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

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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. 

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