GALLIC MAGIC
From the archive: Sheridan Morley hails the musical incarnation of ‘Les Misérables’ at the Barbican in 1985
We have the musical of the year, if not the half-decade, and it is at the Barbican. Not since Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd has there been a score that soared out from the pit with the blazing theatricality of Les Misérables.
There is an energy and an operatic intensity here that exists in the work of no British composer past or present. Nobody here is trying to make some quick money in the charts and nobody believes that a couple of songs can make a show: this score has maybe 50 numbers, all of which fit like jigsaw pieces into a huge revolutionary pattern.
There are patter songs, arias, duets and chorus numbers of dazzling inventiveness and variety. For this is
not the French Oliver or even the musical Nicholas Nickleby, though it owes a certain debt to both. Rather it is a brilliantly guided tour of the 1,200-page eternity that is Victor Hugo’s text, and indeed there is no way that in three orchestral hours we can ask for more than that.
There is of course a central dilemma: though Les Misérables has one of the greatest books of all time to draw on, it has no dialogue. What it has is a score, and beyond it some thin and sketchy characterisations, but no chance of any plot development that cannot come through song. Les Misérables is everything the musical theatre ought to be doing, and there are some striking performances.
This review first appeared in the International Herald Tribune