Les Miserables -- From novel to stage...and why did it fail in France? Episode 13 (7 of 8)

Errata: At about the 12 minute mark I say that Phantom of the Opera is a Victor Hugo story.  It isn't -- it's French, but the author is Gaston LaRoux.

A young music producer has just seen a production of Jesus Christ, Superstar and was hit by his muse … he wandered the streets of Manhattan, unable to sleep.  A native of France, Alain Boublil felt he had to keep walking until he found a theme that could match the power and emotional intensity of what he’d just seen, and something uniquely French.  He came to the defining national moment…the French Revolution.  That idea would develop into a rock opera, then a concept album, and finally transform into what has been rightly called the most successful musical of all time, in a show that has been seen by 70 million people in 44 countries and translated into 22 languages.  It has been a hit everywhere it has been except…France.  Why?

That second turn would see Boublil trade the muse for a mentor…the original production was about the French revolution but it was not about it was not based on Victor Hugo’s famous book.  That would take inspiration from Hugo’s cross-channel counterpart, Charles Dickens.  Boublil walked into a production of the quintessentially English show Oliver and walked out inspired to base the production on Les Miserables.  Incredibly enough, that show will be produced by the same man who was running the production of Oliver.

Which is only one of two incredible connections between England and France…the production of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece will, in the end, depend NOT on France’s greatest novelist but England’s greatest author.  How does the production of Les Miserables depend as much on William Shakespear and Victor Hugo?  We will trace all these fascinating paths of lineage on this episode of THM. 

Transcript

A young music producer has just seen a production of Jesus Christ, Superstar and was hit by his muse … he wandered the streets of Manhattan, unable to sleep.  A native of France, Alain Boublil felt he had to keep walking until he found a theme that could match the power and emotional intensity of what he’d just seen, and something uniquely French.  He came to the defining national moment…the French Revolution.  That idea would develop into a rock opera, then a concept album, and finally transform into what has been rightly called the most successful musical of all time, in a show that has been seen by 70 million people in 44 countries and translated into 22 languages.  It has been a hit everywhere it has been except…France.  Why?

That second turn would see Boublil trade the muse for a mentor…the original production was about the French revolution but it was not about it was not based on Victor Hugo’s famous book.  That would take inspiration from Hugo’s cross-channel counterpart, Charles Dickens.  Boublil walked into a production of the quintessentially English show Oliver and walked out inspired to base the production on Les Miserables.  Incredibly enough, that show will be produced by the same man who was running the production of Oliver.

Which is only one of two incredible connections between England and France…the production of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece will, in the end, depend NOT on France’s greatest novelist but England’s greatest author.  How does the production of Les Miserables depend as much on William Shakespear and Victor Hugo?  We will trace all these fascinating paths of lineage on this episode of THM.

*****

It’s happening!  Please take a moment to share or repost – word of mouth is a key way a podcast lives or dies.

References had been in the show notes but they’re too long, so they’re in the transcripts.

We are in the home stretch for Les Mis, so our agenda is: early adaptations, the creation of the musical, two great questions of the show: Is it cool to get really rich off a story about the poor, and how true is the musical to the book?

Early Adaptations

There are LOTS of adapations – according to the Wikipedia page, which I’m not presenting as definitive but is quite good for a quick flavor – there are 14 book sequels listed by authors OTHER than Hugo, seven comic book series starting in 1943 and the last appearing in 2010, nine different manga series, starting in 1963 but most of them after 2000, Twenty-three different TV series, including one in Japanese and a couple by the BBC, 11 different animated versions, including a Soviet Latvian animated short, and 13 different radio series including the obligatory BBC treatment and a 7-part series by Orson Welles on the same radio series where he did War Of the Worlds.  Like everyone else, Wikipedia says the 1960s TV series “The Fugitive” is based on the story.

So I’m not gonna cover all of them, but true to my promise of doing scattershot research I’ll focus on the ones that seem important or have a good mystery or backstory.

