As a whole, why does Les Miserables get so much hate from theatre folk?

I mean, I've heard arguments against it ranging from a score made up entirely of reprises to performers get swallowed up in the spectacle. The thing is, I think that Les Mis may arguably be the most well-crafted piece of theatre this side of Sondheim. Yes, it has its faults that damned recitative, for instance but they are far outweighed by the musical and dramatic craftsmanship that pervades the piece. People often lump Boublil and Schonenberg in the same category as Lloyd Webber, a categorization that I think is unfair. After Evita, fame got to Lloyd Webber, and he stopped thinking dramatically and started thinking only in terms of spectacle and of music for music's sake, routinely sacrificing dramatic integrity on the altar of pretty melodies. Boublil and Schonenberg, however, are in a class closer to that of Sondheim. Yes, that Sondheim. Heresy, I know but hear me out. First, there's the matter of the overall score. It's huge and bombastic in a word, epic. That's what many of the show's detractors cite as one of its major faults, conveniently ignoring the musical's source material. For Victor Hugo's fourteen hundred-page novel is an epic in every sense of the word. Originally published in 1862, the novel spans five volumes. Each volume was divided first into books, and then into individual chapters (365 of them, to be exact). It covers the entire life of one man, ending with his death of old age. Hugo pauses the action for lengthy discussions on, among other things, religion, politics, and society. He even devotes multiple chapters in a step-by-step description of the Battle of Waterloo. This is the type of material that cries out for a rousing, larger-than-life score. Can you imagine a Les Mis with a chamber score (i.e., Passion or The Light in the Piazza)? How about a sweeping, romantic score (i.e., A Little Night Music or Titanic)? Or, heaven forbid, an old-fashioned musical comedy score? Absolutely not the story being told is an enormous, larger-than-life tale, peopled for the most part with fairly cut-and-paste character cutouts. The story is center stage, and not the characters. Even though the characters are pretty much window dressing for the story, Boublil & Schonenberg still manage to find the time to go through and flesh them out. The way they accomplish it is straight out of Sondheim's playbook: they use the music. They still manage to unearth some absolutely gorgeous melodies, a la Lloyd Webber, but almost all have some sort of dramatic context. An over-riding vamp signals the beginning of Work Song, but after one or two repetitions, it is suddenly and forcefully undercut by two jarring bass notes (listening to the score, it sounds like it's a sharp and a natural right next to one another), thus establishing even out of context of the show that the scene is a prison where the inmates are little more than slaves. Fantine's I Dreamed A Dream is an iinnocent-sounding aria rendered ironic by its not-so-innocent lyric. The song encapsulates her character, an innocent-looking young woman who really isn't all that innocent. Even the big, showstopping numbers reaffirm character or dramatic assessments. When One Day More, the big Act One finale, splits into five separate parts, Valjean the character around whose story the show revolves anchors the Act One finale One Day More when it splits into four or five contrapuntal sections with the extended phrase one day moooooore, which is set on two individual notes. Reprises, too, play an important dramatic function in both their sung and underscored forms. In the Act 1 prologue after his encounter with the bishop of Digne, Valjean sings What Have I Done?, and decides to accept the bishop's challenge and start a new life. In Javert's Suicide, Javert reprises the melody. Both men were faced with the same question what do you do when your worldview is turned upside-down by the compassion of a man who should have no compassion for you? The separate answers they come up with not only gives the audience profound insight into the two characters, but also lays bare the show's underlying theme of compassion versus absolute justice: life isn't unalterably black and white, but shades of gray laid over a black-and-white background. Valjean decides to embrace that premise; Javert cannot live with it, so he throws himself into the river Seine. As

he falls, he is backlit with soft light-blue lights, and the melody fades into an orchestral reprises of the final line of Stars, his big Act One solo where he extols the law and justifies his harsh methods. Finally, while the lyrics can be clumsy at times, sometimes sacrificing meaning for rhyme (and vice-versa Boublil's lyrics were written in French; he collaborated with Herbert Kretzmer to translate them into English), they are overall uniformly well done. It would have been easy to overwrite lyrics in the name of capturing the nuances and meaning of their original French, but Kretzmer and Boublil almost always resist the temptation (in the non-recitative sections, anyway), instead turning out lines like, Yes it's true there's a child and the child is my daughter/And her father abandoned us leaving us flat/Now she lives with an innkeeper man and his wife and I pay for the child/What's the matter with that which may be the best sung exposition ever. Basically, the integration of book and music in Les Miserables is so well-done that the only person who could top it (and has) is Stephen Sondheim. Yeah, yeah, there's composers like Michael John LaChiusa who strive for that integration in all of their shows, but the difference is that Boublil & Schonenberg have managed to do it without becoming academic no easy feat. So why do so many theatre people (the diehards, the ones who love Bock & Harnick's She Loves Me score and remember William Daniels not as Boy Meets World's Mr. Feeney, but as the original John Adams in 1776) dislike Les Mis, or are loath to admit that they do? I think it's the theatrical academic rearing its ugly head. See, the academics are the talking heads of the theatre world. They believe that if something is guilt-free entertainment, that must mean that it's horrible. These people set the standards for shows like Rock of Ages at the same level as shows like Parade, Follies, or Fiddler on the Roof. They also and this is the category that Les Mis falls into hate it when a show becomes really, really, really successful. For instance, they loved the revival of Chicago when it opened in the late 90s. These days, that same show is greeted with disdain, if it's mentioned at all. Which is fine. People have a right to their opinions. I just wish they'd give Les Mis its due.