Les Misérables

Once in every five years or so, given average theater-going luck, a musical soars out at you across the orchestra to strike between the eyes as well as the ears. Les Miserables is one such: a great blazing pageant of life and death at the barricades of political and social revolution in Victor Hugo's 19th century France. But apart from Victor victorious, what matters about Les Miserables is that, like Britten's Peter Grimes and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd and for that matter Verdi's Rigoletto, it sets out to redefine the limits of music theater. Like then it is through-sung, and like them it tackles universal themes of social and domestic happiness in terms of individual despair. When the show first opened in a Parisian sports arena five years ago, its score by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg already seemed to consist of all the great marching songs that Edith Piaf never got around to singing. There is an energy and an operatic intensity here which exists in the work of no British composer past or present: the sense of a nation's history being challenged through trumpets and drums and guitars and violins and cellos. The songs, ranging from the joyous "Master of the House" to the haunting "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" by way of 20 or so others, have now been filtered through the translations of 2 eX-London drama critics, Herbert Kretzmer (author of most of Aznavour's English hits as well as a couple of earlier West End musicals) and James Fenton (who did the recent and superb Rigoletto translation). Here are songs of love and war and death and restoration: patter songs, arias, duets and chorus numbers of dazzling inventiveness and variety. - Sheridan Morley - Container booklet.