But as Victor Hugo, the author, wrote: “The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers.” This doesn’t, at first, seem like it has to do with Les Mis.

Every winter, because of the lack of a sewer system, the streets flood, and cholera sweeps through much of peri-urban Lusaka. Every month, they would wait for it to be built, and every month, it was not built. The sewer system was planned for a “ peri-urban” neighborhood located in the space where the city met the countryside. I lived in Zambia and interviewed people about a sewer system that was supposed to be built in the next couple of months. My first job out of college was in economics research. The key to not taking the songs of Les Mis for granted is looking more closely at the book the musical is based on.

But what gives those songs their gravitas are the themes of Les Mis: It’s fundamentally about misplaced justice and social inequality. The songs in Les Mis are so catchy that they become the be-all and end-all of the piece, something to be sung on road trips and, for many people, completely divorced from the story. The musical has, in many ways, overtaken the novel in the cultural imagination. And that’s because it’s one of the few pieces of art that manages to capture basically everything about humanity. But whether you’re a superfan who wants to fight me about the novel’s 100-page Battle of Waterloo digression or whether Nick Jonas was well-cast as Marius in the 25th anniversary concert (I’m down on Waterloo and up on Nick), or just sort of remember seeing the movie 10 years ago, Les Miserables is something that sticks with you.

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