Les Miserables -- Is it cool to get rich off of singing about the poor? And why did the show fail in France? Episode 14 (8 of 8)

 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

In 1864 the First International Workingman’s Association meeting is held in London.  It’s supposed to be international and they are short of Germans so the organizers reach out to German section of town and invite a disgruntled journalist that is generally regarded as kind of grumpy.  For better or worse, that was a fateful choice, and Karl Marx’s rise from obscurity to being the leading voice of a movement that would take over Russia and China began.  

In 1852, once of France’s most prominent authors, Victor Hugo, had run afoul of Napoleon the 3rd and had been exiled to an island off the coast of France.  He had already published a treatise attacking the tyrant Napoleon, unfavorably comparing him to his great uncle, but his literary career was otherwise on hold as events in France were still treacherous, both for Hugo personally and democracy in general.

Waiting for his new direction, Hugo held and transcribed an incredible 2-years worth of seances, where the transcripts would reveal conversations with Shakespeare, Jesus, and both Napoleon’s.  The seances would end on the same night that one of the attendees, one Jules Allix, would collapse in a catatonic coma, completely insane, at the start of one of the sessions.  But not before one of the voices from beyond the grave told Hugo to finish the manuscript for Les Miserables.

Incredibly, the fates of all 3 men would come together in 1871 at the Paris commune where for 3 months radical workers defied the national government and sought to govern Paris.  Jules Allix would be revealed for the madman he was.  Karl Marx was launched into an internationally recognized figure.  And Victor Hugo would have his house stormed by rioters who opposed his calls for leniency when the commune collapsed in 1871.

What a crazy intersection of fates for Marx and Hugo, two the world’s most prominent authors on the subject of poverty.  The legacy of Marx and his influence on poverty complicated at best.  Hugo’s is more straightforward and presses the question: Is it hypocritical to become fabulously wealthy writing about the plight of the poor?

Hugo wasn’t the only one to get rich on this story, and the producers of the musical now rank amongst the wealthiest people anywhere, and are dogged by the same questions as Hugo.  Has time and the writing of Marx changed the answers?  And why is France the ONLY place the musical has flopped?  Are the answers to these two questions related?  We’ll try to sort it all out in this episode of THM.

[intro]

Footnotes in the transcripts, not the show notes.

This is the last episode of Les Mis and the 14th overall…it’s like we’re finishing a season.  Thanks for your support, and there are 3 things to do.  Post it on your social media to share with others, make sure you follow on your player of choice, if you can subscribe for $3 an episode.  Want your attention far more than your money, but if $6 a month is in your budget and you can support research driven looks at the less explored parts of history and musicals, don’t hold back.   But most of all, just let me know you’re out there.  I am happy screaming into the void but it’s way more fun to hear an echo back, and you can do that by dropping a rating, sending a message, or clicking the follow button.

Today we are going to explore 2 topics; the relationship of theater to poverty, and ask why Les Mis works everywhere but France.

Poverty

First things first, the poverty question.  Les Mis, the novel, was a huge financial success.  As we learned in previous episodes, it was:

·       The first international blockbuster

·       Had been other books that went global, this was the first marketed and simultaneously released

·       Sold out immediately

·       Had offers for 150k francs, but he held out for 300k and he got it

·       It was worth it, the publishing entrepreneur named Albert LeRoix who paid the huge sum made all his money back and tons of profits

·       It was followed by successful stage plays, including one by his son Charles, that ran into the 1890s

But it was not reviewed well…but for reasons that seem a little absurd.  Flaubert didn’t like it because he called it “catholico-socialist poop” but with a stronger word for poop, and that was weird because it was definitely not Catholic.  A key clue to that conclusion is that the Catholic church banned it.

As Kathry Grossman of Penn State put it in her 1986 book, the critics said he was paid by the page and “the tears he shed over the wretched of this world were, they said, paid most dearly.”  Actual value of that claim I’m dubious about…I haven’t seen anything saying he was paid by the page.  And a bunch of critics thought he was excusing criminal activity or removing individual responsibility for it.

For his wealth and his love life, Hugo had an elaborate system of thought that justified his behavior.  His love life was more than a little fraught – he bemoaned the society that forced women into prostitution, but visited many prostitutes himself.  The money side is a little easier to square – he thought, and I believe he’s correct about this – that the real issue was that society was actively keeping the very poor as very poor, and that authors getting paid for their work wasn’t really linked to that in any direct way.

