Les Miserables

Sometimes the reviewer is left with nothing to do but bay at the moon. So be it

Sometimes the reviewer is left with nothing to do but bay at the moon. So be it. When this reviewer first saw Trevor Nunn's production of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg's musical adaptation of Victor Hugo's massive novel at the Barbican in London in 1985, he found it tediously overlong and seriously undramatic, with generally dreary music and utterly banal lyrics (surprisingly penned by Herbert Kretzmer, a drama critic who ought to have known better).

Now, almost 14 years and millions of box-office pounds later, it is back in Dublin and, good to report, Colm Wilkinson is back with it. But the show is no more exciting now than it was then.

It remains a grey, grim, grossly sentimentalised tabloid version of a major and complex book, its plot a mere skeleton of the original with not a shred of human flesh or spirit left on it.

Only two characters have the opportunity to establish any significant characterisation: Jean Valjean (Wilkinson in fine voice and with a commanding presence) and his pursuer, the policeman Javert (Belfast's Peter Corry, also in fine voice but lacking the tortured obsession which his 1985 predecessor brought to the part).

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The rest must make do with caricature and, in this, John Kavanagh and Anita Reeves as the villainous Thenardiers are suitably over the top as they thread their way through the sub-plot of the Parisian underworld.

Carmen Cusack manages well to make Fantine wanly touching while Bobbie Chatt provides a pert Cosette as her orphaned daughter.

Matt Rawle's student, Marius, who falls in love with Cosette is suitably upright and Alex Sharpe is the lively and tragic Eponine with a notably fine voice. Myles Buckley has some lively moments as young Gavroche on the barricades.

The singing is generally excellent by all the cast and Peter McCarthy conducts a good orchestra as well as the music will allow.

John Napier's settings move with monumental ease on and off the large revolve (if only it did not revolve quite as much as it has to!) but it conveys no sense of time or place, no more than the book or music do. And that's enough baying at the moon.

The show was rapturously received by its huge audience and will doubtless continue in exactly the same vein until its close on May 15th.

The triumph, one suspects, lies more in its marketing than in its material.

Booking: (01) 8363633.