Les Miserables, Queen's Theatre, London, review More than 60 million people worldwide have seen Les Miserables on stage - that's equivalent to almost the entire population of the UK. And with Tom Hooper's film creating a new Les Mis frenzy, presumably the demand to see Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's epic musical in all its theatrical glory has been given a long-lasting fillip. I imagine there may come a time when there won't remain a tribesman left in the remotest rainforest who can't sing "I Dreamed a Dream." At the Queen's Theatre, the longest-running musical in the West End shows no sign of neglect. The "house full" signs were up and there was a standing ovation the night I attended. This despite the fact that the actor playing Jean Valjean, the convict hero of Victor Hugo's novel, wasn't the current star, Geronimo Rauch, but an understudy, Chris Holland, who appeared too ravaged to score highly in the swoon-stakes but has a powerful voice and the sort of imposing frame that could plausibly hoist a man from under a runaway cart, thereby arousing the suspicions of the policeman Javert, who pursues "prisoner 24601" with Napoleonic fervour. In all key respects, Trevor Nunn's original RSC staging has stood the test of time well: the revolve whirls tirelessly, lending a cinematic fluidity to a bustling, beautifully lit spectacle which, using John Napier's pile-it-high design and tons of dry ice, memorably evokes the 1832 Paris uprising, when the downtrodden masses (some of them) protested against the monarchy of Louis-Philippe. With its emphasis on poverty and injustice, mood of angry disillusion and yearning for redemption, it may be that the through-sung piece speaks more to our own troubled age than it did to the Eighties. Yet drag me off to the guillotine for saying so, but the critics who sniffed at the show when it premiered in 1985 weren't so very wrong. The long evening commands respect for its size, scale of ambition and great Gallic reservoirs of rousing bombast. Yet aside from a handful of numbers, mostly concentrated early on, genuine pathos gets lost in the hurly-burly of undistinguished, if dramatically efficient, bits of filler music. One seizes on the fleeting comedy of the grasping Thénardiers and their delightful, Oliver!-like ditty "Master of the House" rather like a starving man lunging for a scrap of food. Whisper it but if Les Miserables doesn't seem especially stale after all this time that's possibly because it was never truly fresh in the first place.