My main source here is Kathryn Grossman, who we’ve met before.  Wrote a 1996 book about the novel and what it means, and in 2015 she co-edited a compilation book – that’s one where there is an editor or two, and a bunch of experts all submit a chapter.  The co-editor was Bradley Stephens who specializes in French at Bristol university, and the 2015 book focuses on adaptations of the novel.  The two co-authored an introduction (to the book they were co-editing) and each wrote a chapter separately.  Grossman’s solo chapter – chpt 7 – is about the early reception in the US.

Per Grossman, there are stage adaptations almost immediately.   The book is released in 1862 and by 1863 Charles Hugo – Victor’s son – gets author credit for a stage play version in Brussels.  Can’t be done in France because Hugo is in exile and the book is popular but Louis Napoleon wants Victor dead so it’s a risky proposition to stage a showing in France.   Charles, we learned in earlier episodes, had some tension with his father and also served as the medium of the seances the family held in 1852-1853.  It was good enough that it ran on and off and as late as 1899, where Charles collaborated with a co-author.  It ran 5 hours and packed houses.

The book was famously popular in the US, especially among civil war combatants, although the South had to edit out the parts about slavery being bad.  Which, if I understand the situation correctly, is STILL what Florida and Texas are doing with history textbooks.  Anyway, by 1863 there are number of stage productions of the story in the US and some of them, interestingly, incorporate music and songs.

As a curious side note, the book was banned in Philadelphia in 1897 because it involved a child out of wedlock and a woman in prostitution.  Don’t get any ideas, Texas and Florida or, I guess, Huntington Beach!  It’s a great book!  Anyway, the ban was short-lived and atypical.

Between 1900-1909 there are some more successful stage productions in the US, including student theater companies running performances and touring shows.  One that starred a guy named James Hackett toured for four years.  One starred a different actor named Wilton Lackaye – big name for his day – started in Waterbury Connecticut but the show had so much heat it’s opening in CT was mentioned in papers in Anaconda, Montana.  

I don’t know and it doesn’t matter whether that has historical significance, nobody should ever miss a chance to mention that there is a city in Montana called Anaconda.  That itself sounds like the title track to a musical just to play around with the slant rhyme.

But get this:  One of the reviews read and I am now quoting directly: “The effective use of incidental music in connection with this play suggests that a good opera might be built upon Les Miserables.”  That authors nailed it, and without the benefit of any séance.  Anyway, the successful traveling theater shows were giving Les Mis a life beyond the novel in that first decade of the 20th century.

Rewinding just a bit, in 1897 cinema was just getting started, and two guys named the Lumiere brothers were making some of the first films and did a short version Les Mis.  By 1909 there we now 20,000 theaters in the US, and the main film adaptation to know about is the 1913 verison by French director Albert Capellani. Released in multiple cities at once, has sophisticated advance publicity, doesn’t matter that the actors are French because it’s a silent film and the subtitles are all in English.

Was an “unheard-of success.”  70k people saw it in St. Louis in 16 days.116,00 in Chicago, in San Francisco every showing sold out plus 500 turned away every evening.  Ran for 5 years and was rightly called “the most successful motion picture production ever made” in 1918.  Was eventually shortened and moved out of the grand theaters to smaller, more affordable venues and gave it as second life.  Part of the appeal was that it was shot in France and those who had family members serving in WW 1 were interested in scenes of the French countryside.  It was followed immediately by an American version of the film which was also phenomenally successful.

There are other takeaway points, but two that are interesting to me are (1) Les Mis is a story that’s not only crucial to the making of the modern novel, it’s crucial to the creation of the movie industry (2) it shows that the book can be adapted to theater and film.

By the 1920s there were more silent films of interest.  Hugos’ Hunchback is made with Lon Chaney Sr. as it’s star and is a big hit, and after that Chaney will star in Phantom of the Opera.  Hugo’s book was already a massive hit and he’d already had some of his other stuff made into some of the most recognizable operas of all time, including Rigoletto and Lucretia Borgia.  But the silent movie of Phantom was crucial to the success of the book and the musical.  Won’t rehash old episodes here, but if you haven’t heard the backstory of the silent movie version of Phantom it is definitely worth the time.  For now, it’s an interesting contrast.  Whereas the silent movie version of Phantom was the key to keeping the narrative alive for the musical, the silent movie version of Les Miz wasn’t necessary for the book but was MORE crucial to the development of the entire movie industry.

