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Victor Hugo Goes Broadway
| Article
# : |
12715 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1987 |
1,932 Words |
| Author
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Octavio Roca
Octavio Roca is music critic for the Washington Times and the
author of the biography Scotto: More Than a Diva. |
"To Paris there are no bounds," wrote Victor Hugo. "Paris does more than make the law, she makes the fashion; and, more than the fashion, she makes the event." What was obvious to the great writer a hundred years ago seems as obvious today: The musical event of the 1980s may well prove to be a new work by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg based on Hugo's epic vision of his beloved city.
Les Miserables began life as a recording, selling hundreds of thousands of copies by the time it was brought to the stage by Robert Hossein at the Palais des Sports in Paris. The musical was then translated and produced by Cameron Mackintosh and the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, and presented in London, where it is still playing to sold-out houses. It has now been coproduced by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and opens at the Broadway Theatre in New York City this month after a spectacularly successful American premiere at the Kennedy Center Opera House. There are productions scheduled for Tokyo, Athens, Sofia, Tel Aviv, Budapest, Barcelona, Sydney, Munich, Oslo, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Toronto, Reykjavik, and a return to Paris.
Subject Dictates Style
"It is not a rock opera," says Schonberg about his composition. "Hugo's subject was so powerful that I had to write the only music possible for it, respecting the nineteenth century musically, with the kind of Romanticism we associate with that century. Besides, so much of musical creation is spontaneous, never decided far in advance. We are less clever than you might think: The subject dictates the
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