Les Misrables review: Musical returns to NYC in massive Radio City concert

Two hours and 45 minutes with one 20-minute intermission.Through Aug.

9 at Radio City Music Hall.With a musical like “Les Misérables,” as a rule les isn’t more.It’s a big honkin’ show.Très grand.

Set amidst France’s bloody June Rebellion, common sights include smoking muskets, the imposing barricade and, back in the 1980s, voluminous wigs worthy of their own zipcodes.What informs its physical size, though, isn’t an overzealous designer with a corporate card, but the mega music by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil. The spill-your-guts-out songs, which to this day sound like that of no other musical, even its many pop-opera imposters, still hit hard.A friend of mine in his seventies recently said to me, “I never cry.I didn’t cry when my mother died.

But I cried at the original ‘Les Misérables’.” That’s this show’s legacy — that a loud group of nineteenth-century French revolutionaries and romantics have been improbably able to reach even the most locked-up hearts for more than 40 years. Any staging must stand up to those impassioned, now-canonical ballads such as “On My Own,” “I Dreamed A Dream” and “Bring Home Home” and the thrilling call to arms “One Day More.”  And so it does at Radio City Music Hall, where “Les Miz” has just returned to New York after nearly a decade away in what’s been called “The Arena Concert Spectacular.”Yes, this is a huge concert — not a full production.It nonetheless manages to be as rousing as ever.As the appended title would imply, actors playing Jean Valjean, Javert and Eponine mostly wail into standing microphones.

There’s a healthy 34 performers onstage backed by a 26-person orchestra. You can hear the people sing, all right.Of course, they all wear period costumes, not frocks and tuxes, and there is a sizable barricade that the ensemble mans while singing their lungs out.But conjuring the requisite grandeur as much as the score is Radio City itself — ...