A Jubilant Cry From the Gutter Les Miserables

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Trevor Nunn has reached the shadowboxing phase, the most perilous in any artist's career. Having staged one of the era's most celebrated productions, Nicholas Nickleby, for his Royal Shakespeare Company, and the acclaimed musical Cats for London's West End and then Broadway, Nunn now must top himself each time out or face critics' speculation that his best work lies behind him. Just that sort of skepticism awaited the opening last week of Nunn's production of Les Miserables, a 3 1/2-hr. musical version of Victor Hugo's novel about revolutionary France. In article after article, London journalists asked whether the show would be another Nickleby.

The answer is that the two do not have much to do with each other, except that both are drawn from 19th century novels and both end with haunting cries on behalf of the dispossessed. Nickleby was story theater, narrating its tale as much as acting it out, and using relatively simple sets, lights and costumes. Les Miserables is lavish, with turntables rotating iron gates, marble pillars and big makeshift barricades. Nickleby told of virtue rewarded and villainy punished, while Les Miserables depicts a world less blessed with moral order. But whether or not Les Miserables can match Nickleby's commercial impact, it is extraordinarily ambitious and exciting. Its complex story unfolds with clarity and urgent speed, although at times it seems overeager to please with romantic or comic distractions. Claude-Michel Schonberg's score is almost operatic in its emotional intensity and its use of themes and variations, yet it provides hummable pop tunes. Like Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, Les Miserables originated as a double-record album. That version, by French authors, was staged at the 4,500-seat Palais des Sports in Paris in 1980. For the R.S.C., Nunn, Lyricist Herbert Kretzmer and other writers radically refashioned the text. The result is less French than English in tone and idiom, but that seems apt: Hugo's socialistic portraits of the downtrodden but unconquerable poor, and of the implacable forces of law that try to suppress them on behalf of men of property, could have echoed forth from British history as easily as French.

Colm Wilkinson and Roger Allam carry the show as Jean Valjean, the released convict seeking to escape his past, and Javert, the righteous police inspector who hounds him across France for nearly two decades. Patti LuPone, an American who won a 1980 Tony Award for her starring role in Evita, has powerful scenes as an unwed mother who in desperation becomes a prostitute. The real star, however, is Nunn's staging. He sometimes spoils one effect with the hasty arrival of the next, but his conceptions are clear and simple. Almost every manifestation of evil, from Valjean's skulking emergence from prison to the army's brutal murder of a street urchin, takes place in gloom. The shadows are not soporific but turbulent with agonized life. They prefigure the almost celestial light in the finale, as the dead of Paris rise to join the living in a hymn that promises, then demands, a better future. The moment and the show are thrilling.