Soap Operetta

Some excellent secondary performances provide sparks within this sugary melodrama. Aymee Garcia and J.P. Dougherty continually steal the show in robustly wicked turns as the Thénardiers, the Sweeney Todd­ish couple who start out as Cosette's hired guardians and end up lumpen rogues. Not only that, but their daughter, Eponine, as portrayed in a brief but smoldering performance by Sutton Foster, is a far more compelling figure than her white-bread counterpart, Cosette. All of Cosette's "suffering," after all, comes and goes early in Act 1, while Eponine, who vainly pines for Marius in her raggedy clothes and street diction, evokes genuine pathos throughout. Even the show's famed silent character, production designer John Napier's hulking Parisian barricade, recalls nothing more than one of those theme bars where the junk from half a dozen attics has been attached to the walls and ceiling.

LES MISéRABLES HAS EVERYTHING we high-minded critics in the alternative press love to trash: a simplistic storyline, mushy histrionics in place of ideas, flashy stage effects and, above all, financial success -- producer Cameron Mackintosh couldn't have made money faster had he Xeroxed it. Like Miss Saigon, Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, this is one of Mackintosh's platinum franchises, a traveling culture circus that comes to town with its own shock battalion of vendors, who transform theater lobbies into gift shops selling CDs, posters, T-shirts and key chains. It's probably the show's profane profitability that most irks its detractors -- Les Misérables is not just a commercial spectacle, it's a creature of crass marketing, something you'd expect to have sprung from the brain stem of a Donald Trump.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with reducing a novel into a stage musical, no more than it's a crime for theater to turn a profit. It's a matter, in the end, of how seriously the adapters take their source material. Locally, for example, the Modern Artists Company's Plato's Symposium, as staged by David Schweizer, also moved Socrates into the realm of pop culture, but only so that an ancient message could be translated to us across a gulf of eons -- we never felt that author or audience was being shortchanged. With Cats, Les Misérables and other cogs in the Mackintosh machine, we're constantly aware of the retailing and caramelizing of literature and history. And that alone should be enough to send us to the barricades. LES MISÉRABLES | By ALAIN BOUBLIL & CLAUDE-MICHEL SCHÖNBERG | Adapted from the novel by VICTOR HUGO | Music by SCHÖNBERG | Lyrics by HERBERT KRETZMER | At the AHMANSON THEATER, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown | Through February 12