The world's longest-running musical, Les Misérables, celebrates 25 years on stage with special productions, writes Jessica Holland An unprecedented cultural clash has been happening in London's theatreland: two major productions of the same musical have been going on in the same city, just a few miles apart. Les Misérables, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Herbert Kretzmer's stage adaptation of Victor Hugo's tale of love and death in 19th-century Paris, was first staged at the Barbican in 1985, with Sir Trevor Nunn and John Caird directing. Reviews were mixed, but it was an audience hit, and ended up transferring to the West End where it's been a fixture ever since. In 2006 the show nabbed the title of "world's longest-running musical" from Cats.
Fans can still see that original production on Shaftesbury Avenue in the West End, but for a three-week period, they have also been able to check out a new version of the show running at the Barbican Centre, the musical's original home a few miles east. Directed by Laurence Connor and James Powell, this Barbican version owes much to the original, and retains some of the same set-pieces, staging, and even cast, but injects fresh life into a musical that has outlived all its original competitors. The final show at the Barbican took place yesterday, but today an even more lavish production will be staged. A company of more than 300 people, including both London casts and a gaggle of A-listers, will decamp to the O2 Arena in Greenwich for a celebratory concert.
As the Barbican production was a touring show, which stopped off in Cardiff, Manchester, Norwich and Birmingham, the directors had to ditch the original's revolving stage, although there's still a huge cast and elaborate staging, with recreations of Paris slums, slave ships, sewers, Jean Valjean's upmarket residence and the famous barricade, which is lit up by explosions and swathed in smoke for the climactic battle scene.
Other new touches included regional accents replacing the usual Cockney drawl of lower-class characters, coal being hauled in the factory where Fantine works and innovative use of lighting and backdrops displaying Hugo's own hazy, foreboding paintings. The production has had a rapturous reception by audience members - one fan told me she'd seen the musical more times than she could remember, in numerous languages, and that the latest production tops all of them - but not everyone has was as delighted with it. Sir Trevor told the British newspaper The Telegraph recently of his anger at being overlooked as the touring show's director.
"Everywhere [it] is being advertised [as] a new production," he complained, and argued, "it's not a new production. It is a variant production that owes everything that's good about it to the original production." He went on to say that "the most bewildering thing - and this is not vanity or hubris - is why something inferior has been created when something superior could have been created." Sir Cameron Mackintosh, who produced both the 1985 and 2010 Barbican shows, responded by calling Sir Trevor's remarks "inaccurate and ungracious".
This in-fighting didn't put off audience members: fans of Les Misérables tend to be devoted to the point of mania and the musical has already been seen by around 57 million people worldwide. Another draw of the new show was one of its stars: Gareth Gates - who went on to star in a West End version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat after being a finalist on the British TV talent contest Pop Idol - took on the role of Marius, a student who participates in the Paris uprising and falls in love with the orphan Cosette. Gates has described the role as "quite an honour", saying that he has always been a fan of the show, and always wanted to play Marius.
Gates is an unflashy, soft-voiced performer, convincing enough as the love-struck student but outgunned by both the gifted John Owen-Jones as Valjean and Rosalind James as the downtrodden, lonely Éponine - one of the night's biggest cheers came from her dynamic performance of the ballad On My Own. Ashley Artus and Lynne Wilmot also stood out as Monsieur and Madame Thénardier, the comically grotesque, money-grabbing landlords who enslave Cosette as a young child.
Among a cast of award-winning thespians who will be performing at the O2 today are Jenny Galloway, Lea Salonger and Alfie Boe, Matt Lucas from Little Britain will join the gang as Thénardier, and the 17-year-old heartthrob Nick Jonas will take on the role of the romantic lead Marius. It's a canny casting choice: Jonas, who's best-known as one-third of the multimillion-selling pop group the Jonas Brothers, attracted hoardes of excitable young fans to the musical when he played Marius in the West End earlier this summer. TheNew York Times described the screaming gaggle that would form at the stage door after his performances, with teenage girls screaming: "I want to die in your arms!", a line from the show. The youngest performer to have played Marius, one of Jonas's early child roles was as the street urchin Gavroche in the same musical on Broadway.
"At the time I remember thinking that I hoped Les Mis would still be around by the time I was old enough for the role," he told the newspaper, "which is kind of funny because I now realise Les Mis will probably play forever." In some ways it's curious that such hoopla should still surround a show that's described by its producer, Sir Cameron, as "one of the least likely subject matters for a popular musical of all-time". It focuses on an obscure period of European history - the 1982 Republican Insurrection in Paris - and is sung the entire way through, with no spoken dialogue to break up the music. On its original release it was disparagingly dubbed "The Glums", after a BBC radio comedy from the 1950s. With its enormous cast and unwieldy sets, it's expensive to put on, too, even without the revolving stage that's become a fixture of the West End production.
But the statistics generated by the show's history are mind-boggling. Les Misérables has played in 310 cities and 42 countries. It has been translated into 21 different languages including Flemish, Estonian and Icelandic. Each performance involves 392 complete costumes and the show has won 75 major theatre awards internationally, including eight Tonys, an Olivier Award and a Critics Circle Award for best musical.
"The part I played in bringing Les Misérables to life as a musical will remain one of my proudest achievements," Sir Cameron writes in the Barbican production's programme, and quotes Hugo, the story's original author: "Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth Les Misérables knocks at the door and says 'open up, I am here for you'."
With three huge productions in a single city and big-name stars vying for a place in its cast, it looks like Jonas is right when he says the musical has got a long life still ahead of it. He has already played the child Gavroche and the young man Marius, perhaps we'll see him playing the world-weary ex-convict Jean Valjean in another 25 years.