According to Stephens and Grossman, in their introductory chapter, there would eventually be 65 film versions, and according to those authors that makes it the most popular screen adaptation by a 4 to 1 margin over any other competitor.

So if you are French music producer wandering the streets of Manhattan in the late 1960s, you have definitely heard of the French revolution, you have definitely aware both that Les Mis is the most successful novel of all time and quite probably that it has been a huge success in cinema.

Which gets us to that fateful night on Broadway.

The musical

My source here shifts from Grossman and Stephens to Jessica Sternfeld 2006 (Phd in musicology from Princeton.  She wrote a book called Megamusical and I’m relying heavily here on her chapter on Les Mis.

Alain Boublil was born in Tunisia to a Jewish family, moved to Paris at the age of 18, and after seeing the West Side Story in 1959 pursued a career in music and got work in radio stations and eventually as a music producer.

But the big walk down the road to Damascus came in the late 1960s or very early 1970s, when he saw Jesus Christ Superstar.  He is moved and the muses are screaming in his ear…he walks around in a trance-like state – the same condition that Charles Hugo was in when the spirit of civilization told him, in a séance, that his father should finish Les Miz.  “He felt an overwhelming compulsion to keep walking until he’d thought of a suitable theme for a rock opera that might compare in scope and intensity with the subject matter of Jesus Christ Superstar.  Inspiration came at dawn: why not deal with the single most important event in French history – the French revolution?”  

That account is in Sternfeld, but the footnote is to a book by Behr, which is sort of the promo-book for Les Mis.  Andrew Lloyd Webber, when he made Phantom, had a coffee table book that is the official version of the show commissioned by the producers, and that’s what Behr’s book is to Les Mis.  ALL SOURCES have a perspective, so this doesn’t discredit the account, but the author’s own version is likely to be favorable to the author.  But let’s notice 2 things about it…he’s not drawn to Les Mis but to the French revolution, and he’s centering it on France.  And, for our purposes, the inspiration is mystically inspired.

So he finds a composer named Claude-Michael Shonberg – umlats over the o --  and another couple of collaborators, and together they write a play called La Revolution France.  It is a rock opera, so the music is a more traditional rock band with a drum kit and electric guitars, and it opens in 1973 at a venue called the Palais de Sports.  The album releases in advance and does well, the show runs for a successful season.

It is NOT a mega-hit, but France is not producing those.  A 1-season run is a credible success for French theater but it’s nothing like the scale of a Broadway run.

So Boublil now goes to see a production of Oliver, which is produced by Cameron Mackintosh.  If you know musical theater that’s a name as familiar as Tom Seaver is to music fans, but let’s just put a pin in that for now.  Or better yet, write it on a post-it note and stick it on the edge of our collective computer screen.   According to an author named Hughes I’ll introduce in a second Mackintosh is living the binge and purge lifestyle of the entertainment industry between 1967 and 1981, periodically flush and broke in irregular cycles.

Anyway, Boublil is taken with the character the Artful Dodger – as I Mets fan I cringe at any mention of the word Dodger, and I’ve never really forgiven Orel Hershiser for the 1988 NLCS – but it reminds Boublil of the character Gavroche from the novel.  According to Sternfeld, who is relying on a New York Times interview with Boublil, “he chose it for its specifically French nature.  ‘In order to be able to have musical theater preformed in France, a country where the genre does not exist, you have to touch something that is deep in the heart of the people.’”  And nothing is more central to French culture than the Hugo novel, so there you go.

