Theatrical students in the Fine Arts Department at Churubusco High School are busy gearing up and practicing for their production of the Broadway smash musical, Les Miserables, which will be held on November 15, 16, 22 and 23.
Adapted from the popular novel by Victor Hugo, it is a powerful story of redemption, hope, sorrow, and love.
Dan Hile, CHS choir and music director, is the producer of Le Miserables, the smash Broadway hit that will be presented four different days in November at CHS.
The Saturday performances (Nov. 15 and 22) will begin at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday performances (Nov. 16 and 23) will begin at 2 p.m. Tickets are $8 each, and are available from any cast member.
Don’t miss it - order your tickets today. There’s a reason this is one of the longest-running plays on Broadway.
Call Dan Hile at the school at 693-2131 for more information.
The story of Le Mis:
Jean Valjean, released on parole after 19 years on the chain gang, finds that the yellow ticket-of-leave he must, by law, display condemns him to be an outcast. Only the saintly Bishop of Digne treats him kindly and Valjean, embittered by years of hardship, repays him by stealing some
Lee Blake will portray Valjean and Cassandra Petrie will play the part of Cosette.
silver. Valjean is caught and brought back by police, and is astonished when the Bishop lies to the police to save him, also giving him two precious candlesticks. After being forgiven by the kindly Bishop, Valjean decides to start his life anew.
Eight years later Valjean, having broken his parole and changed his name to Monsieur Madeleine, has risen to become both a factory owner and Mayor. One of his workers, Fantine, has a secret illegitimate child. When the other women discover this, they demand her dismissal. The foreman,
Waiting behind the curtain for his cue.
whose advances she has rejected, throws her out. Desperate for money to pay for medicines for her daughter, Fantine sells her locket, her hair, and finally, sells herself. Utterly degraded by her new trade, she gets into a fight with a prospective customer and is about to be taken to prison when the Mayor (Valjean) arrives and demands she be taken to a hospital instead.
The Mayor then rescues a man pinned down by a runaway cart. Javert is reminded of the abnormal strength of convict 24601 Jean Valjean, a parole-breaker whom he has been tracking for years, but who, he says, has just been recaptured. Valjean, unable to see an innocent man go to prison in his place, confesses to the court that he is prisoner 24601.
Valjean promises the dying Fantine to find and look after her daughter Cosette. Javert arrives to arrest him, but Valjean escapes.
Young Cosette has been lodged for five years with the Thenardiers who run an inn, horribly abusing the little girl while favoring their own daughter, Eponine. Valjean pays the Thernardiers to let him take Cosette away and takes her to Paris. But Javert is still on his tail…
Nine years later there is a great unrest in the city because of the likely demise of the popular leader General Lamarque, the only man left in the government who shows any feeling for the poor. The urchin Gavroche is in his element mixing with the whores and beggars of the capital. Among the street gangs is one led by Thernardier and his wife, which sets upon Jean Valjean and Cosette. They are rescued by Javert, who does not recognize Valjean until after he has made good his escape. The Thernardiers’ daughter Eponine, who is secretly in love with the student Marius, reluctantly agrees to help him find Cosette, with whom he has fallen in love.
One of the hand crafted props - a replica of an 18th Century style cart - for the musical, Les Miserables, sits outside the auditorium, awaiting placement on the stage.
A group of idealistic students prepare for the revolution they are sure will erupt on the death of General Lamarque. When Gavroche brings the news of the General’s death, the students, led by Enjolras, stream out into the streets to whip up popular support. Only Marius is distracted by thoughts of the mysterious Cosette.
Cosette is consumed by thoughts of Marius, with whom she has fallen in love. Valjean realizes that his “daughter” is changing very quickly but refuses to tell her anything of her past. In spite of her own feelings for Marius, Eponine sadly brings him to Cosette and then prevents an attempt by her father’s gang to rob Valjean’s house. Valjean, convinced it was Javert who was lurking outside his house, tells Cosette they must prepare to flee the country. On the eve of the revolution the students and Javert see the situation from their different viewpoints; Cosette and Marius part in despair of ever meeting again; Eponine mourns the loss of Marius; and Valjean looks forward to the security of exile. The Thernardiers, meanwhile, dream of rich pickings underground from the chaos to come.
