Play Review

The play that I viewed was called Les Miserables. I saw the play on the 24th in the black box theatre. I really enjoyed the play and noticed a lot of the themes presented by the actors. I enjoyed the music and the singing and I felt like the main characters did an excellent job with their parts.

The plot of this play starts out with the main character named Jean Valjean. He is in a prison camp and is basically a slave. What happened is he is able to go on paroll. When he went to the city he ended up staying a a priest house. He stole some of the silver and was caught by a briars and was going to send him back to the prison camp, but the priest lies for him so that he can be free. The priest instructs Jean Valjean to use the silver to help him start his life again. The next scene we fast forward about 10 years and the scene is about a woman named Fantine. She is a single mother with a child who is sick named Cossette. She struggles to pay the bills and gets fired. Later, she is close to dying and she asks Jean Valjean to take care to Cossette. Meanwhile, he has turned himself in to Javert who has been hunting him for the last ten years. Valjean is the mayor of the town and everyone likes him. He takes care of Cossette and gives her to a family who treats her very poorly. Years after that he finds Cossette and takes her away from the family who he gave her to. Cossette goes and lives with Valjean and they go back on the run from Javert. Later in the play Javert is still hunting Valjean. He is determined to find him and take him back to prison. Cossette is now older and Valjean is getting older and tired. They want to stop running away and Cossette falls in love with Marious who is apart of this revolution against the government. Valjean helps the revolution while Javert tries to betray them. They want to kill him and Valjean asks that he is allowed to deal with Javert. He had the opportunity to kill Javert but instead lets him free. Javert wonders why he does this. Later Valjean finds out about Cossette being in love with Marious. He prays to God that Marious is kept safe during the fight. As the battle begins, Marious is shot and Valjean takes him a way from the fight and saves his life. Along the way he comes across Javert. He wants to arrest Valjean but somehow he lets him go because Marious was dying at the time. At this point, Javert has a reality check with himself and realizes that Valjean is not a bad person but that he is like a saint. Javert feels so upset that he kills himself. Later in the play Valjean wants to leave Cossette and let her live her life happily with Marious and he wants to tell her the truth about how he went to prison and his whole life story.  So he writes it down on paper and gives it to Cossette so that she knows the truth about Valjean. Cossette and Marious get married and they return to see Valjean. At this point Valjean is ready to leave and he dies shortly after he gives Cossette the story. This is how the play ends.

One of the themes that I felt was present all the time was that people make mistakes but that is not what defines them. Valjean shows this them throughout the play. In the beggining of the play we see a criminal and by the end we see an honestly all around great person. Valjean made a mistake early in his life and he learned that it was wrong. So what he did was he picked himself up and changed his personality and his values and became a great person.

My favorite actor in the play was the person who played Jean Valjean. She did a great job of shows emotion and I could tell that she knew her part very well. I thought she was the best actor in the show.
She was able to show all of the emotions that I imagined in my head. In the last scene was Valjean dies it was so dramatic and very serious and I was in the moment the entire time because of the music and the acting skills. The only thing that kept this from me thinking that it was real life was that it was singing instead of regular talking. Otherwise I could have thought that this actually happened.

Overall I really enjoyed the play and I would definately see it again. The actors did a great job and the stage crew, the director and the musicians. This was one of the best plays I have ever seen.