Boublil and Shoenberg take the idea and run with it by producing a “concept album” that’s mostly just Schonberg playing the piano and singing.  But they’re in the biz, so they pitch it around until John Cameron.  Cameron had been a successful pop artist and producer, and I am most struck by his work with the UK funk band “Hot Chocolate” who had hits you might remember like “you sexy thing” and those you might not like “heaven is in the back seat of my Cadillac” which is notable for including the cheeziest pickup line of all time.  He also recorded an all-instrumental version of Led Zepplin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

But, he goes on to work on music for movies and TV as well, and he’s established by the time he’s approached in the late 1970s, and he orchestrates a fully-produced version of the concept album.  The album cover is the Bayard lithograph – it’s that picture of Cosette that you’ve seen a million times.  And it is in French.

That is the album they present to Cameron Mackintosh in 1982.  They already had some interest in the thing and even a small deposit, but Mackintosh convinces the duo that he’s the guy to go with, they sign up with him, and the plan is to have the show produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and then moved to London’s west end, which is their commercial theater district, roughly the Broadway of London although that sentence surely offends the British who probably think of Broadway as the low-brow version of London’s West End.

I’m kind of poking fun there, but the issues do matter.  There is a real dispute over art that is the horrifying dish you serve when you mix art critics, public funding, and capitalism in your microwave and let it cook for too long.  The broad strokes are that things like the Royal Shakespeare Company is a public entity, it is as the name suggests commissioned by the royal family who pays the bills, and it’s job is to culturally elevate the populace by producing great art, and as a result it has lots of prestige and little money.  The West End is commercial, the critics generally turn up their nose in a way only very British critics can at the rank commercialism and low-brow, pandering nature of the West End production, but that’s where the megamusicals are and that’s where the money is.

The fact that all these things are developing around the time of Thatcherism and Reganomics only makes the dish more, uh, salty, and we will get to all that in our next episode.

But let us not let this tawdry discussion of mere money distract us from the central, spiritual connection here.  As we have learned in our prior episodes, Victor Hugo started the book Les Mis in the 1840s, couldn’t finish it because he was run out of France by the tyrannical soon to be Emperor Louis Napoleon (not THE Napoleon who really got things rolling by 1800, but his nephew who came to power after a few more tries at both kings and democracies by 1850).  He was exiled to the island of Jersey where he held seances.

I’m just reviewing previous episodes here, but his son Charles was the best medium, and through him William Shakespeare himself appeared from beyond the grave to dictate the first act of a new Shakespearean play.  At these same seances the spirit of civilization told Victor Hugo to finish the Les Mis manuscript, which he would return to 6 years later and finish by 1862.

And if that sounds like a third-hand ghost story you don’t have to take my word for it, Hugo’s daughter Adele kept a transcript of every word of the hundreds of seances and it is available in published form that you yourself can read if you either speak French or have a lot of patience for google translate.  Where IS THE babel fish?  Hugo didn’t need one, because although Hugo could speak no English William conveniently decided to write his new play in French because he said he preferred that language to English.  That does introduce the question of why he did all his writing in English while he was alive, but the afterlife is all about second chances.  Maybe I shouldn’t joke that ghosts aren’t real because the one that told Hugo to finish Les Miz was dead on.  I didn’t even try to do that, but I like “dead on” as the standard for the accuracy of specteral predictions.  

ANYWAY – Hugo does Shakespeare a solid by being a vehicle for the great English author to continue his work from beyond the grave, and Shakespeare returns the favor by having the theater company named for him giving Hugo’s great novel a third life as a successful musical.  It’s like watching Elton John and Billy Joel go on tour together.  Seriously, I think it is just a crazy connection or coincidence or something that Hugo was a huge fan of Shakespeare and the Les Miz musical started in the royal Shakespeare company.

But not yet.  The original lyricist is named James Fenton but he’s fired; he’s a good poet but it’s taking too long and not really coming together.  This is quite a parallel to the Man from La Mancha, which consumes the first 3 episodes of this podcast.  Their original lyricist was also a great poet and was also fired because all his lyrics sounded like good poetry and bad songs.  Mackintosh brings on the relatively unknown Herbert Kretzmer, who’s making a way with a day job as a journalist.

