In the long history of the Broadway road, no touring show has been more significant than “Les Miserables.”
That’s not just because Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg’s singularly popular piece of musical theater has been trucking around the country now for more than nine years (and has made so many carefully spaced multiweek return visits to major markets like Chicago that most people have lost count). The reason those in the touring theater business hail this show as a major breakthrough is that the bus-and-truck “Les Mis” raised the standard for every other touring musical that followed.
“I had seen some lesser versions of `Cats’ where they just strung up a few light bulbs,” producer Cameron Mackintosh said on the show’s 10th Broadway anniversary last year. “I didn’t want that to happen to `Les Mis’ when it went on the road. I was rather obstinate with everybody.”
Eager to please their demanding boss, Mackintosh’s staff members thus threw away their plans for a scaled-down version and instead adapted the grand technology of the original so that a show that looked exactly the same could play single-week engagements and be loaded in and out of theaters within hours.
So the bus-and-truck “Les Mis” that begins its latest visit to the Auditorium Theatre on Tuesday is an exact duplication of the Broadway version. And every major touring musical thereafter had to take the same approach.
“Once they had seen the tour of `Les Mis,’ ” said Mackintosh, “the public would no longer put up with lousy sound and lighting in other shows.”
Such quality, of course, does not come cheap. These days it costs more than $400,000 to bring the character Fantine, prisoner 24601 and all the rebelling students to your hometown (including the turntable and the famous barricades). But if a theater like the Auditorium has houses that are anywhere close to capacity, the weekly box-office take can easily double that amount.
Twelve years after the London opening of “Les Mis,” much of the audience is repeat business. Alan Wasser, who manages this tour from New York, estimates that as many as 50 percent of the people who go to the Auditorium Theatre this month will have seen the show before. Anxious not to saturate his markets, Wasser never allows “Les Mis” to return to any given city until at least 18 months have elapsed.
Still, a good chunk of the crowd will be “Les Mis” groupies, who can hum every note of Schonberg’s score. And there’s plenty out there to sustain such folk between visits.
You can now find at least 30 different recorded versions of the show, from the Original French Concept album to the Complete Symphonic Version. You can watch the PBS documentary on the making of “Les Mis” (which brought in a record number of pledges when shown on public television), and there’s a new CD-ROM about the musical. You can also read “Barricade,” the unofficial but fawning 28-page newsletter with correspondents worldwide. Or you can visit the show’s relatively new Web site (www.lesmis.com) and download video clips.
Unsurprisingly, book writer and lyricist Boublil is eager to encourage repeat business.
“Each time people come back,” he said from his home in France last week, “they discover more of the nuances of the score, or a part of the story that they never appreciated before.”
In Australasia (only), Mackintosh has already released the amateur rights to “Les Mis,” meaning that schools can substitute tables and chairs for those barricades. But with this North American tour already booked for the next two years, you won’t be seeing Cosette at your local suburban dinner theater anytime soon.
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Fresh from its hit production of “Dealer’s Choice” (which sold out almost every night of the recent run at Victory Gardens), Roadworks Productions is this week beginning its first attempt to make a name for itself in California. Previews begin next week at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles of Roadworks’ version of Mike Leigh’s play “Ecstasy,” marking the first West Coast production of Leigh’s depressingly realistic drama.
The same cast (Lance Baker, Rachel Singer, Scott Denny and Debbie Bisno) that performed the play at Victory Gardens in Chicago will be reprising their roles in Los Angeles under Abby Epstein’s direction and the producing auspices of the Odyssey Theatre. One night before the Jan. 10 opening, Kimberly Williams, Nicole Sullivan and Patrick Marber (the author of “Dealer’s Choice”) will be attending a benefit party in Roadworks’ honor.
So does this development prefigure a permanent California migration by one of Chicago’s most successful young theater troupes? “We have no current plans to turn into Roadworks West,” says artistic director Debbie Bisno. “The idea is just to get some national exposure.” And if the “Ecstasy” cast is offered its own suitably bleak TV series after its seven-week L.A. sojourn? “If someone is throwing around $30,000 an episode,” admits Bisno, “it will be hard to turn that down.”
