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About the play
Victor Hugo’s masterwork, Les Misérables was truly a work of love; it took the novelist 17 years to finish this work which was crystallized in a specific incident Hugo observed in 1845 Paris. On a cold and sunny day, a poor worker was arrested for stealing a loaf of bread. As the man stood awaiting his trip to prison, a richly dressed aristocratic lady arrived in her carriage and stopped next to him. Oblivious to his situation, the woman missed the man’s appeal to her. Hugo explained that for him, the man was a “spectre of misery, the ghostly forewarning in the full light of day, in the sunshine, of the revolution still plunged in the shadows of darkness, but emerging from them. The moment he became aware of her existence, while she remained unaware of his, a catastrophe was inevitable.”
At the end of its lengthy writing process, Hugo shipped off his novel (his “leviathan” as he called it) to his publishers with the note “?” His publisher Lacroix answered “!” The protagonist of the tale, Jean Valjean is an ex-convict seeking to redeem himself from his sordid past and his repeated errors of selfishness and neglect. But the epic story, which begins in the year of Napoleon’s defeat (1815) and spans over twenty years, follows the lives, loves, and tangled relationships of a host of characters across the social spectrum. While Hugo examines the impact of Valjean’s choices and actions, he also comments on the nature of law and justice, the role of religion and social conscience, the nature of romantic and familial love, and of course, the struggle between good and evil.
A commercial hit when it was released in 1862, it was severely critiqued by essayists and other writers of the day who complained of its immorality, its sentimentality, and its political agenda. It continued to sell copies! At one point there were traffic jams across Paris as readers battled each other for one of the initial 48,000 copies available on the first day. The book saw translation almost immediately into English, with the American translation appearing one month after the initial French release. Since its publication, it has remained immensely popular and is now critically acclaimed as one of the finest novels ever written. That commercial success is also reflected in the number of cinematic adaptations; to this date there have been over 50. Victor Hugo wrote that this work was, “meant for everyone... Social problems go beyond frontiers.” And, it often found a resonance with readers in times of civil conflict. It was the most widely read novel for American Civil War soldiers, especially with those of the Confederate Army who dubbed it “Lee’s Misérables.”
After Boubil and Schönbergís initial French adaptation for the stage in 1980, Trevor Nunn, John Caird, and Cameron Mackintosh reworked and restructured the play for its 1985 opening at the Barbican Theatre, London. While the novelís reputation helped the initial ticket sales, critics and audiences agreed that the strength of this English production was its selling point. The show has gone on to garner 8 Tonys among its over 50 major theatre awards. There have been productions in almost 40 countries and the musical has been translated in 21 languages as diverse as Icelandic, Estonian, and Mauritian Creole. There are 31 cast recordings and audience figures (for professional productions) in excess of 51 million people. The largest single audience for a production was for a 1989 Australia day concert in Sydney (125,000 people attending). In 2004, it became the longest running musical in London’s West End with 7,602 performances.
About the authors
Victor Hugo was born in Besançon, France in 1802 to a career officer father who supported Napoleon Bonaparte and Catholic Royalist mother who supported the monarchy. After a youth of much travel (due to his father’s career) and chaos in family life (the result of his parents’ ideological squabbles and his father’s rampant infidelity), Hugo and his mother returned to Paris in 1803 for his education. In Paris, Hugo found his inspiration in the leader of the French Romantic movement, Francois-Réne de Chateaubriand. He resolved to be “Chateaubriand or nothing!” His passion for the political and poetic ideals of the movement led to his first success at the age of 22, a collection of poems entitled Nouvelles Odes et Poesies Diverses (New Odes and Assorted Poems). The work was so successful that he received a pension from Louis XVIII.
After his mother’s death in 1821, he married his childhood friend, Adele Foucher to whom he had been secretly engaged. While the couple had five children, their eldest son died in infancy. Hugo’s prose took precedence in his writing career with the publication of his first work of social conscience, The Last Day of a Condemned Man; this work would profoundly affect writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. His first full-length novel appeared in 1831, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Its popularly not only made Hugo wealthy, it also forced the restoration of the famous cathedral.