A fairly conclusive point in my mind is how he was embraced at his funeral.  Covered in a prior episode, but the cliff notes version is that his funeral drew more people than the population of paradise, and socialist writer Meghan Behrent said the proceedings were a “festival of the oppressed.”  My experience has been that poor people can generally spot a hypocrite pretty easily, and it was evident that Hugo had won the hearts and minds of the poor.  If he made money on the book, he spent a very active political career advocating on their behalf, in the words of Behrent “giving voice to the voiceless.”

The musical is a little less straightforward.  Outside of Les Miz, some of the most successful people, including AL Webber, fall on the “crime is a failure of individual responsibility” side of the question, which was the same group to savage Hugo’s work initially.  Inside Les Mis, Cameron Mackintosh, who made more money than anyone on the production, has detractors, although he did tell Trump to stop playing Les Mis songs at rallies.  Both may be decent guys, but neither really has the political chops that Victor Hugo did as a nonstop advocate for the poor.

So IF there’s a case to be made about it being a little greasy to make huge piles of money while writing shows about sympathy for the poor, it’s more squarely leveled against the musical.

If you were to imagine a line and on the opposite sides were different opinions about the causes of crime, on one side you’d see the “law and order” folks who saw crime as a huge failure of personal morality.  Crime is committed by criminals, criminals are bad people, and the political responses stem from there.   At the other end you’d find Victor Hugo, saying as loudly as possible that crime is a product of society and the law putting the poor and disenfranchised into horrible situations, and OVER-punishing them for minor offenses that compound.    In one view, it is fine to throw Fantine in jail for prostitution because she IS a prostitute.  In the other, she deserves compassion and rehabilitation.  In other words, the two poles are defined by Javert who judges everyone harshly and JVJ who judges not at all.

Jenny Huges, who I’ll properly introduce in a second, points out the irony of very wealthy theater-goers having to navigate past unhoused people who were growing in number just as the show was getting popular.  And Mackintosh openly complained about crime growing in the west end, while his own show has a very concrete and unmistakable solution for that situation.  Just ask yourself what would JVJ do?

As a side note, there are those who are not troubled by the situation.  Sternfeld recounts a story of a Washington DC production that invited 150 unhoused people to attend the show; their reviews were generally positive.  This she takes to be a fairly firm defeat to the objection that the show allows rich people to gaze at poverty to feel good about themselves.

I’ll pause here and say that these are the very straightforward criticism of the situation: It is hypocritical to champion the needs of the poor while making piles of money on your production.  That question I’m not gonna answer, because I think the much bigger question, and the one that Hugo’s book puts front and center, is what can be done to address the needs of the poor?  If the big musical productions help that, they’re probably worthwhile.  If they make it worse, they probably aren’t.  If you are satisfied that the production has done more than most to engage in charity and give back to the community, you are probably OK with the show.

But there are those who would probe deeper, and here I’ll introduce the star of the show, Jenny Hughes of the University of Manchester writing in the publication Theater Journal in 2015.  I will present some core ideas from that piece and let you know where I’m departing from Hughes’ ideas to share my own.  Huges is comparing Les Mis to another production called Road, but I’m just going to focus on the Les Mis half.  The first section of the article is a critical take on economics, which includes a discussion of Marx, Freud, David Harvey (who writes extensively on neoliberalism), Jacques Ranciere (who I had not heard of before this article, but is indeed a critical economist), Michele Foucault, Dominque Laporte (who published a book title A history of shit that was published by the MIT press), and a few others.  I will NOT review all of it, although I think Hughes does a nice job, but for our purposes I just want to focus on neoliberalism.  Here’s the extended quote from Hughes: “Useful here is David Harvey’s definition of neoliberalism as founded on the rhetoric that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial

freedoms and skills with an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”  Viewed by the political Left as an economic ideology that exacerbates inequality and by the Right as generating wealth in ways that benefit many, neoliberalism, as articulated in the writings of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, for example, conceptualizes poverty as a condition that, while unfortunate, is a necessary stimulant to general prosperity. Harvey, from the political Left, agrees that wealth and poverty are mutually  interdependent within neoliberal economic regimes, drawing attention to neoliberalism’s distinct contribution to the long-term capitalist project of “accumulation by dispossession.”

