COMMENTARY : Seeing Paris, but Thinking Tian An Men : In ‘Les Miz,’ the campaign by idealistic French students and workers against the powers that be brings to mind the disturbing reality of recent history.

When I first saw “Les Miserables,” in Los Angeles in the spring of 1989, I couldn’t enjoy it. The sets, costumes and staging were great; the music and lyrics were fine--nothing you’d leave the theater singing, but fine enough. The problem was, history kept intruding.

As the idealistic students and workers on stage built their barricades in the streets of 1832 Paris, I knew they were doomed, destined to fail in blood, as would successive generations in France’s liberal revolution of 1848 and in the Commune of 1871 (the Paris student uprising of 1968, fortunately, ended peacefully). But what really troubled me that May night in Los Angeles was not the rebels who already had died, but those who were about to.

As I watched Paris on the stage, all I could think of was Tien An Men Square, where those struggling for democracy then were camped. As a Beijing resident for 15 months in the early 1980s, I’d walked the square many times. I knew in my heart that the same fearless, reckless rectitude I saw being portrayed on the stage--untempered by pragmatism or calculation--was being acted out in China. And that the results in both arenas were inevitable.

Insurrection, even without orchestral accompaniment and a revolving stage, can be intoxicating. In real life, the bullets can kill. The cost of such confrontation was made plain at Kent State and Jackson State.

In my youth, I helped build a barricade or two, and I have run wild in the streets of our own nation’s capital in the merry month of May. I can recall what the Pentagon looked like by night in 1967, floodlit and besieged by thousands of students facing a line of troops with fixed bayonets. I remember the sound of the crowd chanting to the soldiers: “Join us, join us.” At the time, I remember thinking: This is what it must have felt like at the Bastille in 1789.

But of course, it wasn’t the Bastille and they didn’t join us. And if they had, and we had gotten inside the Pentagon, we were more likely to have gotten lost in the bureaucratic maze than to have seized control of the levers of power.

“Les Miserables” is stirring theater, but if there is a more incongruous setting than the Orange County Performing Arts Center to watch this violent rebellion against the inequities of wealth and power, I can’t imagine it. If you go see it anyway, let yourself get carried away as the play builds toward its crescendo. Just remember what you’re cheering for when the curtain falls.