Magic of Les Mis thrills again...

I mean, well, wow!

For its 25th anniversary Cameron Mackintosh has had this always-stunning Boublil and Schonberg masterpiece washed, brushed up and botoxed and the result is quite different — but just as thrilling as ever.

Always the most epic of epic musicals with its 20-year timescale, sentimentality, deprivation, love, honour, melodrama and thrills, the new production has lost a lot.

The sets are smaller, the cast a little thinner, the orchestrations slimmed, the giant revolve gone, the bridge removed and the barricade no longer a ton and a half of hydraulically-operated trucks.

So has it lost what made it musical theatre on the grandest of scales?

Not at all. In the quarter-century since Trevor Nunn and John Caird put grandeur into modern stage musicals, much has changed, including theatre technology.

New directors Laurence Connor and James Powell have cut away the minute details — we don’t even get the date and city checks we used to — giving the narrative one long, rushing arc from first to last. The show still lasts not far short of three hours, but seems to fly by.

The directors do have a couple of aces up their sleeves though, restoring all the epic scale with superb lighting and sets by Paule Constable and Matt Kinley respectively.

Constable draws us into a dark, deprived world shot through with brilliant shafts of light, while Kinley uses dark, scratchy, painted backdrops to depict town and city streets, topping this in the second half with a solid, stage-wide barricade, then a brilliant special effect for Javert’s suicide, then a sewers scene with the most amazing back projections I’ve yet seen.

All this technical brilliance would be wasted, of course, if the cast was below par. But the truth is there isn’t a single underpowered turn in the whole evening.

From the delightful youngsters playing Gavroche and the young Cosette to the grimly wonderful Thenardiers of Lynne Wilmot and Ashley Artus, dashing Enjolras (Jon Robyns) and intense Marius of Gareth Gates, to the thrilling voice of Rosalind James as Eponine, almost rabidly dogged Javert of Earl Carpenter and topping them all, the towering overall performance of Welshman John Owen Jones as Valjean, this is a cast that any producer would be proud to call his A-Team.

You might find getting a ticket difficult-to-impossible for the three-week Palace run, but dash over to the Lowry instead, where the show stops for another go with the same cast in August. But be quick.