 Let’s take a minute to unpack that a little.   Neoliberalism emphasizes the free market as the key to unlocking human potential, but the political left feels that in doing so it locks poverty in as a permanent part of society.  Why is that, exactly?  Well, they’ll start by saying that as an empirical fact neoliberalism has worked very well for elites and not at all for the very poor.  A commonplace statement is that rich/poor inequality now is higher than it was in the French revolution, the salaries of executives are soaring way out proportion to that of wage workers, and those who get buried in debt find it harder and harder to get out.

The promise of capitalism is that if you work hard enough you can rise from a floor worker to a chief executive, and that’s true.  But it also means that while that is possible for anyone, it can’t happen for everyone.  Or even very many.  For everyone who believed in themselves, stuck with it, took the one in a million shot, and came out on top, the vast majority do not.  I mean, isn’t that the plot for just about every musical ever?  From Annie to Newsies?  For every million to one shot that makes it there are 999,999 who don’t.  But that constant belief that its possible keeps attention away from what’s happening to most people, and worst of all it allows us to blame the poorest amongst us for their situation – if the economic system didn’t work for you when it DID work for Elon Musk, there must be something wrong with YOU.  If that sounds very Victor Hugo to you, I don’t think you’re off base.

So: The system works so that an individual investor puts up the capital and takes the risk.  If it loses money they are bankrupt and in hot water.  If it hits – like it did for Apple and Microsoft and Facebook and Google – those who invested the capital get fabulously wealthy and everyone else just gets what might be a fair wage for the specific work they did.  The way that is structured there will always be the very wealthy, a middle class that makes a decent living if they’re lucky enough to get one of the good jobs at the companies of the very wealthy, and a bunch of really poor people who end up buying the smartphones and computer chips the super-wealthy are producing.

That is part Hughes, part David Harvey, and part Jon Bruschke, but I do think it’s a reasonably accurate description of neoliberalism.

Within that framework, charity isn’t the issue.  If the richest people make billions from a system that guarantees that millions of people have to stay poor to make it happen, having those billionaires throw scraps off their table to charities won’t really change things.

Now, I’m not as absolutist as your average neoliberal critic, and I’ve seen many charities and nonprofits do really important work and change lives.  But I do think there’s a very valid point to the belief that you have to look at the way the economy is structured IN ADDITION to having all those charities and nonprofits do their thing if we are serious about eliminating poverty.  

Hughes explicitly links how this belief played out under the Reagan-Thatcher era.  Public subsidies were thought of as investments that sought returns.  A theater getting public funding wasn’t just expected to make a cultural contribution and raise the intellectual enrichment of the audience, it was supposed to form a public-private partnership and make a profit.  The winners were people like Trevor Nunn who could get some serious theater networking done for the publicly-subsidized Royal Shakespeare company and then split time with Cats and make a fortune.  The losers were independent, regional, experimental, and generally left-wing theaters.

Hughes point is that Les Mis participates in the neoliberal framework, and it really does.

·       The actors, especially in the West End, were paid less than average wage

·       All theater asks workers to subsidize their own development, paying for acting classes, etc.

·       They then sell their labor for fixed rates

·       If the show hits it big the producers will make the big bucks, but the actors will still negotiate fixed contracts

·       Even in this high-skilled area the workers are treated as interchangeable factory workers; on Les Mis in particular to keep it fresh the actors were literally replaced

In the end the neoliberal formula had perfectly played out: By the end Mackintosh was one of the wealthiest people in England, those lucky enough to get the good jobs in the production did pretty well, and all the actors who weren’t cast got nothing.  As the trickle-down policies of Reagan and Thatcher failed to trickle down the number of poor multplied, including in the areas around the theaters in the West End and Broadway.

At the same time, the show itself is about the plight of the poor.  But it’s more than that – it’s about the identity of the poor.

Earlier I had said that the simple accusations of poverty were too simple.  At the end of Hughes article, there is a lot of critical theory jargon about many concepts.  Two I take to be central are two things that confuse just about everyone the first time they encounter them; the social construction of reality and the discursive fight for identity.  I actually think both are pretty simple.

The social construction of reality just means that society is shaped by human choices.   The proof is that different societies and cultures make different choices, and that shapes the way the society functions and what it values.  If you all believe that there’s a King with a divine right to rule, you’ll end up with a King.  If you stop believing that and want a republican government you get the French revolution.  The important thing is that either is a choice, and there are similar choices to be made about legal systems and fossil fuel consumption.  Society is the sum total of human choices, so different choices can produce different societies.

