I’ve never experienced a production that forces me to feel the pain of humanity so much as Les Misérables. Hope crushed, love lost, children without the gift of innocence — all brushed with disease, desperation and despair. And death.
For some reason it feels perfectly normal to cry out loud when watching it. You can’t not feel the heartache. I felt it, literally, in my heart — a dull, steady ache for people I’ll never know and would never wish such pain and suffering upon.
Tonight I sat through the film in a theater with my wife and daughter, who brilliantly portrayed Fantine as a high school junior. She (my daughter) took us out to see it and had been patiently waiting as we sorted out our messy lives to make the time to go. The emotion of her watching a musical so dear to her, and to be away from the art that defines her livelihood, was a little Les Mis-ish in itself. She actually ended getting sick in the car with a migraine.
A part that stood out to me was Jean Valjean’s love for Cosette as her father. I feel the same love for both of my daughters, in both similar and different ways. A daughter is the greatest gift a man could ever ask for.