Not Misérable: talented actors overpower sound issues at Rainbow Stage

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/07/2015 (3922 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A certain sense of disassociation takes place seeing Les Misérables under the Rainbow Stage dome in Kildonan Park.

The outdoor venue has always felt perfect for lighter, frothier musical fare. So the combination of Victor Hugo’s weighty, decades-spanning melodrama and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s richly bombastic musical score feels like an event more suited to a cushioned concert hall.

Seeing the show at Rainbow Stage feels a bit like watching Citizen Kane at a drive-in movie theatre.

But it’s easy to put such niggling disconnect aside, because, as always, Rainbow gives us the pleasure of seeing talented local actors stake claim to formidable theatre roles that aren’t necessarily available to them. Note Simon Miron having sordid fun with the role of the scavenging M. Thénardier (Master of the House), or young Meaghan Moloney’s plaintive rendition of young Cosette’s Castle on a Cloud. Take particular note of a luminous Paula Potosky as the doomed Fantine, taking authoritative ownership of Les’s Miz’s greatest hit, I Dreamed a Dream.

That is not to suggest the cast members from out of town didn’t hold their own. Taking centre stage was Aaron Ferguson as Jean Valjean, lending his soaring tenor to this heroic prisoner/fugitive/mayor/fugitive redux.

As his ruthless nemesis, that dubious moralist Insp. Javert, Kevin Aichele matches a necessarily commanding stage presence with a potent singing voice.

Their protracted duel takes them from a prison camp to a village where Valjean has built a respectable life, only to throw it away for the sake of saving a man from a cruel injustice.

Along the way, he effectively adopts the child Cosette from the dying Fantine, whom he has inadvertently wronged. More years pass, and Valjean must again face Javert during the Paris Uprising of 1832, a showdown complicated by the fact the adult Cosette (Colleen Furlan) has fallen in love with the fiery young revolutionary Marius (Matthew Fletcher, whose rendition of Empty Chairs at Empty Tables is especially lovely).

Director Marcia Kash negotiates the diverse elements of the musical — the intricately staged business attending Master of the House or the deathly still solo I Dreamed a Dream — with an overriding sense of elegance.

Brian Perchaluk’s set design gives audiences the feeling one might experience watching a magician make an elephant disappear. Giant, blocky set components give the illusion of stone walls and ramshackle barricades, all coming together or separating with graceful ease. Decades-long strife has never looked so good.

Speaking of decades-long strife, Rainbow’s drive-in movie-quality sound system continues to be problematic. Thursday evening, that was a particular affliction for actress Julie Lumsden, who valiantly sung her heart out in the role of Eponine despite a mike that cut in and out or backed her vocal work with an unpleasant white-noise fuzz.

Kudos to her. When it comes to exhibiting grace under adversity, Lumsden could teach Jean Valjean a thing or two.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca