A musical full of heart and hope

Its first production 40 years ago was critically panned, but Les Misérables continues to enthral and delight theatregoers- and outlive the original critics

- By Michael Billington

So were we wrong? By “we” I mean the overnight critics, myself included, who gave largely negative reviews to the musical of Les Misérables when it opened at London’s Barbican in October 1985. All the statistics suggest we misjudged popular taste. Since it began, the show has been seen by more than 130 million people, has played in 57 countries and has been sung in 22 different languages. Faced with such daunting figures, I am reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s comment when he was accused of damning a Parisian boulevard comedy that had been a huge popular hit: “Forty million Frenchmen,” said Shaw, “can’t be right.”

But as Les Mis celebrates its 40th birthday, it seems a good time to reassess the show. The first thing to say is that there is a vast difference between the show I saw at the Sondheim theatre recently and the one at the Barbican 40 years ago: the songs may be the same, but the context has radically changed. When Les Mis opened it was jointly produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Cameron Mackintosh, and was judged as a company product as much as a commercial musical. Rereading the original reviews, almost all of them invoke Nicholas Nickleby, which was produced by the RSC, directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, and designed by John Napier.

The big difference is that Nickleby was a two-part, seven-hour show that reflected the whole of Dickens’s novel; Les Mis was a drastic reduction of a 1,300-page epic and viewed as much from a literary as a musical standpoint.