The day after “Les Misérables” premiered at London’s Barbican Theater 40 years ago this week, its creative team gathered for a party to toast a successful debut, complete with bottles of champagne adorned with special “Les Misérables” labels.
But the celebration quickly “turned into a wake,” recalled John Caird, who directed the production with Trevor Nunn. As attendees read that day’s newspapers, it was clear that the musical had not won over Britain’s theater critics.
The Evening Standard dismissed it as a “glum opera” more suited to Victorian times than 1980s Britain. The Daily Mail lamented that Caird and Nunn had transformed the “tidal wave of emotions” in Victor Hugo’s novel “into ripples of cheap sentiment.” It was “The Glums,” the review added.
Adding to the pressure, Cameron Mackintosh, the show’s lead producer, had just 48 hours to decide whether to pay for a West End transfer. If he didn’t, the musical would vanish after just a few weeks when it ended its Barbican run.
Fortunately for the team, the critics didn’t have the final say.
“The word of mouth around the show was astonishing,” Caird recalled in a recent interview at his home in the Highgate neighborhood of London. The Barbican had to quickly expand its box office team to field phone calls from theatergoers seeking tickets.
It was “two or three days” of worry, Caird said. “Then it became apparent this thing was unstoppable.”
Today, “Les Misérables” — the story of Jean Valjean, a former convict, being relentlessly pursued by Javert, an unforgiving police officer — is an icon of musical theater. It has run for over 15,500 performances in London and is a staple of school theater programs in the United States, where a long-running touring production is playing at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles until Oct. 19, before hearing to Milwaukee and Indianapolis.
It’s also been translated in 22 languages and staged in 53 countries. Next month, productions are set to open in Madrid and Shanghai.
The idea of turning Victor Hugo’s sweeping 1,400-page novel about poverty and social upheaval in 19th-century France into a musical was actually that of two Frenchmen — the composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and the lyricist Alain Boublil — who, inspired by British and American shows, created “Les Misérables” in 1980 and staged it in Paris.
About three years later, Mackintosh heard a cast recording and, blown away by the music, decided to bring it to London. Caird similarly recalled being “completely captured by the theatricality and emotion” of the songs, particularly what became “On My Own” and “I Dreamed a Dream.”
Still, Caird said, the creative team knew the French musical needed an overhaul: It was little more than “a series of tableaux,” and required audiences to know Hugo’s book inside out.
So Caird, Nunn, Schönberg and Boublil, along with James Fenton, a poet, were soon reading Hugo’s tome and trying to work out a new structure, eventually deciding to open the musical with a scene in which Jean Valjean steals silver candlesticks from a bishop, only for the prelate to forgive him.
Suddenly, Caird said, the character’s motivations were clear: Valjean believed in the New Testament idea of forgiveness, while Javert, his pursuer, adhered to a sterner Old Testament form of justice.
“As a bunch of liberal humanists, we had tried to avoid every mention of religion,” Caird said, but “sewing God into the show was what animated the characters.”
Even with such breakthroughs, progress was slow at first. Fenton, a perfectionist, took so long to write the libretto that Mackintosh had to delay the musical’s planned opening by a year, according to Edward Behr’s “The Complete Book of Les Misérables.” Eventually, Herbert Kretzmer, a librettist and critic for The Daily Mail, took over.
Caird said the team had continually changed the musical in rehearsals. One Friday just weeks before opening, for instance, they decided that the actor Colm Wilkinson, the original Valjean, needed a ballad to “really let his voice off a leash.” The next Monday, Schönberg played everyone the gentle tune of “Bring Him Home,” one of the musical’s most beloved songs.
Even small changes were crucial. During a recent interview in his grand home — which Caird said the musical’s success had made possible — he riffled through boxes of his rehearsal notes. He pointed out that the musical’s most famous song had initially opened with “Do you hear the people sing / Singing the song of common men.” In rehearsals, Kretzmer changed the lyric to “a song of angry men.”
By the premiere, Caird recalled, everyone involved thought they had something special, so it was a bit of a shock when the critics disagreed.
Lynn Gardner, one of Britain’s longest-serving theater critics, was one of those who originally panned it, writing in City Limits magazine that the musical was “sentimental old tosh.” In a recent interview, Gardner said there had been “a lot of snobbery” around the original show, given that it was a Royal Shakespeare Company co-production and many critics believed that the revered outfit shouldn’t dabble in West End musicals.
Gardner said she stood by her original assessment, but now recognized that “Les Misérables” had many charms. “It does what all great musicals do: It makes you feel,” she said, adding, “It doesn’t make you think so much.”
In addition to the songs’ catchiness and bald emotion, part of the appeal of “Les Misérables” has been its political undertones, with scenes of students trying to overthrow the French government. In recent years, demonstrators in places like Hong Kong, Venezuela and Turkey have sung, “Do you hear the people sing?”
Dann Fink, a producer who acted in the original Los Angeles production of “Les Misérables,” said he believed that the musical’s message of “fighting for what you believe in” struck a chord with audiences. He recalled one night in June 1989 when the cast, backstage during intermission, watched live TV news coverage of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square in Beijing as the Chinese government tried to stop student-led antigovernment demonstrations.
That footage, Fink recalled, seemed to echo the musical’s story, and soon he was onstage, climbing up a barricade with a flag in hand. “We ran on feeling like we needed to vent our rage for what was happening to those people in China,” Fink recalled. “We were singing to empower them.”
“I’ve never had a more charged night in a theater,” he added.
Caird said the story’s political overtones were clear to the creative team, but to his mind the musical’s success was down more to the universality of the characters: people struggling against injustice and their own personal obstacles. “Deep down, so many members of the audience feel the same sense of fate or destiny about their own life journeys,” he said.
That is really why “Les Misérables” has lasted 40 years, Caird said, adding: “It’s never going to go away, is it?”
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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