An Epic of the Downtrodden

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

From the bitter opening invocation "Look down, look down," intoned by prisoners in a dungeon, to the anthemic rallying cry "When tomorrow comes," sung at the finale by the spectral dead of revolutionary 19th century Paris, the musical version of Victor Hugo's epic novel Les Miserables is a melodrama inflamed with outrage. Its politics always matter more than its love stories. Many of its principals die in violence or grief, but the most unprincipled of them endure and thrive. Like Nicholas Nickleby, staged largely by the same team, Les Miserables denies itself the indulgence of even a muted happy - ending: its last image is of struggles to come. Yet also like Nickleby, this epic musical sends audiences out exalted. Handsomely staged, stirringly sung and performed for the most part with consummate craft, Les Miserables nonetheless succeeds not so much for its artistry as for its heart. Far more than an entertainment, it is a thrilling emotional experience.

A hit in London and sold out during an eight-week tryout in Washington, Les Miserables opened on Broadway last week with advance ticket sales of more than $11 million -- the most in U.S. theater history, nearly double the $6.2 million record set by Cats in 1982. The show is already slated to open in 20 more countries: requests have come from the Soviet Union and South Africa, Bulgaria and Japan. Says Producer Cameron Mackintosh, 40, an impresario whose properties include Cats, Little Shop of Horrors and the London smash The Phantom of the Opera: "Les Miserables has the potential to be the most successful musical of the past 20 or 30 years."

Novelist Hugo's chase story between good and evil -- with good ironically represented by a runaway convict and evil by a zealot of a policeman -- has captivated audiences from the moment it was published in 1862. The original Paris press run of 7,000 copies sold out within 24 hours. Since then the combat between the virtuous thief Jean Valjean and the merciless detective Javert has been retold onstage and in at least 14 films. At heart, the novel's conflict is metaphysical: Valjean believes in the forgiving God of the New Testament, Javert in the retributive God of the Old Testament. The story resounds with images of Christian redemption. Yet it is by turns a panorama of the underclass, a Gothic romance about love at first sight threatened by family secrets, a psychological study and a radical tract. The novel's scale and complexity seemingly defy adaptation to a musical, especially one that in the fashion of opera, sets every word to song. The stage version's triumph is that it captures the book's essence while speaking with absolute clarity to that vast majority of spectators who have not read the novel.

The plot sprawls across 17 years, most of them so telescoped that to believe the tale spectators must make leaps of faith. Valjean first appears in chains; released after 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to save his sister's starving child, he remains unrepentant. Given shelter by a bishop, the hardened Valjean robs him, only to be recaptured by police; when the clergyman backs up his false claim that the booty was a gift, Valjean undergoes a moral transformation. He also undergoes a legal one: he destroys his papers, takes a new name and eventually becomes a wealthy man. Twice he risks all to save other men; then, having befriended the dying prostitute Fantine, he once more eludes Javert to devote himself, in hiding, to the welfare of Fantine's child Cosette.

That rapid-fire sequence occupies roughly half of the first act, which is nearly two hours long. The show continues at a pell-mell pace but shifts from incident to soliloquy -- seven characters have long solos, most on a bare stage -- and to grand effects, including a doomed 1832 uprising complete with six tons of barricades, eventually heaped with the bodies of the rebels. The nature of the intended revolution remains more than a little sketchy, as does the alliance that binds together the likes of the streetwise urchin Gavroche (Braden Danner) and the idealistic student Marius (David Bryant), the lover of the grownup Cosette (Judy Kuhn). This lack of ideology may enhance the show's appeal: it taps generalized populist sentiment without bogging down in debate.

Just as the moral center of Hugo's Les Miserables is Valjean, so the driving force of the stage show is Colm Wilkinson. An Irish singer largely untrained as an actor until he originated the role in London, Wilkinson, 43, has a superb pop-rock voice, whether in the assertive Who Am I or the wistful Bring Him Home. Unexpectedly, he encompasses the outsize moral stature of Valjean, making believable both his general saintliness and his outbursts of animal ferocity. Only one other member of the original cast is in the U.S. company: Frances Ruffelle, who as a tomboyish adolescent joins the revolt out of unrequited love for Marius. Many of the other performances rival the West End originals; Randy Graff's splendid Fantine, utterly persuasive when, on her deathbed, she "sees" her absent daughter, is actually an improvement. In three major roles, however, the new ensemble falls far short: Terrence Mann sings Javert impeccably, but in an effort to humanize him, loses his obsessive core; Leo Burmester as the grasping innkeeper Thenardier and Jennifer Butt as his wife are neither scary nor funny, depriving the show of its keenest image of ignobility while also flattening much needed comic romps.

Oddly for a work so plot-heavy and meticulously told, Les Miserables began life as a score rather than a libretto, appeared as a record album before it reached the stage, and languished for five years between the French and British productions. The original creators, Composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and Lyricist Alain Boublil, owed little to French musical-theater tradition -- there isn't much of one -- and a lot to rock operas like Jesus Christ Superstar. In their 1980 version at the 4,000-seat Palais des Sports in Paris, the show ran little more than half its present length and consisted of a dozen tableaux vivants accompanied by incidental music during ponderous scene changes. A year later Mackintosh heard the record and found the score so inherently theatrical that he decided to produce an English-language version.

Four years of development followed, during which the show raised its total of credited writers to seven, among them Herbert Kreztmer, who translated the lyrics, and Co-Directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird, who asked for five new character songs -- several of which, notably Javert's meditational Stars and Marius' farewell to his slain companions, Empty Chairs at Empty Tables, became showstoppers. Nunn and Caird reconceived the staging, using one huge revolving turntable inside another -- on which sets come and go and characters move from one scene into the next -- to achieve a fluid, cinematic style. Also involved from the outset were Designer John Napier and Lighting Designer David Hersey, who provided the monumental look and characteristic haze that at key moments gives way to otherworldly bursts of white glare. Says Caird: "As to which of the creators are responsible for what, it is always impossible to disentangle the complexities of a true collaboration. You lose your contribution in everybody else's, which is one of the most exciting things about the musical theater." Another of the most exciting things about musical theater nowadays, in London or on Broadway, is Les Miserables.