nixsight

I love a good musical, me. I also really like Girl One’s family, and having stuff done for me.

A couple of weeks back – on Saturday 16/05/2009 – I experienced a perfect confluence of these three things, when Girl One and I went to London on a day-trip – long arranged by the Girl herself, and all but forgotten by me – to see Les Miserables at Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue with her parents, sister and brother in law.

It was a relatively early weekend start for us – and coming just a week after the lack-of-sleep fest of the Bristol Con the week before, I’ve found I’m still recovering a couple of weeks later. Still, early or no, we managed to get to Waterloo around 10.30, only a little bedraggled and hungry.

We actually met up with the others in Bethnal Green, at the V&A Museum of Childhood, which was somewhere I’d probably never have thought to visit myself, because I’m stupid like that – I love galleries and museums whenever I do visit them, but the fact that they seem like such constant, static places in abstract means that it never seems all that urgent to get to them, to me.

This particular museum is running a special exhibition at the moment, though, which had drawn us as a group to the venue – Snozzcumbers and Frobscottle! The Wonderful World Of Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake has been running from the 2nd of May, and will be up until the 6th of September.

The museum is a beautiful, open and light space, and as such not really like many of the museums in my mind’s eye at all – and geared toward children and young families, most of the exhibits are low to the ground and well-spaced. There’s a lot of interactivity built in to many of the displays, too – it turns out one never actually grows out of distorting mirrors, nor playing with stickle bricks, for example – and nowhere is this more evident than in the Dahl/Blake area.

The guest exhibition is in it’s own annex, and introduced via one of the only ceiling-high features in the building – a giant, stuffed BFG. Well, more accurately, it’s the BFG’s legs, and scattered around are lovingly recreated scale replicas of props from Blake drawings from the book, including tactile removable snozzcumbers.

The walls contain dozens of Quentin Blake’s original drawings, from several of Dahl’s books, and from sketch stage to finished work. I didn’t realise how many of them I’d remember so clearly from childhood memory! That focus on interaction, education and engagement is obvious in every part of the exhibit, with informative displays scattered among the items, several areas dedicated to reading and drawing, and well-thumbed copies of Dahl’s books all over the place.

My favourite display was probably a row of samples from original Dahl notes to final published, Blake illustrated page, with all of Blake’s development work, for a sequence from “The Twits“. As well as seeing the evolution of a story I’ve known since childhood from brainfart to the finished article I grew up with, the display created an impression, like the rest of the exhibition, of Blake’s true and vital place in the creation of those works, and the symbiotic creative relationship the two had with each other.

The rest of the museum was involving, too – I tried to maintain focus around the childcare-through-the-ages bits, because they were extremely well collected and interesting, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the areas with toys and games that appealed the most. And as nice as it was seeing what kids played with before my own childhood, or since, it was finding the stuff that I remembered from my own youth that was the most exciting.

The selection was pretty broad, and interestingly the only real omission was Lego – they had one of the tiny pre-made vehicle boxes from the early nineties, but nothing else. It’s a pretty important toy, and other construction brands were well-serviced, so I can only assume that there was some practical reason why they didn’t make more of it, like the fact that the toy already has museums or theme parks of it’s own. Any ideas?

Lunch was shop-bought sarnies – or sushi in my case – in Covent Garden, on some steps, with some pigeons. Tasty, and a good opportunity to watch London – or at least tourists – pass by.

I’m not a big fan of street-theatre so I’m no great judge, but it strikes me that if you get a license to perform in one of the bigger areas, and you’re a mime-oriented act, it’s a good idea if your act is actually comprehensible to the passers-by. Beyond that, it strikes me that a lot of the people performing in the area have made a living out of padding out fairly straightforward acts, and fair play to them – at the very least, the ability to engage and handle large and unpredictable pedestrian audiences should be rewarded.

Anyway, we were due for a 2.30pm performance of “Les Miserables”, so we didn’t hang around for long before it was off to Shaftesbury Avenue.