In past episodes we’ve talked about the spiritual content of the original book, and Kretzmer got that right.  In his interview with Tims Kretzmer describes himself as an atheist, but when penning lyrics for JVJs song he realized it sounded like a prayer and said he had to believe the spiritual content with every sinew as fervently as JVJ did.  That approach seemed to work

Mackintosh brings in Boublil and Schonberg in a central creative role, which surprises them because they think he’s bought the rights and is just going to do his own adaptation.  They add a lot, and there’s work to do.  In France you can just assume everyone knows the Les Miz plot but there’s more to explain to the English audience including and especially the sewer system.  The cast is charged with doing research so they can better convey the ideas.

The director is Trevor Nunn, who is the director of the Royal Shakespeare company, but controversially is also working on Cats, which is fueling the public subsidy/commercialism maelstrom.  But it’s clear he’s giving Les Mis significant creative input.

Finally, it opens in the Barbican Theater in October of 1985, running an insomnia-curing 3 and ½ hours.  One of the challenges all the adaptations are going to have is staying true to a 1,500 page book while keeping an audience awake.  Just like the original novel, the initial reviews were not good.  According to both Sternfeld and an interview Mackintosh gave to journalist Anna Tims, the next-day reviews were so bad they were seriously considering letting the show end early at the Barbican and just die a natural death.  Those negative reviews will be all about commercialism debates and high artistry.  Should say, it sounded less like a major crisis of faith in the production and more like a bad morning.  Like, the early reviews ruined their mood when they first woke up and read them.

Among the unimpressed was Andrew Lloyd Webber.  He’s an owner of the West End Theater the Palace, which is where Mackintosh wants to take Les Miz after the Royal Shakespeare Company run, and he offers to return to the deposit to take the bite off of the show he thinks will obviously be a failure.

But the spirit of Shakespeare will have none of it; great word of mouth offsets the negative reviews, a few positive and rave reviews show up, and the show sells out the entire Barbican run.  After the bad morning Mackintosh called the box office and the sales were doing fine.  The best remedy for a hangover is lots of water, and best remedy for bad reviews is ticket sales.  In fact, they set records for ticket sales for the duration of the Barbican run.  They did move to the Palace and sold out every show until they moved to the Queen’s theater in 2004, played there until the theater was refurbished un 2019, now plays at the Sondheim theater where it is still running as of this recording in January of 2025.  That is to say that after it’s run at Royal Shakespeare it’s West End run was a huge success.  Lloyd-Webber was happy to accept the successful show into the Palace theater and cash all the checks.

It still has another life, and it needs to jump the Atlantic to get to Broadway.  This it will do in March of 1987, so only a couple of years after it opens on the West End, and it does so by breaking all the advanced ticket sales of Cats.  This time, the reviews were generally positive, although some felt the production was a little too much of a good thing.  One called it “too inspirational.”  The Newsweek reviewer predicted, correctly, it would be the most successful of all time.  Unlike the original book or the Royal Shakespeare company’s production, the critics were behind this version of the show.  

There are a few things worth mentioning about the production.  It’s initial run had 12 Tony nominations and it won 8.  It now runs 2 hours and 50 minutes with intermission, 40 minutes shorter than it’s original Shakespeare Company rendition.  There are fast scene changes with few applause breaks, which Sternfeld thinks is the key to making a really long epic work.  Both Sternfeld and master’s student Mary Pezzillo of Stephen A. Austin University notice that the show makes extensive use of musical leitmotifs – those are musical phrases that repeat to bring the audience back to important points.  These were also use extensively in Phantom, but Les Mis used them first and in Les Mis the music marks ideas, whereas in Phantom it marks characters.

In the musical, the Thernadiers are presented as comic and in the closing scene, when all the characters come back from the dead on the barricades in a rousing finish, the Thernadiers rise from the stage.  This is a different treatment than they have in the book, where they are the arch villains and not comic.  For now I’m just pointing this out, later we’ll talk about why that might matter.

