Finally, someone turned Victor Hugo’s epic historical novel into a show! Idiot/savant clown duo Stepdads were always the right people to do it, though it’s funny that no-one ever tried this before.
Luke Rollason and Tom Penn, our Stepdads, introduce and corral the show between assorted and very brilliant guest performers, many of whom have also performed hereabouts this weekend. This bank holiday at SpiegelGardens, programmed by Ellie BW and Ben Alborough of Leibenspeil, is the Weekend of Weird, and Stepdads’ Les Mis is therefore the perfect, condensed, hyper-bomb of bizarre.
Penn and Rollason have been performing together a long time, and their chemistry is superlative. Here Rollason is the straight man / Javert; Penn the very playful, bread-hungry criminal troubadour and chaos monkey Jean Valjean.
Rollason can get a laugh from a single glance or grimace, while Penn busies himself destroying everything, including the scenery and his own costume.
In between, various alternative comedy greats and will-be-greats get their five minutes, each playing a different character from this great French novel that has been never been attempted in a theatre before.
How much the guests shoehorn their own usual act into their character is entirely left to them. And so we have: Joz Norris – fresh from his own Hugh Jackman is The Phantom of the Opera – playing the narrator as a ludicrous, prancing, hammy menace; Ben Alborough, fresh from his own turn as Terry Wogan, as the Bishop very hurriedly converting the entire room to Catholicism (which means your correspondent is now a DOUBLE-CATHOLIC); Anna Leong-Brophy using clingfilm and the spirit of a long-dead relative to inhabit Fantine; and A&E Comedy playing a brilliant, rabble-rousing pair of innkeepers handing out rats on sticks.
If that sounds breathless, it’s supposed to – the sheer number of guest acts gives the whole affair the feel of a blancmange that could collapse at any moment.
This just adds to the fun, though, as guest acts flail around trying to keep to time, and our hosts return every so often to give us the clowning repetition we crave.
A special mention must go to Rob Duncan, for playing the director of a rival (who knew?) Les Miserables running in the West End, and especially to Rob Duncan’s real-life mum, whose utter confusion at being on stage in front of a packed tent of people is genuinely adorable to behold.
Everyone here is fabulous, be it Lil Wenker playing two characters at once, replete with half-drawn moustache, Michael Brunström as the entire concept of revolution, or self-proclaimed “flop-star” Alice Ella performing a beautiful rendition of a song that definitely isn’t in the musical Les Mis, not that that matters in the slightest.
This is a fever dream of joy and madness, and I expect it to be even more crazy (a good thing) by the time it is performed at Edinburgh this summer.
Reviewed on 23rd May
