The choir director at my church is a huge fan of musicals (all music, actually) and for several years, he has been organizing groups to attend shows at our famous Fox Theater in St. Louis. This is an absolutely breathtaking venue. According to Wikipedia (and we all know it is the second-most reliable source of all knowledge):

The Fox was built in 1929 by movie pioneer William Fox as a showcase for the films of the Fox Film Corporation and elaborate stage shows. It was one of a group of five spectacular Fox Theatres built by Fox in the late 1920s. (The others were the Fox Theatres in Brooklyn, Atlanta, Detroit, and San Francisco.)

When the theater opened on January 31, 1929, it was reportedly the second-largest theater in the United States, with 5,060 seats. It was one of St. Louis’s leading movie theaters through the 1960s and has survived to become a versatile performing arts venue.

The Fox was designed by an architect specializing in theaters, C. Howard Crane, in an eclectic blend of Asian decorative motifs sometimes called Siamese Byzantine….Reporters in 1929 described the Fox Theatres in St. Louis…as “awe-inspiringly fashioned after Hindoo (sic) Mosques of Old India, bewildering in their richness and dazzling in their appointments … striking a note that reverberates around the architectural and theatrical worlds.” William Fox nicknamed the style the “Eve Leo Style” in tribute to his wife, who decorated the interior with furnishings, paintings and sculpture she had bought on her trips overseas.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Theatre_(St._Louis)

The Director has often said that Les Misérables was his favorite musical and that the music would bring him to tears. I’ve always been hesitant to go see it because I didn’t think I would like it.  The advertisements always showed this sad, little waif, and who wants to pay to see something sad? But, I decided to go this year when he planned the excursion to see what I might be missing.

 Last weekend, while the Great Hunter was off not killing a Bambi, I watched a six-part series of Les Misérables on  PBS’s Masterpiece Theater. This wasn’t a musical, but it was awesome. Not only did I really enjoy it, but it also gave me the ability to follow the live performance at the Fox.

There is no speaking during the entire two-and-a-half-hour production and had I not known the story ahead of time, I think I would have been completely lost and frustrated.

As I said, our Fox Theater is truly a masterpiece and it’s a joy to just surround yourself with its beauty. The one big drawback is that the ability to see the entire stage depends on the size of the person sitting in front of you. Unfortunately, I could only see about three-quarters of the stage when I kept my head tilted to the left (and my neck has let me know today that it is not happy with me), and I couldn’t understand many of the words to the songs. But even with these negatives, the play was still fantastic and I’m glad I finally saw it.