The discursive construction of identity means that most inequities in society can be explained by the ways that different people are assigned different identities and what that means.  If someone is a felon or a prisoner that means that they are thought to have one set of characteristics; if they are a priest it’s another.  One piece of evidence that identity construction is really at the heart of political arrangements is how hotly its contest by political conservatives.  Nothing is a bigger hotbutton issue than people who challenge traditional identities, like transgender people, or gender fluid people.  Women who don’t conform to traditional identities are a bugaboo in conservative circles.  Immigrants are thought to have a very specific identity type, and making sure they are portrayed as outsiders or unhealthy or criminal is central to arch-conservative policies.

I’m not even saying that it’s good or bad yet, but I am saying that societal hierarchies are built around the way different people have their identities defined.

In the context of Les Mis, there are 2 more points I want to make.  First, this is absolutely the exact point that Victor Hugo is trying to make.  The real problem with Les Miserables, the outsiders, the disposed, the low of the earth, is that they are thought of as lesser than, as immoral, as nonproductive, as vile, as filth.  Hugo’s entire point is that thinking of these people in a different way transforms them AND society: When the priest treats JVJ with kindness DESPITE his criminality it fundamentally changes who JVJ is, and he ends up not only the mayor and a factory owner but as a good politician and a good boss.

Second, I’ll say that in my own encounters with the unhoused this is an issue central to them.  They are acutely aware of how people look at them, and they want respect more than they want money.  [Elaborate]

So in the end, Hughes poses this question: The musical production of Les Mis is one that participates in a neoliberal system that socially constructs the identity of poor people in one specific way.  But on the stage is portrays an entirely different identity for the poor people.  The real question, the central question of the relationship between theater and poverty, is which one is more important.

For Victor Hugo, this was a no-brainer.   The real problem, according to Hugo, is the social construction of society, the heart of the matter is the way identities are constructed for the disposed, and changing that is the core of the matter.  The problem was spiritual, and treating the least among us as holy, and doing so in our politics, was the way to address the problem.

For me, I want to agree with that as much as I can.  Yet, Hugo’s novel is the most famous in France, and there are still poor.  Yet, Les Mis is the most successful musical ever, shown to cheering audiences of 70 million, and yet there are still poor.

I think, that as we look back at Victor Hugo’s proposition 175 years later, and having seen an enormous amount of critical theory to bolster his beliefs, we can say there is evidence that neoliberalism as an empirical fact does increase economic inequality, but we can also say that discursively challenging the identities of the poor will be necessary but not enough to end poverty.  

In slightly different terms, Hughes is right to say that the megamusicals embrace neoliberalism even as they critique the identities it constructs.  I had posed this as a question of which is more important.   Perhaps the answer is that we need to do both.

I get this has been a little heavy and not super focused on the musical, but I do think this is the core question at the heart of Les Mis, the ultimate book about the poor, and as we ask ourselves what lessons musical theater has for life I think it’s a question worth asking.  I think it means that musical theater should recognize the ways that it is complicit with economic models that guarantee exclusion, and this includes preaching to our high school students the way performers need to accept very rigidly hierarchical casting practices to the way megamusicals suck up all the oxygen to the exclusion of truly innovative and different theater.  

[Summarize] We hear almost the same speech from Tony winners every year.  What we’re missing is the experience of the losers.  And we have a system that guarantees far more losers than winners.

Ah yes, the losers!  Well, that makes an excellent transition to our second point today!  The losers!

Why not France?

Let’s start with 3 things I’m not afraid to call facts:

1)      Hugo wrote Les Mis as statement about French character, and the book’s success in France is due in large part because of that.  It IS about the revolution, but it’s also treatise on the soul of France.

2)      Boublil switched his creative project FROM the revolution TO Les Mis for this very same reason; to make it more French and about more than just the Revolution. The dude already had a play about the revolution; he made it about Les Mis so he could make a musical that would resonate in France.

3)      Despite this, the ONLY losing version of the production was the one that ran in Paris.

4)      Here’s a new one: The 2012 movie by director Toby Hooper and produced by Cameron Mackintosh won 3 Oscars and made $442m…but flopped in France

And that presents the gaping and obvious question: Why does the musical make it everywhere except for France, when it is the ultimate statement on French culture.

