Pops celebrates musical theater writers
Work of Boublil and Schönberg takes symphony center stage
The Milwaukee Symphony Pops concert this weekend will probably require hankies.
The program, “Do You Hear the People Sing?,” is a celebration of the work of musical theater writers Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg. The orchestra and chorus will be joined by conductor Dale Rieling and some powerhouse guest vocalists, all veterans of the duo’s shows, to perform music from “Les Misérables,” “Miss Saigon,” and others.
If the duo’s “Bring Him Home,” from “Les Misérables,” doesn’t moisten your eyes, you clearly just weren’t listening.
The French lyricist Boublil, who currently lives in New York, spoke recently about the shows he’s written with the composer Schönberg.
He said he was 18 years old when he saw “West Side Story” in Paris. He called it a “revelation” that hit him “like lightning,” adding, “I wouldn’t be writing musicals if I hadn’t seen it.”
He delved into musical theater from that point on. Meanwhile, his future partner was discovering opera.
“Michel’s parents took him to the opera in Paris from a very young age,” Boublil said. “Our shows have all been a blending of our two sources of inspiration.”
“If our shows are a bridge between a certain kind of operas, like Offenbach’s ‘The Tales of Hoffmann,’ and musical theater, so be it,” he said. “I think it’s wonderful if that’s the case.”
The pair, who have continued reworking and revising their shows long after they first opened, did a revival of “Miss Saigon” in London last year, winning nine British WhatsOnStage awards.
“When we created ‘Miss Saigon’ the war was still a close event and some truth was hard to say,” he explained in a gentle French accent. “Today we have more distance from those events and we can analyze them in better light.”
“We had a unique opportunity to make a new version of ‘Miss Saigon’ with the same producer, composer and lyricist all alive 25 years after the show first opened,” he said. They are working on a film version of it as well.
He explained their recipe for a musical, saying, “It’s an obsession Michel and I have that musicals are the story of simple people that are drawn or thrown into events bigger than they are and survive them. Think of the boys in ‘West Side Story’ or the people in ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ ”
“For us, that’s what makes the heart of the story,” he said.