Theatre 2016: Review Thirty Eight

Les Miserables, Queen's Theatre London. December 2016.

This one really is squeezing in at the the end of my theatre going year and was a post-Christmas treat for Mr Norfolkbookworm, me and my parents. In fact we all gave each other the the tickets as Christmas presents!

Les Miserables is always going to hold a special place in our family as this was the first London show my sister and I were taken to. I still remember Dad coming home with the tickets and the anticipation of our grand day out. I think I was about 13 and my sister 8 or 9... I've seen the show twice more since then, once in London and once on tour in Norwich but not recently.

We had a lovely day, seats in the stalls with a great view (they were listed as restricted view but as we are short only Mr N missed a tiny bit of projected writing and despite knowing the show inside out we were still all swept up in the drama of the piece.

Dad and I agreed that it doesn't matter how many times we've seen it neither of us warm to Cosette and always find her the weakest part. We also all agreed that the show is really about Javert and not Valjean!  Every word of every song could be heard clearly and the staging was effective - many times the scene changes were done to expertly that we were surprised to see that they had taken place!

We jumped at the gun fire and wept at the sad bits and all four of us came out of the theatre feeling astounded at how good something so familiar can be.

This is the 2nd time we've had a family theatre outing at Christmas time and Dad is already asking what we can see next year - a new tradition is born, but the bar has been set very high!