On Stage

...While their extravaganza suffers from all the weight-lifting and dollar-spending, they nevertheless do not betray Victor Hugo's story...

...Fortunately, directors Nunn and Caird had the final say in determining what went on the boards...

...Gustave Flaubert, for instance, pronounced it "childish...

...Les Misérables remains recognizable in its English-American operatic version...

...Defending the same barricade is Marius, whose family is not only rich but noble...

...Artistically, however, what codirectors Trevor Nunn and John Caird of the Royal Shakespeare Company have done to Victor Hugo has more in common with their acrobatic exploitation of T.S...

...It exaggerates the mean to the point of hellishness and makes the good into pure heaven...

...The two directors do a very smooth job with the considerable stage resources furnished by set designer John Napier, using them flawlessly and elegantly to link up the many disconnected episodes of Les Misérables...

...Although the producer doesn't say so, he might have deemed Fenton particularly qualified to augment a work by Victor Hugo because Rigoletto was based on Hxxgo's Le Rois'amuse...

...that's what's expected...

...The show is also too intent on highlighting the causes of the 1832 Paris slum uprising that frames the later events in Les Misérables...

...John Caird has stressed the need "to give some focus to Hugo's anger and some credence to the grievances of insurrectionists who would otherwise come across as a bunch of well-meaning but foolish dilettantes...

...Thus Les Misérables is not legitimate theater in the usual sense of the term...

...But what Nunn and Caird have concocted is in fact an unhappy imitation of an opera...

...No one at the Met is disturbed when the most pedestrian, nonlyrical piece of conversation becomes a recitative, delivered in a fashion falling somewhere between speaking and singing...

...Still, a powerful drama should not be reduced to a mere libretto and manipulated according to the restrictive conventions of opera...

...The symbolic imagery of the 19th century gives way to the cheaply—no, expensively—wrought ending of a tearjerking soap opera...

...He admitted that it contained a very few "fine pieces," but criticized what he saw as a lack of authenticity: " It is not permissible to describe society so falsely when one is the contemporary of Balzac and Dickens...

...I've dipped into it and read sections of it, but it's so heavy that I mainly use it for weight-lifting," he said...

...A weighty argument indeed— albeit for dumbbells, not theater producers...

...Eliot in Cats than with their laudable treatment of Charles Dickens' NicholasNickleby...

...Leo Burmester's Thénardier is conceived as belonging to some sinister farce— but it is difficult to see anything comical in the beast who mistreats and exploits little Cosette before Valjean rescues her, and robs the bodies of fallen insurgents (a practice he began in 1814 on the field of Waterloo...

...But the most gratifying contribution is David Hersey's lighting...

...Not everyone admired the novel upon its appearance in 1862—a time when Hugo was living as a political exile on the Channel island of Guernsey, and the soldiers of Napoleon III were invading Benito Juarez' Mexico...

...Remarkably, despite the many formal distortions...

...Consider the death of Gavroche (a character so well-known in France that his name is to this day used to refer to the naughty Parisian street urchin, le gamin de Paris...

...as the Playbill informs us, "References to Voltaire and Rousseau, allusions to French political life, were cut out...

...They also manage to convey something of the flavor of Hugo's ideas and ideals...

...Here are Victor Hugo's final lines: "The night was without stars, deeply dark...

...Mackintosh boasted in an interview that he could never read the whole book...

...Speaking of Fenton's approach in searching for something to add to the novel, Mackintosh gives us a bit of information that is highly significant to him—and to me...

...As in the London production, concert singer Colm Wilkinson plays the role of Jean Valjean...

...Mackintosh also revealed what had initially impressed him about Fenton: In a new libretto for Rigoletto "Fenton had turned Verdi's opera into a Mafia show...

...It seems the show's writers thought Lamarque's name would be more meaningful to a Broadway audience than those of Voltaire and Rousseau...

...On Stage HUGOS UNLIKELY LIBRETTO BY LEO SAUVAGE It has been called the biggest event in show business history—and if the accent is on business, that's probably true of Les Misérables at the Broadway Theater...

...As for the vast company in general, let me simply say that while Broadway's singers/dancers/actors are the best in the world when it comes to group scenes in musicals, as opera extras they are not terribly dazzling...

...Here played with unexpected authenticity by the young American Braden Danner, Gavroche is cut down in front of abarricade as he scavenges desperately needed bullets from dead soldiers while flouting the fire of living ones...

