Word: valjeans
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...good ironically represented by a runaway convict and evil by a zealot of a policeman -- has captivated audiences from the moment it was published in 1862. The original Paris press run of 7,000 copies sold out within 24 hours. Since then the combat between the virtuous thief Jean Valjean and the merciless detective Javert has been retold onstage and in at least 14 films. At heart, the novel's conflict is metaphysical: Valjean believes in the forgiving God of the New Testament, Javert in the retributive God of the Old Testament. The story resounds with images of Christian redemption...
Colm Wilkinson and Roger Allam carry the show as Jean Valjean, the released convict seeking to escape his past, and Javert, the righteous police inspector who hounds him across France for nearly two decades. Patti LuPone, an American who won a 1980 Tony Award for her starring role in Evita, has powerful scenes as an unwed mother who in desperation becomes a prostitute. The real star, however, is Nunn's staging. He sometimes spoils one effect with the hasty arrival of the next, but his conceptions are clear and simple. Almost every manifestation of evil, from Valjean's skulking emergence...
...murders senseless, but we know that buried deep inside a Wayne Williams lies a horrible, though perhaps unfathomable, purpose. We suspect a reason, some powerful, twisted logic. Anomic violence, on the other hand, is truly senseless. Thus crimes of madness elicit from us revulsion; crimes of need (like Jean Valjean's) sympathy; but crimes for fun, for a video game, for no purpose, elicit rage. John Hinckley Jr. did more damage in a minute than these four combined had done in a lifetime. But there could be no satisfaction in blowing him away. Blow these four away...
...ways. One is as pure literary criticism, as a reinterpretation of Stendhal and Balzac. She writes with assurance and insight of the 19th century novel, of George Eliot's "homely English novel," of the literary use of Napoleon as the personification of genius, of Les Miserables and Jean Valjean's conscience as a dialogue. Her writing is spirited but there are grounds for disagreement, such as her contention that the fiction of Conrad "went so far in' the direction of brevity and concentration that they were closer to the tale than the novel." A rather curious assertion in the light...
...that Dick Tuck has angered Richard Nixon as much as any other man alive. As relentlessly as Inspector Javert trailed Jean Valjean, as doggedly as Caliban followed Prospero, as surely as a snowball seeks a top hat, Prankster Tuck stalked his quarry from one campaign to the next. "Keep that man away from me," Nixon ordered his staff, who were seldom able to oblige. Ultimately, Nixon paid his adversary the highest compliment: in the 1972 campaign, the White House decided to employ a Dick Tuck of its own. As H.R. Haldeman testified last week, Donald Segretti was hired to adopt...