Why does Trump like ‘Les Mis'? The many meanings of the megamusical.

Washington Post

a day ago

Claudia Salazar had the crazy idea to produce 'Les Miserables' in Venezuela in 2019, at the height of the demonstrations raging against the authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro, when violence scarred the streets and citizens struggled to find food and medical care.
'I decided that my biggest protest was to put on 'Les Mis' in the country that was living 'Les Mis,'' recalls Salazar, now 39.
During rehearsals, the company lost power for several days; the threat of violence sent the director fleeing home to London for a bit. But when the show finally went up at the Teatro Teresa Carreño in Caracas, it sold out most of its 12-performance run.
'They came from the streets to the stage,' she says of the cast. 'They knew exactly what they were portraying to the audience.'
'Siento libertad,' one audience member said as she left the theater: I feel freedom.
'Les Miserables' has sparked all sorts of feelings in the 130 million people who have seen it over the past 40 years, since the musical based on Victor Hugo's 1862 epic novel first opened on the London stage in 1985. 'I love the songs, I love the play,' President Donald Trump proclaimed last week ahead of its return to the Kennedy Center Wednesday through July 13, the first Broadway musical tour to arrive since his takeover of the institution. Trump has organized a fundraiser for the center around the first night's performance, with guests paying up to $2 million. A chunk of the main cast plans to boycott.
Some may hear a dissonance between the show's values and Trump's; for others in this left-leaning city, the three hours in the Opera House could be portal to a better world, like how 'The West Wing' became a balm to liberals during Trump's first term. But theatergoers across the political spectrum have long seen themselves in the populist uprising at the center of the story — and with its romance and heroism, 'Les Mis' can appeal to the hearts and minds of just about anyone.
The tour's last stop before D.C. was at the Stranahan Theater in Toledo, a Democratic stronghold of an increasingly red state, where some theatergoers at Saturday's matinee found their politics reinforced.
'I first saw 'Les Mis' in the late 1980s on Broadway when my friends and I were the 'angry men' because so many people were dying of AIDS — and every time I've seen it again it has reminded me of how important resistance is,' recalled retired hairdresser Will Lawson, 68, of Toledo. 'You can't watch it today and not relate it to the cruelty of the current administration toward people who are undocumented, can you?'
Jerri Carpenter, 50, a ride-share driver from Milan, Mich., saw parallels between the protagonist, Jean Valjean, and Trump, in having been 'wrongly accused, never given the benefit of the doubt, constantly hounded and chased by the Democrats.'
The lyric 'the blood of the martyrs will water the meadows of France' resonated with retired autoworker Grant Parson, 66, who lives near Perrysburg, Ohio, and said he volunteered for Vice President JD Vance's 2022 Senate campaign.
'That's pretty close to that line about the tree of liberty needing blood, isn't it?' he asked. (Thomas Jefferson's 1787 quote 'The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants,' has long been a right-wing slogan.) The MAGA movement is about the 'angry people' taking back power and making the world more fair for everyone, Parson said.
Donna Winchester of Toledo agreed. 'I'm sure the liberals and the fake-news media will say that 'Les Mis' is anti-Trump,' she said, while rolling up the windows of a Jeep adorned with stickers mocking 'wokeness' and LGBTQ pride. 'I think we can all agree the songs are great,'
These days, when the prisoners sing, 'Look down, look down, you're here until you die,' some on the left might remember the administration sending Kilmar Abrego García and 260 other Salvadorans and Venezuelans to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center. Others, on the right, may recall the defendants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner" in jail. The show's student uprising may bring to mind law enforcement's clashes with the Los Angeles protests of Trump's administration immigration crackdown.
When the impoverished Fantine is forced to give up her child or gets sick, some might think of Trump's big tax bill, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will shift resources from the bottom 10th of income earners to the top 10th, with 8.6 million people losing access to health insurance. (Even in the 'Sesame Street' parody, a Frenchman named Jean Bon-Bon, brought to life by Cookie Monster, learns to share his cookies.)
'The values of 'Les Miserables' are completely antithetical to the current administration,' says David Bellos, a Princeton University professor and author of 'The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables.' The story, he says, 'is a plea for charity and mercy. It shows you that the law when applied without mercy or charity is cruel and absurd.'
Its anthem 'Do You Hear the People Sing?,' sung by the protesters in the 1832 anti-monarchist student uprising in Paris (not the French Revolution, as historians will remind you), has been borrowed by a global multitude of protest groups, including in Belarus, the Philippines, Turkey and South Korea. Tom Hooper, director of the 2012 movie adaptation, compared the plotline to Occupy Wall Street. A 2014 modern-dress production in Dallas alluded to the Arab Spring, among other movements.
In 2002, the Chinese government invited the show to be the nation's first full-scale Western musical, in part because Victor Hugo is so popular there. But after Hong Kong protest movements deployed the show's stirring anthem in 2014 and 2019, Chinese authorities reportedly blocked the tune from streaming services.
Trump used the song as his entrance music to a 2016 Miami rally, where a screen graphic behind him read 'Les Deplorables' — a scoff at Hillary Clinton for calling a segment of Trump supporters a 'basket of deplorables.' The show's producer Cameron Mackintosh and other copyright owners released a statement saying that they 'were not asked for permission and did not authorize or endorse usage … and have never done so for any of the songs from the musical for this or any other political event.' Nonetheless, Trump cued it up again for his 2022 announcement that he was running again, and the U.S. Army Chorus performed it at the White House Governor's Ball in February.
