Les Misérables in Concert: The 25th Anniversary (Live at the O2)

Three Voices

On October 3, 2010, the O2 Arena in London held sixteen thousand people.

The lights went down. A man walked onto the stage from the side. He wore prison rags, walking slowly, each step as if treading on broken glass.

Then he opened his mouth—

“Look down, look down, don’t look ’em in the eye…”

Alfie Boe’s voice isn’t the kind of beautiful that makes you forget the story. It’s the opposite—rough, tired, like a man who really spent nineteen years in a chain gang.

He’s one of England’s finest musical theatre tenors. But the first time I heard him sing Jean Valjean, I didn’t hear singing. I heard a man asking for rescue.

But the voice that floored me that night belonged to someone else.

Norm Lewis’s Javert — the song “Stars” — from the first note to the last, his low register didn’t waver once. That certainty wasn’t an act. He truly believed. The law is the law. People can be sorted into good and bad.

“There, out in the darkness, a fugitive running…”

His voice cut through the arena like a laser beam. Sixteen thousand people stopped breathing.

The third voice was Lea Salonga’s “I Dreamed a Dream.”

If there’s a song on this planet that needs no introduction, it’s this one. But when Lea Salonga sang it, I realized I’d never really understood it before.

Her Fantine wasn’t just crying about her fate. She was angry — angry at a world that had chewed her up and left no dignity behind. That line “He took my childhood in his stride, but he was gone when autumn came” — the way she sang “gone” held not just grief, but the clarity of someone who knows she’s been betrayed.

The Children of the Barricade

When “Do You Hear the People Sing?” erupted, five hundred people filled the stage. The O2’s lights blazed, and the audience roared back: “Will you join in our crusade?”

But Ramin Karimloo’s Enjolras — that was something else entirely.

He stood atop the barricade, red flag in hand, singing “Red and Black.” His voice wasn’t asking anyone to follow. It was commanding.

Fifteen years later, I learned, he would stand on a stage in Taipei, channeling the same force into another song.

Nine Minutes of Curtain Calls

The curtain call after the show lasted nine minutes.

Not because the actors kept bowing. But because when the original 1985 cast members walked on stage, the audience wouldn’t let them leave.

Colm Wilkinson — the first Valjean, then sixty-six years old — sang the final line of “Bring Him Home.” His high notes weren’t perfect anymore. But they still held.

Michael Ball — twenty-five years earlier a twenty-three-year-old Marius — now had grey hair, but his smile was still that young man’s smile.

“One day more!” the entire hall sang.

I pressed pause and got a glass of water. My hands were shaking. I’m not sure if it was from emotion, or from shouting along too loudly.

Why This Blu-ray

If you own a Blu-ray player, this might be the best musical Blu-ray bargain you’ll ever find.

The video isn’t perfect — bright stage lighting softens the wide shots. But the audio is. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track captures every breath, every footstep, every moment of silence.

More importantly, it captures a night that will never happen again. Two shows. Five hundred performers. Twenty-five years of tears, all pressed onto a silver disc.

You don’t need to know the musical. You don’t need to be able to sing along. You just need to sit down and listen.

Further Listening

For a deeper dive into Les Misérables, the 10th Anniversary Dream Cast Concert (1995, Royal Albert Hall) offers a different dramatic approach with Colm Wilkinson’s definitive Valjean. The 2012 film adaptation (starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, three Academy Awards) provides a gritty cinematic reimagining. The 1985 original London cast recording preserves the raw original sound.