...Astonishingly, Claude-Michel Schoenberg—who composed the music for this show, as well as for a concert version of Les Misérables performed in 1980 at Paris' Palais des Sports—passes over the musical challenge posed by Hugo's verse...

...Its leader was Enjolras, a republican and the only son of a rich family...

...In any event, there is definitely no mention of Voltaire or Rousseau...

...In the novel as well as the history books, the erecting of the barricades in 1832 was occasioned by the military funeral of General Lamarque, a former commander under Napoleon who had acted as a "Leftist" representative in the Parliament of the new King, Louis-Philippe...

...In fact, they go farther—sometimes too far...

...Moreover, clever promotion has given the production a spectacular aura that virtually assures a steady stream of profits years into the future, there apparently being no shortage of people able and willing to pay $47.50 for a seat...

...In the novel, he dies singing a song— Hugo's Chanson de Gavroche—whose last word is interrupted by a final bullet: Je suis tombé par terre, C'est la faute à Voltaire, Le nez dans le ruisseau, C'est la faute à Rousseau...

...Nunn and Caird are faithful to this tendency...

...On a trip to inner Borneo, Fenton "took a copy of Les Misérables with him in preparation for our musical...

...Nor is it a "musical," as the advertisements proclaim...

...Claude-Michel Schoenberg's music survives the amplification reasonably well and it is quite pleasant, especially when it reminds us of Kurt WeiU...

...No doubt a musical adaptation of Hugo's novel would be very much at home on stage...

...To make matters worse, the operatic form spoils passages where a full-blown song is called for...

...In the shadow, no doubt, an immense angel stood erect, with widespread wings, waiting for the soul...

...The particular barricade depicted by Hugo was held by a politically vague revolutionary group made up mostly of students...

...He is flanked by Cosette (Judy Kuhn), the prostitute's daughter he has brought up like his own child, and Marius (David Bryant), the student wounded on the barricades whom he carried to safety through the sewers of Paris because of the love between Marius and Cosette...

...perhaps it is lost among the half-sung recitatives and half-spoken dronings of the chorus...

...Overall, he found Les Misérables "exasperating...

...He was a poet who followed his feelings wherever they took him...

...No other show has had anything like its $ 11 million in advance sales...

...Because of the book's weight, he hacked off chapters with his machete as he read them, and dropped them into the river for the alligators to eat...

...There was even a time, not long ago, when an arid wind of kitchen sink realism blowing over Broadway sent fanciers of imaginative theater to the Met in search of a little atmosphere...

...Lamarque's funeral procession, led by the Marquis de Lafayette, brought out the town...

...On stage, Nunn and Caird substitute for the angel a maudlin trio of singing ghosts...

...His Les Misérables is full of sentimentality and heroics, of indignation and protest...

...Take the concluding scene, in which the unjustly persecuted convict Jean Valjean dies...

...A Bonapartist, his presence has more to do with the friendship he feels for the other fighters and the influence of Enjolras than with ideology...

...Theatergoers may, of course, also be lovers of opera...

...When the emotional Paris crowds pushed too close to the coffin of the popular leader, the troops opened fire, and the barricades went up...

...The part is played as well as it is sung by Michael Maguire, one of the few really good performers in the large supporting cast...

...The resulting display of spectacular miserableness intrudes on the novel's "social romanticism...

...This can scarcely be credited to producer Cameron Mackintosh or to James Fenton, the former London theater critic who supplied "added material...

...Though a newcomer to the stage, Wilkinson dominates the proceedings with his powerful presence, not to mention his great voice...

...But there are several references to General Lamarque, today remembered mainly through Hugo's novel...

...But to hear factory workers, prostitutes, corpse-robbing criminals, and barricade-building insurgents all communicate exclusively in recitatives—as they do in Les Misérables—strikes one as phony, not to say ridiculous...

...It not only expresses Hugo's social romanticism, it actually brings us moments of his romantic poetry—something otherwise absent from the Broadway Theater...

...It is important not to confuse the 1832 uprising with the "July Revolution" of 1830 that toppled the absolute monarchy of Charles X—as critics in London, Washington and New York have done...

...Certainly the novel is a stranger to nuance...

...At least I could not discern any translation or adaptation of the Chanson de Gavroche...

...Out of the selection of scenes originally made by Alain Boublis and Jean-Marc Natel for the 1980 Paris version, Nunn and Caird succeed in articulating the major turning points within the convolutions and digressions that make up the book...