A Personal History of Les Miserables

 On this page, I write my last confession.

---

When I was a small child, I would dress up in my special fairy princess dress and my mother would put on the double-disc, 10th anniversary CD of Les Miserables and I would cartwheel alone around the living room, bouncing from piano stool to couch to carpet, singing my lungs out. Imagine a manic 8-year old in a sparkly pink tutu bellowing "THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS WILL WATER THE MEADOWS OF FRANCE!!!"

It must have been a terrifying thing to behold.

In hindsight, I feel like this explains a lot about who I am as a person.

I have known every single word of this musical for almost as long as I can remember.

---

When I was about nine, my primary school choir performed a comprehensive medley version of Les Miz, which opened with La Marseillaise (the French national anthem), sung in French.

Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!

More lines of freedom, bloodshed, glory. I think it was probably the first time I ever sang in another language. It was possibly even the first time that I realised other languages existed. Mum could speak pretty good high school French and she translated each line for me and told me what they meant. I remember being struck by the 'blood-stained flag being raised' and 'the blood of the impure watering the furrows'. Again, very heavy metal stuff. Marchons, marchons!

In this medley I played the role of Eponine, singing On My Own, wearing my mother's red beret. It was my first important solo role and it gave me the bug. More of this; more of this story through song, more of this glory, more of my voice ringing out in a chorus, more of this lifting-up-feeling, more of this forever.

---

When I was eleven, Mum took me to audition for the role of child-Cosette in Sydney's professional production of Les Miz which would be on at the Theatre Royal. Of the hundreds of little girls who auditioned, I made it to the last group of 21 finalists (this is such a well-worn boast of both my mother and myself that I feel I can say this sentence in my sleep). Needless to say I did not get the role and thus launch my career to musical theatre stardom (alas). Probably for the best.

But we went to see the show when it was on, and oh. My first professional musical experience.

Everything was heightened by the rush of my father not being able to find the tickets in his wallet as we were trying to enter the venue. I remember much stress and much frantic discussion at the box office window. Eventually they showed mercy on the four of us and let us in, just in time for us to take our seats before the lights went down. 

But finally, inside, in the darkness and blown away by the sound of a full orchestra and those opening chords. My first understanding of the importance of live music.

I specifically remember thinking very hard about certain lines during the factory segment of At the End of The Day. I think I knew in a very vague sense what prostitutes were - Mum must have had to explain Lovely Ladies for me at some point in my previous acquaintance with this musical - but it was the double entendres in this particular verse that tripped me up:

"Have you seen how the foreman is fuming today,
With his terrible breath and his wandering hands?
It's because little Fantine won't give him his way - 
Take a look at his trousers, you'll see where he stands."

At this point I leaned over to Mum and asked, in a child's whisper (and there is nothing louder than a child's whisper) "MUM, WHAT DOES THAT BIT MEAN??"

She hushed me and said something along the lines of, It just means that the Foreman likes Fantine but she doesn't like him back, now shhhh.

It must have been years and years later when I finally puzzled it out.

The other specific moment I remember from this show, which strikes me only now as impeccable foreshadowing, was the moment where adult Cosette and Eponine see each other through the garden gate, and there is just a second of recognition as they see each other there, through the iron bars of the past and the future.

Since I'd never seen it staged before, it was one of those realisations you could only have in the embodiment of it. There are no lines at that fraction of a moment, but I saw it. The Cosette of that performance was wearing a pale blue dress. I think their hands touched.

Every time, no matter how many times, every time I see this show I take something different from it. It is constantly new to me. Even then, already deeply familiar, it was also new.

---

Months and months later, Dad found the tickets - they had slipped through a tear in the fabric lining of his leather wallet and hid themselves there. I remember the exasperated chuckle in his voice as he told us about it.

---

When I was 14.

Oh, when I was 14. The agony and ecstasy of 14-year-old existence (hah).

When I was 14, my all-girls high school put on a production of Les Miz in partnership with our brother school.

I had been in a few musical productions by this point in the local musical society, and had been a card-carrying member of the school's chamber vocal group since Day 1, so obviously, I never even considered not being in it.

It's hard to know where to begin with this production. The ways in which it moulded my impressionable teenage brain cannot be understated. It was already that age of hyper-reality, where everything is felt so purely and intensely. Then throw teenage hormones and epic musical theatre into the mix, and it's a conflagration.

It brought me home to some of my closest lifelong friends. The Cos to my Ette - we shared the role of adult Cosette and alternated in the chorus on our other performance nights. My Eponine - our love for Marius eventually waned, but the two of us are in it for life.

Look, in our defense, when you're 14 it's hard not to fall head-over-heels for the first beautiful tenor voice that sings love songs to you. It wasn't our fault.

On the closing performance of our high school show, something very strange happened to me. As we sung the final words - Tomorrow Comes - I was suddenly, ecstatically, floating outside of my body, looking down on myself on the stage below, watching all of us sing. Just for a couple of seconds, it was like I existed as a vibration inside of the sound.

I didn't know what it was called at the time, but I know a bit more about it now. It was an out-of-body experience, and I've actually had them once or twice again after this time, though these other experiences were much more sedate and meditative. (This might sound kooky but there is quite a lot of interesting research on OBE's - I suspect my 14-year-old one was a combination of physical exertion hitting that top C, the audio stimulation of the chord, and sensory overload).

Tomorrow comes.

It demarcated my life into a clear before and after. It was the end of childhood and the start of something else.

(And part of this, maybe, is just the story that I tell myself now. But I won't ever forget what those few seconds felt like).

---

A decade or so down the track, we are performing Les Miz again with the local musical society. I am older now and realise that the quiet, understated despair of 'Turning' in Act II might be the most devastating number of the musical.

At the end of 'A Little Fall of Rain', I am standing sidestage to enter for Turning. Our Marius turns towards the back so that we can see his face, as he buries his floods of real tears in Enjolras' shoulder. It was so hard not to cry before walking on stage.

The performances for this show are held at the local community theatre, but our musical director was the music teacher at the old high school where our teenage production of the show was on. We have our sitzprobe in that old school hall, unchanged by the decade that had flowed around it, and I felt the years like a river. The smell of the dust and the quality of the light on the floor boards.

I was in my mid-20s and thought that I had come so far. I looked back on my overwrought teenage self with great compassion and great love.

---

Another decade (and change), and I am sitting here at 1:30am, unable to sleep, because I have once again been emotionally devastated and emotionally renewed by this story, this music, this show. This was the Arena Spectacular production, in which my exceptionally talented cousin played the oboe in the orchestra.

His solo after the final massacre on the barricades was transcendent. The voice of a single instrument, six thousand people sitting spellbound in a massive theatre, and we all held our breaths.

It was phenomenal.

I have seen countless versions of Les Miz, from the tiniest amateur show through mid-budget and to professional. I will never, ever, ever get sick of it. I will never see any version of it without crying. I will never not feel changed by it.

Because the central premise is right there, amidst all the bloodshed and the violence and the heartbreak and the hope and the glory:

To love another person is to see the face of God.

I am an atheist and this line moves me more than anything. When I look back at my own history with this story, this music, it is a history of love. An abundance of love: parental, familial, romantic, platonic, it is there in every possible facet and every shade in which love can be expressed, running throughout all of my decades and all of my selves.

That's why tomorrow comes. It's all about love.