is stuffed with past Grantaires and Feuillys and Courfeyracs and Factory Girls, these featured and supporting players lovingly compiled in YouTube celebrations.
This is an irresistible, 40th anniversary love letter to the show that is so many people's first favourite musical, made for the fans who have passed it on to their children, or who play the ensemble numbers for singalongs at house parties, or who lovingly collect cast albums and trivia (or all of the above).
That everyone is completely, fully, gorgeously committed is what makes it work. They have to be: you simply cannot approach the material half-heartedly, which directors James Powell and Jean-Pierre Van Der Spuy clearly understand. If you take one second to detach from Les Mis's gorgeous, enormous, bleeding heart, it all feels a bit silly and over-dramatic. Rush the tempo too much and you could break the spell. Suffer an awkward scene transition and you start to remember that some of these characters are pretty thin and the ending feels like a bit of a slog towards the finish line (OK, that part still happens here).
But for most of its runtime, this Les Mis, an 'arena spectacular' of all things and at the ICC Sydney of all places, just works. This company gets you right in that sweet spot when their voices carry up to the rafters. Do you hear the people sing? I did, and it was magical.
Les Misérables: The Arena Spectacular is on at the ICC Theatre now, then Melbourne's Rod Laver Arena from 14 May and Brisbane's Entertainment Centre from 28 May.