For help, I’ll turn to Survarna Variyar, who was a postgraduate student in the Studies of Religion department at the University of Sydney in 2017 when he published an article in journal called literature and aesthetics.  Variyar very much agrees with my description of what Les Mis means to France.  “Hugo’s original Les Misérables, written during and for the emerging modern French nation, is perhaps the most prominent post-revolutionary work of fiction focusing on the new French identity,”

For Variyar, that is a transcendent, religiously-oriented French nationalism.  It’s a “civic religion” – that is, it’s a nation brought together by a shared spiritual commitment to each other that is not traditional Christianity.  Whereas, say, the US evangelical movement says that the nation should embrace Christianity for political decision making, Hugo would say France itself should be formed around a shared understanding of a spiritual commitment to one another that transcended any religion.  THIS, thought Hugo, would reshape the identities of the poor in a way that solved the problem of their disempowerment.

Les Mis, the novel, is epic because it encompasses the totality of the human struggle.  The meaning is in the language and the digressions, and not the plot.  The plot can highlight different elements of spirituality but it is spirituality at the core.  Javert and the church represent narrow, legalistic, and hierarchical ways of relating to others.  JVJ and priest treat others well not because of the consequences of being punished for violations, but because acts of unrequited kindness bind us to other humans as spiritual beings.  Society should be organized around connections to each other because of our shared inherent worth as spiritual beings, and not as self-interested egos constantly in competition with each other.

Anyway, says Variyar, that’s what the book is about.  And there’s a point to be made there; Hugo to the end defended Les Mis as a deeply spiritual book, and it was all about how France should be reformulated amidst the ongong series of revolutions.

And in ways I appreciate, Variyar thinks the 1980 concept rock album captures the true vibe of the original book, but the orchestrated, string-oriented 1985 score does not.  And, he’s right that the 1980 album did well in France, but the 1991 Paris production and the 2012 movie face planted.

But if you’re going to dramatize it, you have to focus on the plot.  You aren’t going to put together the entire 1,500 book, even if you’re a BBC radio show.   You have to make cuts and some are easy.  Like the digressions on sewage, criminal slang, and a recounting of the battle of Waterloo.  And you’ll focus on universal themes.  Everyone, including Variyar, thinks that works.  Here’s another quick quote: “The result is a visually and aurally compelling product; but one which seems to represent Hugo’s underlying themes as though they are no longer relevant.”

So I will now return to that first quote of Variyar’s I read because I think it answers the question about why the musical works everywhere but France: “If Hugo’s original Les Misérables, written during and for the emerging modern French nation, is perhaps the most prominent post-revolutionary work of fiction focussing on the new French identity, then its English language musical adaptation - particularly when considered in contrast with its 1980 predecessor - highlights exactly what that identity is not.”

I am less sure than Variyar is that the 1980s concept rock album captures the true spirit of France.  It was, after all, co-written by the guy who helped produce these lyrics: 

“When I'm close to you I wanna touch you
 There are people ev'rywhere
 People who like to stare

Can't take it Baby
 Let's get outta here.

Heaven's in the back seat of my Cadillac”

But even if Variyar is a little off about the 1980 album, I do think that the article contains an answer to our core question – the musical fails in France because the anglicized and universalized version that focuses on the plot fails to deliver what every French person already knows, that Les Mis contains an idyllic vision of what the heart of France is.

And that will do it for our final dive into the musical Les Mis.  It’s a great show if you’re not looking for the true meaning of French spirit, and it’s got a great message about how society keeps its poor down by forcing identities on them that are almost impossible to overcome, and insisting that by constantly resisting them we can make some progress.  But it probably won’t get us there as long musical are run through the exact same economic systems that are creating the problems in the first place.

Victor Hugo, you had a vision about how to unite poetry, spirituality and politics, and you are invited to my seances any time I get around to holding them.  This casting of pod is NOT sponsored by Hasbro, but if you want to summon the spirit of Victor Hugo they hold the patent on the Ouija board and will be happy to sell you a alphabet board and a planchett.  If you get him on the line, ask him what he thinks about the musical.

We will lay Les Mis to rest, and step away from France.  But we will not run out of musical theater productions to talk about any time soon.  Up next is CATS…who’s immediate mysteries might not seem that deep.  Why did TS Elliot like cats so much?  Why didn’t he capitalize words?  How can you make an unlimited budget movie that includes Taylor Swift and still not get an audience?  Did the costumes really get made out of yak hair?  I am herby granting you an invitation to the Jellicle ball, and our next episode will broadcast live from the heavyside layer, on the next episode of THM.