Do You Hear The People Sing?

Recently, my sister and I got to go see Les Miserables at PPAC as a sort of Philosophy Club field trip. The title of this post is a song from the musical, and you’re likely to hear me singing, at least, as most of the songs are still stuck in my head. I read the book—or a very much abridged version—in English class last year, and I love theater, so I was really looking forward to going. It was even more amazing than I expected it to be. 

The play does a much better job of showing not only the main characters’ story, but the broader context of events than the abridgment we read did. Moreover, the music was fantastic. Musicals just get to me more than anything else—plays, books, movies, whatever—ever can, and I was crying for about two thirds of it. Not only did I see the story come to life, but I started to empathize with all the characters, from main characters like Jean Valjean and Fantine to minor ones like Gavroche, and even with whole classes of people.

It’s an effective play that can make your heart wrench over the fate of all the slum dwellers of Paris from two hundred years ago. Not that Les Mis is without a funny side. For instance, the Monsieur and Madame Thenardier, who are portrayed as evil parasites in the novel, become comically cheap and untrustworthy characters in the musical, though it glosses over none of their despicable actions. We saw it on Homecoming weekend, and while most of my friends were getting their pictures taken at the dance, my sister and I got ours taken with the Thenardiers after the performance. 

Part of Les Mis is the sad story of a group of passionate young students who attempt a rebellion to restore democracy to France, and so I couldn’t help but find the play applicable: with the final chords still ringing in our heads, we drove over to Burnside Park to talk to members of the Occupy Providence movement. The park had become a campground, not a barricade, and the movement is one of peaceful resistance, not of revolution. Still, the resolved and hopeful spirit of the protesters was much the same as that of the ABC in Les Mis.

They even had music: six or so people were playing African drums, and two danced. Whatever your politics, this is becoming an age of civil disobedience, and liberals and conservatives alike are taking to the streets. I’m not sure how many solutions we’ll find by simply protesting, but I think their purpose is more to call attention to a problem. If the government doesn’t hear us when we use our indoor voices at the ballot box, perhaps they will hear us when we shout in the streets. I’ve had two school assignments in the last week or so that require me to think about what it means to be an American, and I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s one of the things that’s best about our country: that we have the right to protest peacefully and thus don’t need to protest with violence.