The show makes use of the chorus as vocal contributors.

A massive marketing push preceded its release everywhere; Sternfeld notes and points to others who think that a big part of Mackintosh’s success is his commitment to marketing.  It’s definitely a megamusical, and has been called “McMiz” derisively for those who think the artistic quality-commercialism dialectic has tipped far too heavily in favor of commercialism.

It has had international appeal, being adapted many places and in many different languages.  Advertised in Oslo, where Cosette has a Viking helmet, Tel Aviv, where she has an Israeli flag, and Australia, where she appears upside down.  Earmuffs for Reykavick, and a Mountie uniform for Toronto.  Sternfeld attributes this to the cross-cultural emotional impact of the show.  And, of course, effective marketing.  Stephens and Grossman is universal and also finds the emotional themes trans-cultural.  A variant on this theme is in the Master’s Thesis of Kelsey Blair of the University of British Columbia, who finds the theme of empowerment, including power and change, to be one that resonates with audiences.

Political content has resonated worldwide.  Cosette’s image has been superimposed on the solidarity flag of the Polish resistance; performances were dedicated to the protesters in Tienamen square.  Les Mis songs were played during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 Presidential candidacy.

And, an issue we will dwell on in the next episode, it opened in 1991 in France, fulfilling Boublil’s vision of creating the ultimate French narrative.  It wasn’t that much of a risk, the show had been a success in 60 other cities already, and it opened to rave reviews and big crowds…which died out after 1 month, lost $3.7m, and was the only losing production of the show ever when Sternfeld had printed the book in 2016.

The last thing I’ll say about this production is that famously, and controversially, in 1996 there was a pretty substantial cast turnover.  It had opened in 1987, so it was about a decade in, but the producers had seen a show they felt was stale, so they replaced 12 of the performers on a very large cast.  This was obviously bad for the perfomers, many of whom relied on the paychecks for mortgages, and most were really hard working and not necessarily credited.  But, Mackintosh did give them the maximum severance plus $25,000, which is something.  But, it definitely was for the good of the show and to the detriment of the performers, and a New York Times reporter noted that production team was treating the cast as if they were thought of as interchangeable parts, just like Fantine had been in JVJ’s factory.  This theme we will also get to in the next episode, but Sternfeld estimates that the move worked.  It was bad for the performers and good for the show, with the open question being how the moral scales balanced out.

And, in the introduction to his book, Hugo said that as long as the poor, the young, and the female continued to be exploited, there would be a need for books like Les Mis.  Here we are a century and a half later, and part of what Les Mis must mean is that those issues are still with us.  What resonated with the audiences of the novel in 1862 was still poignant to the audiences of the musical in 1985, and since the book and the musical are both running strong today, 40 years later in 2025.

And how well did this musical work?  I will turn to Carly-Ann Clements, a writer for the officiallondontheater.com website, to give us the final box score.  According to Clements, it is the longest-running musical in the world, it has had 3 Broadway runs, it was the core of Toby Hooper’s 2012 movie – produced by Mackintosh – that won 3 Oscars, it won 8 of the 12 Tony’s it was nominated for on its initial Broadway run, it had 6,680 performances in Broadway between 1987 and 2003, NOT counting the runs in the other 44 countries, and just to say it again, a total audience of 70m, in 45 countries, and 22 languages.  More than one author has called this the most successful musical of all time and I’m not here to argue about it.

For me, it would have just been enough that Victor Hugo’s famous novel was first performed as musical in the theater named after Shakespeare, AFTER Shakespeare had appeared to Hugo in a séance.  

But that tally sheet does not put all of our mysteries to bed.  The success of the musical was enormous but NOT in France.  That would be weird by itself, but wasn’t Boublil’s whole point to make the most French thing he possibly could?  Why would it fail in France, of all places?  And, all this success is making a lot of people really rich…but by dramatizing the lives of the really poor.  Is that…cool?  There are a lot of armchair opinions and a lot of surprisingly deep economic analysis and we’ll talk about all of it in the next episode of THM.