Though I’ve seen a few musicals live now, and I’d seen this particular one before in Southampton, I’ve never been in the stalls before, and was a little perturbed at first at how enclosed and cosy it was. Being at ground level to the stage – and relatively close – is great for bands or stand-up, but I’m used to seeing musicals from a distance, and didn’t know how well the show’s more epic excesses would hold up when seen from such an intimate angle. On first impression with the opening number, it gives the peculiar feeling of a much smaller production.

As it turned out, that really wasn’t a problem – barring the fact that from our spot, we couldn’t read the rare title cards, and when the action reached the very top of the amazing set – as it does two or three times during the show’s battle for the barricade – we were having to crane forward a little to see what was going on.

In fact, I found that the quieter, more character driven scenes in the show really benefitted from this more personal vantage, which is handy because the really impressive sets don’t get wheeled out until after the groundwork for the plot has been set, and poignance and nuance could have been lost amid all that lovely chaos.

The performance was great – I already have a deep fondness for some of the songs, and the central plot of the fugitive Jean Valjean on the run – only exposed to the authorities by his abiding sense of goodness and loyalty to an innocent – and his relentless pursuer – the honourable, resourceful and dutiful Javert – is kinda timeless. It’s also the source of some of the more impressive acting and vocal performances, from David Shannon and Earl Carpenter, and the two characters are the most consistently sympathetic in the show.

Not quite so strong was the sometimes shrill Fantine, who is prominent early on but thankfully not in most of the play, or the often insipid Cosette, played by “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?” runner-up Leanne Dobinson.

Cosette causes a narrative problem for me, in that she is the emotional crux of several of the storylines, but we’re never really given much - beyond her oblivious innocence and inaction - to explain why any of the other characters are so obsessed with her. This becomes especially evident when seen alongside much more spunky, arguably more engaging, strong and indomitable women like Eponine, who is her closest analogue in the plot. I know the untouched beauty, “love at first sight”, and the unrequited love of the reliable friend are all staples of entertainment media, but that doesn’t make them all that much easier to swallow.

As such, it’s difficult to blame Dobinson for the lack of real work she gets to do on stage, and she acquits herself well with what she gets, but it’s really Nancy Sullivan as Eponine who does the best work, with a warm and heartbreaking performance. Also, she’s cute as hell.

The other slight glitch for me was that without any pre-existing historical knowledge, the larger background conflict of the student uprising and its subsequent quashing by the authorities sat awkward, this time around. There’s plenty to be said throughout the show about class and status in society, and how the low co-exist or don’t with the higher-up, but this tends to work better through the ongoing trials of Valjean and his inability to escape from his past status, and the pragmatic, cynical approach in the often hilarious and near-the-knuckle exploits of Eponine’s parents the Thenardiers, played with vigour and sleaze by Jimmy Johnston and Jackie Marks.

What isn’t very clear is how sympathetic you are supposed to be toward the revolutionaries. You’re obviously supposed to feel a bit roused by their idealistic rhetoric, and feel a little anxious when it’s apparent how outclassed they are, but working out what exactly it is they stand for, when you realise that they are for the most part upper-class students slumming it with the downtrodden and have just assumed they know what is best for the citizenry, just like the authorities they oppose, is problematic. Their smug certainty also makes it a little hard not to feel like they sort of have it coming when, of course, it does come, and personally my sadness was entirely for the poor street-dregs who get swept up in the cause with not enough sense of self-preservation to know any better.

Actually, I choose to look at that whole area of the show as a deliberate effort to get the audience to question their own loyalties, rather than just take the revolution at face value, but I don’t know if this is the most objective view – I may just be bringing my own slice of middle-class guilt to the table, here.

But anyway, the show was particularly awesome, and it was good to see it in a new light, from a new vantage point.

It was also lovely to visit with Girl One’s family, who made the occassion sufficiently exciting – I am an innately cold fish about such events, and need other people’s enthusiasm to infect me – and it felt good to make a day of it, and still be home in time for an evening on the sofa with the girl and pup and TV.

Early starts are like time-machines in that way – time gets bendy around them.