Globally, it’s the most famous French musical. One hundred and thirty million people have seen Jean Valjean face off against Javert, in 22 languages; its downtrodden characters have taken to the barricades in London’s West End nearly continuously since 1985.
Everyone knows “Les Misérables.” Everyone — except the French.
In a strange twist of fate, “Les Miz,” an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s sweeping novel about justice, poverty and the social reality of 19th-century France, has never been popular in the country of its birth. Despite being created by two Frenchmen, the composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and the lyricist Alain Boublil, it has only been performed in Paris twice since the 1980s. The 2012 film adaptation, starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, also performed poorly at the French box office.
Now a major new stage production, set to open at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on Wednesday, aims to make “Les Misérables” a star at home, too — with the enthusiastic assent of its creators.
During a recent rehearsal, in an impersonal industrial space in Romainville, a Paris suburb, Schönberg, 80, held his fist in the air as the nearly 40-strong cast belted out an impassioned French-language version of the finale, “Do You Hear the People Sing?”
“Returning to France is important to us, because it’s our culture, our way of thinking,” Boublil, 83, said in an interview between rehearsals. “Even though we’ve both lived abroad for a long time, that hasn’t changed.”
In France, the homecoming of “Les Misérables” follows the newfound popularity of American- and British-style musicals, which have drawn larger and larger audiences over the past decade. Still, over eight years of development, the team behind the Châtelet run has put significant effort into shaping “Les Misérables” to French expectations.
Audiences around the world typically all see the same staging, created by Laurence Connor and James Powell (which replaced the original London production, by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, in 2009). Yet for France, everyone agreed a fresh take was needed. Olivier Py, the director of the Théâtre du Châtelet, which is coproducing the show, described the Connor/Powell production as “a little dated” by local standards.
Boublil said that there was “something contradictory about bringing a classic French story back in an imported production, made famous worldwide by Britain. We had to reinvent the way we present it.”
The seed for this project was planted in 2016, when Boublil attended a performance of a new French musical: “Oliver Twist.” Going into it, he was wary, he said, since “Oliver!”, the 1960 British musical version of the Dickens tale, was the show that had inspired him to adapt “Les Misérables” in the late 1970s.
Yet he was won over by the storytelling of Ladislas Chollat, the director of “Oliver Twist,” who had developed the project with the first-time producer Stéphane Letellier. “I told them they should take a look at ‘Les Misérables,’” Boublil said, with a smile.
Letellier and Chollat jumped at the chance. “In my mind, ‘Les Misérables’ was the Everest,” Letellier said. He funded the development of Chollat’s plans for a new production, and 18 months later, brought them to Cameron Mackintosh, the powerful British producer who owns the rights to the musical.
At that point, Mackintosh had given up hope of establishing a meaningful French presence for “Les Misérables”; Letellier remembered the producer telling him, “I’ve been trying for 30 years in France, and I just don’t understand it. So go ahead, and good luck.”
This was despite Boublil’s having originally written the show in French. In the 1970s, spurred by their love of Broadway and the West End, he and Schönberg attempted to adapt the musical genre for their home country, starting with “The French Revolution” (1973). “Les Misérables” followed in 1980.
Some Parisian reviewers’ assessments of “Les Misérables” were brutal. On “Le Masque et la Plume,” a long-running critics’ panel on the radio station France Inter, the journalist Philippe Tesson described the adaptation as “deplorably foolish and vulgar.” “Some people found the idea of adapting Victor Hugo’s work dangerous,” Boublil said. “They thought setting it to music trivialized it.”
Mackintosh bought the rights in 1983 and turned “Les Misérables” into a West End blockbuster, reworking it extensively in the process. In 1991 he produced a French-language revival in Paris; middling box office returns forced its closure after six months.
Letellier, the producer, believes Mackintosh was “unlucky” in France, where musical theater tradition was strongly tied to operettas in the 19th and 20th centuries: “Operetta was deeply uncool in the early 1990s, and so were musicals.”
In order to find a new approach for today’s French audiences, Chollat “went back to the roots” of “Les Misérables,” he said: Victor Hugo’s monumental novel, which runs to over 1,500 pages. Published in 1862, it follows a large cast of characters over decades, with frequent musings about French history and moral philosophy.
“Hugo is a kind of alchemist of the human soul, and the book resonates so much with the French spirit of revolt, even today,” Chollat said. His production would be more socially realistic than the British one, he said, comparing Hugo’s “miserables” with the “Yellow Vest” protesters who, in 2018, engineered a lengthy anti-government movement in France.
In rehearsal earlier this month, Chollat encouraged the actors playing the student revolutionaries, who lead Paris’s 1832 anti-monarchist rebellion in the musical, to lean into naturalism. “Some of these students have never held a gun in their lives before. It’s completely new to them. It looks too easy right now,” he said to the performers, addressing them all as “friends.”
And while some die-hard fans of “Les Misérables” in the cast were initially unsure whether a new production was needed, Chollat has won them over. Maxime De Toledo, who left France to train in musical theater after a “life-changing” encounter with “Les Misérables” during its 1991 Paris run, said he had had his doubts about “remaking something that has worked so well for 40 years.”
He added, “Sometimes, in France, we’re not so humble about coming in and saying ‘we will do better.’”
Still, De Toledo, who has performed leading roles on Broadway and in Paris, said he would have taken any role to be part of this revival. As the Bishop of Digne, a small character who protects Valjean early on, his stage time is limited, but he has fully embraced the new-look “Misérables.” “It will require a little adapting for purists, because some layers have been peeled back, in a way,” De Toledo said. But Chollat “is so sincere, so moved by the story that he moves us too,” he added.
Changes include 300 brand-new costumes, a more diverse cast — mandated by Mackintosh, who insisted on approving the lineup — and a reworking of the existing French lyrics, which Boublil was happy to agree to. “I adapted them based on the notes I had accumulated, the corrections that had been made over time internationally,” he said. The vocabulary used by some characters was tweaked, too, to better reflect their social origins.
In total, about a quarter of the text has been changed. In rehearsal, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” — in French a more politically inflected song, titled “To the Will of the People” — took on a less formal tone.
And a new generation of French performers is learning to cherish Boublil and Schönberg’s songs. Benoît Rameau, the operatically trained singer who plays Jean Valjean, sheepishly admitted that he didn’t even realize how big the leading role was when he was cast. “Growing up, I didn’t know anything about musical theater,” he said. He has gained a new appreciation for “the complexity” of Schönberg’s score, he added, and the genre as a whole.
France appears ready to embrace its prodigal musical offspring, too. The Châtelet run, through Jan. 2, is nearly sold out, and arrangements are being made to tour “Les Misérables” around the country, taking it outside Paris for the first time in the musical’s history. “With 39 people onstage and 14 musicians in the pit, it’s extremely expensive in a country with high labor costs like France,” Letellier, the producer, said. “It won’t be a moneymaker, but we’re making it a point of honor.”
Py, the director of the Châtelet, is thinking even bigger. “The goal is for it to become the standard staging, worldwide, for the next 40 years,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
In the meantime, after an early run-through of the first act this month, Chollat, Letellier and some of their collaborators hugged tearfully outside the rehearsal studio.
“To me, ‘Les Misérables’ is a diamond that had grown dusty in France,” Letellier said. “With the dust lifted, there’s no reason it won’t shine bright.”
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