Les Misérables
 of the Palace Theatre, Feb. 27. 1997 | About his Javert: He was completely different from any other Javert I have ever seen. All Javerts I knew before were more or less in that Quast-like interpretation. Well, Ethan was not. He had much more facial expressions and gave you the strong feeling that Javert was a person with feelings. His suicide scene was one of the most intense scenes I have ever seen in theatre. In this scene he made two things obvious. First: Javert's lost his mind. Second: He is afraid to die. Two very interesting points in my opinion, as I always saw Javert's motivation for committing suicide in the fact that he thought his whole image of the world was distroyed.
Vocally, he was incredible, of course (what would you expect) and acting-wise convincing. However, he had to take a lot of criticism about his interpretation, as he was so different. And when I spoke to him about it, he almost apologized about his being different (some actors seem to think that "different" means "bad", while I think that different is both interesting and good - if I'd like to see the same everytime, I would rather go to the movies). He told me he couldn't just "sing beautifully in such a scene as the suicide. I had to put more into it." And surely he did! |