Hugo first began work on his greatest novel in 1829. It took a full 17 years for Les Misérables (The Wretched Ones) to be published. While it was born of a specific observation of the negative impact of social and economic repression it was shaped by Hugo’s life, political theories and understanding of national history. Like most epic novels of the period, it appeared in multiple volumes; the first two in April 1862 (complete with one of the largest advertising campaigns ever launched) and the last in May of the same year.
In addition to his literary output, Hugo was prolific in the visual arts as well, completing over 4,000 drawings. By 1841, Hugo was a member of the Academie Française and a widely recognized figure in the world of literature and arts. Having been elevated the peerage by King Louis-Phillipe, Hugo turned more to the political and the literary realm with each passing season. When Napoleon III seized power in 1851, Hugo declared him a traitor to France and went into exile until 1870. By 1881, Hugo was celebrating his 79th birthday and to honor this momentous 89th year, the French held one of the largest parades in its history. The marchers took 6 hours to complete the route from the Avenue d’Eylau down the Champs-Elysées by Hugo’s window. The official guides for the day wore the cornflowers of Cosette’s song to acknowledge Hugo’s greatest work. He died in Paris in 1885 and is buried in the Pantheon next to Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola. In addition to his impact of letters and politics, Hugo was an inspiration to the composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. While he did work as a librettist on operas in his lifetime, over 1,500 musical works are based on Hugo’s canon including over 100 operas. Within contemporary France he is acknowledged as primarily a poet, playwright, essayist, statesman, human rights advocate, and proponent for the ideals of the Romantic Movement in 19th century Europe. Outside France, his fame rests predominately on his novels, in particular his two full-length epics, Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Les Misérables.
* * * * * Alain Boublil is a 68-year old Tunisian-born librettist, best known for his collaborations with Claude-Michel Schönberg. Within their canon, lie some of the most popular works of the last 25 years of musical theatre: Les Misérables (1980), Miss Saigon (1989), and Martin Guerre (1996). Together they created and produced France’s first rock opera – The French Revolution in 1973. In addition to his work in musicals, Boubil is a writer of plays and novels. His most recent collaboration with Schönberg is Marguerite, based on the Dumas Fils’ novel, The Lady of the Camellias.
Claude-Michel Schönberg was born in Vannes, France in 1944 and began his musical career as a record producer, singer and actor. Following his 1973 collaboration with Boubil, he wrote the music and lyrics for the chart-topping French hit song of 1974 selling over a million copies in the process. In addition to his works with Boubil (5 to date), he has composed for ballet and popular records. He is married to the English ballerina Charlotte Talbot with whom he has three children.
About the production
For Associate Artistic Director Roger DeLaurier, Les Misérables is a powerful artistic enterprise because it hails from the pen of a great European writer, Victor Hugo. This serialized novel of redemption and reformation offers us a prism through which we can look into the people and ideas through multiple perspectives. In finding that redemption for individuals and for the society in which they live and love, Hugo could remind his generation of the work it takes, the cost of the steps both forward and backward in the process, and that despite the challenge, the possibility of that redemption exists.
DeLaurier notes that Hugo’s novel was a popular fiction that played to great acclaim and an extensive and diverse audience. This same audience reaction is reflected in the musical’s production history and so – each new production stays true to the author’s original intention. This story of Jean Valjean plays out through great music; music with a powerful emotional content that informs the context of each scene. The score offers a world of baritones where one great tenor can transcend that world just as the light can transcend the worlds of darkness and
despair that characters inhabit.
While the original French production as well as the London remastering of the show relied heavily on now famous spectacle and scenic elements, recent regional productions have the opportunity to reinvestigate and rediscover the Valjean story and the brilliant score with an eye for both the core truth of the original concepts, and with a nod to the increased technical possibilities now available to designers and musical directors. The “modern sound” no longer needs to rely on a synthesizer with limitations. And the reconsideration allows a company to offer a production born of American experience and ideas rather than purely European artistic traditions.
It is the struggle for a true and real democracy which genuinely serves the needs of the whole community, and the people of France that drove Hugo’s novel. Despite limited attempts at period reform of governmental and economic institutions, Hugo saw his France as a world of special interest, elites who thrived, and a majority who suffered at the hands of that elite. His novel searches for a path to full community. That for DeLaurier has a resonance that transcends its own era and speaks with conviction and strength in our own. |