'President Trump is a virtuoso and his musical choices represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors when others often paint in pale pastels,' says Steven Cheung, White House communications director, in a statement. '… There is nobody more uniquely qualified to bring this country, and its rich history of the arts, back to prominence.'
Representatives from the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Army did not comment. The touring production declined interview requests for the cast and the current and original creative teams, and Mackintosh was unavailable for comment.
When asked about the show's politics in 2017, Mackintosh carefully toed the line. 'It's all about passionate beliefs,' the British producer told Washingtonian, 'which certainly on both sides of the divide is what's happening in your country and indeed in ours.'
Hugo's original 1862 novel was a phenomenon, and arguably helped inspire universal primary education and other liberal-minded initiatives. Working-class Parisians would band together to buy a single copy and spend evenings reading it aloud. But it was also so popular among Confederate soldiers that the Army of Northern Virginia came to call it, and themselves, 'Lee's Miserables.'
Salazar says that even Maduro loyalists appreciated her Caracas 'Les Mis.' His predecessor and mentor Hugo Chávez was a fan of the novel — a New Yorker story after his death quoted him as saying that socialism 'clicked for him' after he read it. 'They took it upon themselves to see, 'This is the 'Les Mis' we believe in. This is also our revolution,'' Salazar says, adding, 'That's the beauty of art. It belongs to all of us.'
Hugo witnessed the arrest of a man for stealing a loaf of bread — a poignant moment that inspired his singularly appealing protagonist Jean Valjean. The author imagined the man's struggle to get back on his feet after 19 years in prison; the pitiable peasant steals from a sympathetic bishop, who later shields him from the authorities. It inspires Valjean to become an 'honest man,' a businessman and mayor, displaying astonishing strength and generosity, even as he arouses the suspicions of an Inspector Javert against the backdrop of the student uprising.
'He's a bit of a Hercules, a bit of a Christ figure, a bit of an action hero and all the way through a moral hero,' says Bellos, the professor, whose book notes the existence of least 65 'Les Mis' screen versions — from silent film to anime — not to mention loose adaptations such as 'The Fugitive.'
The version that made its way to Broadway and regional theater around the world is propelled by the affecting songs composed by Claude-Michel Schönberg, notably 'I Dreamed a Dream,' which Anne Hathaway sang to win an Oscar and Aretha Franklin belted out at a Bill Clinton inauguration event. (Not everyone was enchanted: Barack and Michelle Obama bonded over their dislike for the show, she wrote in her memoir.)
'Frankly, it's pop music from the '80s, so it has an enduring quality,' says Jason Moore, who directed the a cappella movie 'Pitch Perfect' after a decade overseeing 'Les Mis' stage productions.
'The thing that's unifying about it is the spiritual message, the endurance of the human soul, the hope that is engendered by climbing toward the light,' he says, citing its climactic lyric: To love another person is to see the face of God.
'That's basically the whole show,' Moore says.
He observed that Latter-day Saints especially liked 'Les Mis,' and in the conservative city of Salt Lake City, auditions would attract several hundred actors, and audiences would applaud at the beginning of songs. 'It was like being at a god---- rock concert.'
'It was sort of a cathartic way for me to feel big, sweeping emotions a safer way,' recalls Melissa Juarez, 37, who grew up Mormon in rural Idaho and watched the 10th anniversary concert every Sunday for five years.
As an awkward teen, she identified with Eponine, who sings of her unrequited love for Marius in 'On My Own.' Now, as a parent, she relates to Valjean, who adopts Cosette and later carries a wounded Marius through the Paris sewers to save his life. 'He didn't want Cosette to be with Marius,' she says, 'but he is actively trying to protect him and sacrificing his life and health and well-being, because that's what he knows his daughter will appreciate.'
The original London production drew mixed reviews, but set designer John Napier remembers women leaving the first performance with mascara running down their cheeks.
'It makes you feel like a good person, a better person, to have watched it and listened to it and been moved by it, and have sympathy for the poor and dispossessed,' says Roger Allam, who originated Javert in London. 'I think that was a big hook for the audience and still is 40 years later.'
There was also Napier's sculptural set built around a turntable to accommodate the book's formidable array of characters. 'It was very much to do with bringing people into the foreground from out of the darkness,' he says. 'And it was magical.'
Not to mention the instantly iconic marketing poster, which Russ Eglin — the same designer behind the classic logos for 'Cats,' 'The Phantom of the Opera' and 'Miss Saigon' — adapted from the novel's Cosette illustration.
Almost from the start, the do-good ethos of 'Les Mis' put it at the center of fundraising efforts and cast activism — for the Amazon rainforest, for victims of the 1988 airline bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, and for Amnesty International, prompted by the Tiananmen Square massacre.
When the show came to the Kennedy Center in 1988, about 10 cast members worked in a shelter kitchen every Friday and invited 150 people experiencing homelessness to a matinee.
'I cried a lot because I have a little boy who's living with his father now and who I haven't always been such a good mother to,' said an unidentified 22-year-old woman, quoted in The Post. 'It made me want to run to a phone and call my son and tell him I'll do a lot better.'
Steve Friess contributed reporting from Toledo.