INSPIRED BY LES MISÉRABLES

Musical

“I thought it would last two or three years,” Cameron Mackintosh, producer of the record-breaking musical adaptation of Les Misérables, told the New York Times. So much for theatrical fortune-telling. The Broadway production of “Les Miz” was one of the most successful musicals of all time. The show originally opened on September 17, 1980, in Paris and in 1985 premiered in London, directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird of the Royal Shakespeare Company. On March 12, 1987, the London production came to Broadway. Like Hugo’s novel, the musical was initially greeted with mixed reviews, but it was soon embraced by the theater-going public. The New York production ran for sixteen years, until March 15, 2003. Les Misérables is the second longest running musical in Broadway history, second only to the T. S. Eliot-inspired Cats.

The musical Les Misérables was created by Claude-Michel Schönberg (music) and Alain Boublil (original French lyrics), who together wrote the songbook; Herbert Kretzmer wrote the lyrics for the American version. The three-hour spectacle features fluid costumes that are simultaneously ragged and glamorous, revolving sets, sweeping lights, and a showcase of memorable numbers. The production is passionate, ecstatically energetic, and ultimately uplifting.

Les Misérables has been produced in thirty-eight countries and twenty-one languages, and has received numerous awards the world over. In the United States, it won eight Tony Awards—Best Book, Best Score, Best Set Design, Best Lighting, Best Actor (Michael Maguire), Best Actress (Frances Ruffelle), Best Director (Trevor Nunn), and Best Musical. Les Misérables also won two Grammys: one for a 1988 cast recording and another for a 1991 symphonic recording, one of a total of thirty-one recordings that have been made.

Film

The first feature film based on the novel was Charles Pathé’s version of 1909, the same year J. Stuart Blackton filmed Les Misérables in England. Indeed, France’s first film to find a wide international audience was Albert Capellani’s faithful screen version of 1912. Fredric March played Jean Val jean and Charles Laughton was Inspector Javert in Richard Boleslawski’s superbly staged version of 1935. Les Misérables has been filmed more than twenty times, including musical productions.

In the mid-1990s a suite of film adaptations appeared, perhaps prompted by the hugely popular musical. Writer and director Claude Lelouch’s brilliant 1995 retelling of the novel is a layered epic that takes Hugo’s novel as its central reference point, much in the same way that Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours draws on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Set during the Nazi occupation of France, Lelouch’s Les Misérables focuses on Henri Fortin, an illiterate boxer turned furniture mover who comes to see parallels between himself and Jean Valjean. The film moves between Fortin’s tale, the story of his father, and scenes from Hugo’s novel. Fortin is played by legendary French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, now aged and creased, and convincingly miserable; he also plays Fortin’s father and Jean Valjean. Belmondo’s exemplary performances and Lelouch’s skillfully woven cinematic tapestry unify all three stories, rendering them incarnations of one story: the common man’s struggle against the implacable powers that be.

Director Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror and Smilla’s Sense of Snow) remains strictly faithful to Hugo’s text and sets his 1998 film of Les Misérables in early-nineteenth-century France. This sweeping costume drama, which stars Liam Neeson as Valjean, avoids political overtones and concentrates instead on the adversarial relationship between the persevering Valjean and Geoffrey Rush’s icy Javert, characters who are more similar than different. The all-star cast includes Uma Thurman as a pallid Fantine, Claire Danes as Cosette, and Hans Matheson as Marius.

In 2000 director Josée Dayan, screenwriter Didier Decoin, and actor Gérard Depardieu collaborated in a faithful, made-for-television adaptation. The three talents, who had collaborated on The Count of Monte Cristo and a bio-pic of Balzac, convey the grit, grimness, and grime of pre-Revolution street life. The film stars Depardieu as Jean Valjean and John Malkovich as his nemesis Javert.