Les Miserables turns Victor Hugo's novel into a musical sung from beginning to end, following an escaped convict, the policeman who pursues him across decades, and the students who die on a Paris barricade. It is long, serious, and among the most successful pieces of theatre ever written.
The draw is the score and the voices. This is a singers' show above everything else, and several of its songs have left the theatre entirely and are known by people who have never seen it. Casting rotates across long runs, and the principal roles are demanding enough that alternates are scheduled for some performances, so the performers on a given night are not fixed by your ticket date.
Staging differs between productions. The original used a revolving stage that let scenes turn into one another; later versions replaced it with projections drawn from Hugo's own artwork. Both are built to be seen straight on and slightly elevated, where the crowd scenes and the barricade read as complete pictures rather than as clusters of people. That makes central seating in the front of the upper tier a strong value choice.
It runs close to three hours with an interval, which is long by any standard and worth planning around. The story takes in prostitution, suicide and the deaths of young characters, so it suits teenagers and adults rather than small children, regardless of how familiar the songs are.
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