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The Darkest Night Will End
Les Mis meets the queer rights movement

by Stephen Marc Beaudoin


Sometimes I choke on the words.

Rehearsals for music theater productions aren’t supposed to be sobby affairs. As a performing artist, I’m trained to be just emotionally invested enough for the feeling to “read,” but not so overwrought that I can’t make it, dry-eyed, through an especially moving lyric.

That Friday night, in rehearsal for Broadway Rose Theatre Company’s production of Les Misérables, I lost it.

“Do you hear the people sing? Lost in the valley of the night—it is the music of a people who are climbing to the light,” I sang in a super-soft tenor, almost whispering the words. Except when I got to the next lyric, my voice caught: “For the wretched of the earth, there is a flame that never dies—even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”

Suddenly singing that lyric—about hope, about moving forward, about change and inspiration and what lies ahead—became just impossible. My eyes clouded over, tears streamed down my face.

Returning to the musical theater stage in Les Mis after a few years’ absence has often been jarring like this. But nothing prepared me for the explosive torrent of emotions that Les Mis unleashed in me, not least because of the surprising resonances between many of the show’s themes and today’s queer rights movement.

Actors often like to pay lip service to the “timeliness” of a certain piece of theater, but here it’s smacked me right in the face. Since coming to Just Out several months ago, my own sense of urgency on queer equality has expanded incalculably. There are moments, like in those Les Mis lyrics, when the scope of the struggles before us looms so large as to seem unbeatable. How many more equality-stripping initiatives are there to report, and how many frivolous lawsuits? How many times can I choke down another interview with a gay-hating activist or find another queer suicide in the national headlines?

Right at the end of Les Mis, there’s a bloody battle in which a group of starry-eyed student revolutionaries fight for their fervent beliefs in hope and change. As one of them (Enjolras, a Larry Kramer type) waves a proud flag in the face of imminent defeat, others rush forward to battle, losing their lives in the headlong heat and rush of a powerful enemy. Then the actors re-emerge from the wings to sing a soaring final reprise of the show’s major anthem. These are the words:

“Will you join in our crusade? Who will be strong and stand with me? Somewhere beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?”

I see the barricade: It is David Crowe and Marylin Shannon and Gary George and those diminishing numbers of old-school anti-equality activists across Oregon. It is our country’s administration, on its way to being retired. It is also sometimes our own inability to stay actively committed to advancing equal rights.

But I also, most days anyway, try to see beyond it. I see the proud queer director of our Les Mis production, Broadway vet Robert Hunt, one of the hardest-working theater pros I’ve met. I see his wonderful partner, Frank, with whom he lives in Chicago. I see that, as Illinois residents, they have no legal protections as a couple, and am reminded of the Washington lesbian who died suddenly while on vacation in Florida with her partner and children, and how that partner was denied emergency room access because the state does not recognize their partnership.

It is not even news anymore: These are major recurring themes, just like that anthem. You read these stories, battered into our collective queer consciousness. As students of our own civil rights movement, we’re scrambling to scale the barricade. Sometimes (e.g., Measure 36) we’re shot down by the opposition.

But guess what—tomorrow comes. As we sing in full-throated abandoned at the musical’s end: Tomorrow comes.

Staff Writer Stephen Marc Beaudoin writes about Portland arts and queer culture at http://fromeverycorner.blogspot.com. He welcomes feedback at stephen@justout.com.



 
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