AD Helps Me See Between The Lines
The French adjective misérable means grotesque, destitute, pitiful, despicable, poor. As a noun: a wretch, a pauper.
Victor Hugo’s novel-turned-musical Les Misérables announces the bottom of an inherent caste system in the title itself. Every character in the story is a caricature of misery according to the 19th century French Catholic lens: prisoners, rebels, thieving innkeepers. The cockroaches that elite society wished to keep on the ground, or better, underground.
Look down are the first words we hear in the musical. The entire opening number hammers that phrase in repetition. Circumstantially in the scene, prisoners sing a survival chant. Functionally, the musical commands the audience: Look down. Look down your nose. Pay attention—for three hours—to a motley collection of human beings in the lowest social tier, or in the circles of social hell.
I’d love to know: did the composer-lyricist consciously craft their musical adaptation to begin as a double entendre? For the latest creative team involved, were the scenic and lighting designers clued into the lyrics “look down?” Was that a directorial mantra handed out to every department, including costumes? How else would they all have arrived at and collaboratively developed a cohesive product with that clear through-line?
After decades of knowing this musical inside and out, I put those misérable and downcast pieces together for the first time while preparing to deliver the live audio description at STG’s Paramount Theatre last week. Thanks to a subtle lighting cue, I discovered that the performance begins below deck, inside the belly of a boat. This tipped me toward a longer trail of clues, a clear pattern, that the current national tour of Les Mis had designed its visual metaphors based on a concept of social and moral strata.
As an audio describer, it’s my job to say what I see. Once I notice something symbolically woven into the work, I can’t avoid saying it.
The downcast motif appears most literally in these locales: below decks of a galley, the lower floor of a factory, a basement hideout, the sewer system. A perilous fall from one’s high horse—er, bridge.
Then things shift from blatant to subtle.
Even when characters interact at ground level or above, the staging visually maintains a dramatic tension between high and low: three-story buildings, balconies, streetlamps, winding staircases, a judge’s bench, rooftops, a grand chandelier, a bridge, a starry sky.
The vertical axis is never totally empty or neutral. With the help of projected images and peripheral ensemble characters, what’s staged in vertical space usually symbolizes a measure of status. That is, how the characters are in relationship with social status, if not their own moral standing.
Even in the soliloquies! A lone character is rendered low onstage because the space is lit enough around them (compared to an old-fashioned follow spot), so they shrink in the vast, high, empty surrounds. Levels are constantly at play, both in the absence of set pieces and within the actors’ physical movements—which appears to be deliberate choreography of cowering, kneeling, bowing, and rising.
In this fresh take on the musical (compared to the original 1980s staging), every location and interaction follows a pattern of tiers.
With one exception.
The scene introducing the plot-driving silver candlesticks has one level. No staircase, no elevation, no hierarchy. Valjean and the bishop are on the same plane. With a realistic ratio of wall height and simple furniture, and only a whisper of “look down” hinted by a beckoning, diagonal beam of bright light and its architectural presence cast through a window onto the floor. (It’s the same intense white glow that the lighting designer uses throughout the production to indicate heavenly ascension—another nerdy blog article forthcoming re: Paule Constable’s design!) In this pivot point of the narrative arc, the man on parole and the holy man are equals.
How? Following a series of interactions with hardworking, everyday citizens, wherein Valjean ends up beaten or shoved to the floor—viscerally taught that the social order remains firm (and cruel)—the bishop flatly contradicts that. Valjean flinches, on guard, as if another blow is coming, because that’s what he knows. Instead, the bishop looks down at Valjean hunched on the ground and says—paraphrasing—”I invite you to join me. You need not hang out in the dirt. Stand up, you’re more than that.”
The bishop’s mercy isn’t just kindness. Against the backdrop of every other scene in this production, it reads as a rupture in the order of the world, demonstrating what’s possible. What choice we always have. And it helps highlight Javert’s tragic self-conviction of his mighty righteousness.
The first candlestick scene is the single deviation from the production’s visual motif—until the end, when the same ascetic furniture returns around the candlesticks for the completion of the circle.
One metaphor more: the barricade. Middle and upperclass idealistic students stage an uprising. They climb up and down a chaotic bramble of a makeshift, porous wall in order to overcome an existing social order, one blocking everyone. The barricade is a physical obstruction between where they’re at and what they want (e.g. more equitable distribution of wealth). Did I stumble into an accidental book analysis of Hugo’s novel? I’ve never read it.
The revival of Les Mis uses the theatrical medium much better than this other Broadway musical!
If Victor Hugo and our contemporaries Schönberg & Boublil intended all this symbolic messaging, now we have a staged iteration of Les Misérables that makes sure you can see it.
And if you require audio description to see it in your mind’s eye, I’m here and ready for you.
P.S. The title of this blog article is another double entendre. The purpose of audio description (AD) is to transform nonverbal activity (i.e. gestures, facial expressions, scene changes) and other visuals into spoken words. AD is delivered in the pauses between spoken or sung lines of dialogue to avoid overlapping with the performance.