The students prepare to build the barricade. Marius, noticing that Eponine has joined the insurrection, sends her with a letter to Cosette, which is intercepted at the Rue Plumet by Valjean. Eponine decides, despite what he has said to her, to rejoin Marius at the barricade.
The barricade is built and the revolutionaries defy an army warning that they must give up or die. Gavroche exposes Javert as a police spy. In trying to return to the barricade Eponine is shot and killed. Valjean arrives at the barricades in search of Marius. He is given the chance to kill Javert, but instead lets him go.
Cassandra Petrie, who plays the older Cosette, practices a song during rehearsal for Le Miserables.
The students settle down for a night on the barricade and, in the quiet of the night, Valjean prays to God to save Marius from the onslaught which is to come. The next day, with ammunition running low, Gavroche runs out to collect more and is shot. The rebels are all killed, including their leader, Enjolras.
Valjean escapes into the sewers with the unconscious Marius. After meeting Thernardier, who is robbing the corpses of the rebels, he emerges into the light only to meet Javert once more. He pleads for time to deliver the young man to a hospital. Javert decides to let him go and, his unbending principles of justice having been shattered by Valjean’s own mercy, he kills himself by throwing himself into the swollen River Seine. A number of Parisian women come to terms with the failed insurrection and its victims. Unaware of the identity of his rescuer, Marius recovers in Cosette’s care.
Valjean confessed the truth of his past to Marius and insists that after the young couple are married, he must go away rather than taint the sanctity and safety of their union. At Marius’ and Cosette’s wedding the Thernardiers try to blackmail Marius. Thernardier says Cosette’s “father” is a murderer and, as proof, produces a ring which he stole from the corpse in the sewers the night the barricades fell. It is Marius’ own ring, and he realizes it was Valjean who rescued him that night.
He and Cosette go to Valjean, where Cosette learns for the first time of her own history before the old man dies, joining the spirits of Fantine, Eponine and all those who died on the barricades.
About Victor Hugo:
Victor Hugo’s enormously successful career covered most of the nineteenth century and spanned both the Romantic and Realistic movements. A great poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, pamphleteer, diarist, politician, and moralist, Hugo was a man of immense passion and endless contradictions.
Hugo was born on February 26, 1802. His father, General Joseph Leopold Hugo, was the son of a carpenter who rose through the ranks of Napoleon’s citizen army. However, Victor’s mother decided not to subject her three sons to the difficulties of army life, and settled in Paris to raise them.
As a teenager, he fell in love with a neighbour’s daughter, Adele Foucher. However, his mother discouraged the romance, believing that her son should marry into a finer family. When his mother died in 1821, Victor refused to accept financial help from his father. He lived in abject poverty for a year, but then won a pension of 1,000 francs a year from Louis XVIII for his first volume of verse. Barely out of his teens, Hugo became a hero to the common people as well as a favorite of heads of state. Throughout his lifetime, he played a major role in France’s political evolution from dictatorship to democracy.
In 1822, he married Adele Foucher, who became the mother of his children, Leopold-Victor, Charles-Victor, Francois-Victor, Adele, and Leopoldine.
In 1830, Victor became one of the leaders of a group of Romantic rebels who were trying to loosen the hold of classical literature in France. His play Hernani, whose premiere was interrupted by fist-fights between Hugo’s admirers and detractors, took a large step towards a more realistic theatre and made him a rich man.
During the next 15 years he produced six plays, four volumes of verse, and the romantic historical novelThe Hunchback of Notre Dame, establishing his reputation as the greatest writer in France.
In 1831, Adele Hugo became romantically involved with a well known critic and good friend of Victor’s named Sainte-Beuve. Victor became involved with the actress Juliette Drouet, who became his mistress in 1833. Supported by a small pension from Hugo, Drouet became his 
unpaid secretary and traveling companion for the next fifty years.
When Les Misérables was published in Brussels in 1862, it was an immediate popular success in spite of negative reaction by critics, who considered it overly sentimental, and the government, who banned it.
Hugo died in 1885 at the age of eighty-three. Although he left instructions that his funeral be simple, over 3 million spectators followed his cortege to the Pantheon, where he was buried amid France’s great men. Hugo’s death came at the end of a century of war, civil conflict, brutally repressed insurrections such as the student rebellion in Les Misérables, and social injustice. Because of his belief in the triumph of good over evil and his pleading for tolerance and non-violence, Victor Hugo was the herald of the new democratic spirit.
