Bring Him Home

Hugh Jackman's Valjean has learned something across the course of the show that his voice encodes in "Bring Him Home" — it is the sound of a man who has been changed by love beyond the self. The song is a prayer, structurally and emotionally: quiet, addressed upward, asking for something with no claim to deserving it. Jackman's falsetto passages are extraordinarily controlled, the restraint doing everything the orchestration refuses to do. Where other songs in this score use size and volume to indicate emotion, "Bring Him Home" uses absence — the spaces between notes, the held breath of the prayer. The character asking God to spare Marius rather than himself is the spiritual architecture of the whole show made explicit. It is also one of the great demonstrations of what a performer does when they fully inhabit rather than perform a moment. Deep listening, alone, preferably in the dark.