Les Miserables - An Interesting London Tourist Activity

Every night the crowds gather outside the Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Theatre, London to see the Boubil and Schonberg musical Les Miserables Above them the famous waif stares along the Avenue in the direction of the much larger Palace Theatre where Les Miserables opened on the West End in 1985. 

The move to the smaller Queen’s Theatre in 2004 surely couldn’t have anticipated the huge demand that the recent smash hit movie of the show has created for tickets for the original stage version.

So each night the Queen’s Theatre becomes a hub of activity as audiences, who have planned ahead and already got their tickets, jostle with locals and tourists alike who arrive in the hope of getting some last minute tickets.

It is long time ago since I first saw the show. Originally it was much longer – an attempt to do due homage to the massive scale on which Victor Hugo originally wrote. But even though the show was re-written, once when it moved from the Barbican to the Palace Theatre and then again when it moved to the Queen’s Theatre, it still paints an impressive backdrop on which the intimate stories of the entwined lives of Jean Valjean, Javert, Fantine, Éponine, Marius and Cosette are told.

The huge boost in demand for tickets cannot have gone unnoticed by the show’s writers whose second West End production, Miss Saigon, is due to return to London after an absence of almost 14 years... it makes one wonder whether a two film deal was done and that the return of Miss Saigon just round the corner at the Prince Edward Theatre in Spring 2014 is timed to coincide with an announcement for the silver screen!

But however you see these two superb shows – in a cinema or on a theatre break to London – you can be sure that, like the crowds on Shaftesbury Avenue, you will be in for an experience that you will remember for a long, long time.

Author Simon Harding has been helping visitors to London enjoy  London Theatre for over 30 years!