It has taken nine years of development, including three years of on-and-off production, but the born-again musical “Martin Guerre” is finally on its way to Broadway, with a premiere production now on view here at the Guthrie Theatre and an April target date set for its New York debut.
That the show has survived a long, often tortuous progress, from its early commercial letdown to its current roaring comeback, is a tribute to the tenacity of its authors, composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and lyricist Jean Boublil, and its producer, Cameron Mackintosh.
The team had achieved major hits with their earlier “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon,” and the tale of “Martin Guerre” — with its story of true love, false identity and individuals caught up in a time of great social upheaval — seemed a good prospect for repeating those earlier successes. But the authors and producer were taken aback in 1996, when their long-hatching project received mostly mixed to poor notices in its first London staging.
(At the same time, Goodman Theatre in Chicago mounted a separate, different musical, “The House of Martin Guerre,” by the young Canadian composer Leslie Arden. It was warmly received at the Goodman and in a later production in Toronto, and that was the last anyone ever heard of it.)
Discouraged but undaunted by the London reviews, Mackintosh shut down the show for an overhaul in late 1996 and re-opened it to better notices, but finally closed the production in early 1998 at a substantial loss.
Still determined to make the show a legitimate hit, the producer gave a radically revised, recast and reconfigured “Martin Guerre” a third opening, outside London at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in December 1998. The large cast was slimmed down to 24 actors, the orchestra was reduced from 27 to 9 pieces (boosted to 12 at the Guthrie), and a new artistic team, headed by the young Irish director Conall Morrison and choreographer David Bolger, reworked the production. Songs were either tossed out or replaced and repositioned. According to Mackintosh, “90 per cent of the words were changed.”
This time, the reviews from many of the earlier naysaying London critics were much better, and the box office for Leeds and a subsequent tour in the English provinces was healthy.
Enter the Guthrie. Morrison and Bolger had been colleagues with and proteges of Joe Dowling, the theater’s artistic director, in earlier days in Ireland. Now, Dowling offered the Guthrie’s big thrust stage, 1,300 seats and 31,000 season subscribers to the show for the start of its U.S. tour.
With Mackintosh putting up $1.1 million and the Guthrie providing another $1 million for such essentials as costumes and scenic elements, “Martin Guerre” opened Sept. 17, with a new, all-American cast. After its near-capacity run ends here Sunday at the not-for-profit Guthrie, the Mackintosh production will go on to commercial engagements in Detroit, Washington, D.C., Seattle and Los Angeles before arriving on Broadway in a theater yet to be determined.
The changes certainly have made “Martin Guerre” a tighter, more compact, more commercially viable show — and one that the Guthrie audiences have greeted with standing ovations.
It now begins with a rush of sword-clanging on a 16th Century battlefield, where the young soldiers Martin Guerre (Hugh Panaro) and Arnaud du Thil (Stephen R. Buntrock) are bonding (strictly fraternal) to the tune of “Without You as a Friend.”
Guerre has just enough time to tell his friend, in flashback scenes, of his unhappy, unconsummated marriage back home in his village of Artigat before he is ripped by an enemy sword and collapses in du Thil’s arms. “Tell Bertrande (his young wife), I’m sorry,” Guerre whispers; and, good friend that he is, du Thil journeys to Artigat to deliver the message.
There, in the rat’s nest of jealousy, superstition and bigotry that Guerre had fled, the bearded du Thil is mistaken for Guerre. With the aid of the lissome Bertrande (Erin Dilly), who loves him even though she realizes he is not her husband, he becomes Martin Guerre — until at the end of the first act, the real Guerre, who had been wounded but not killed, shows up.
From then on, the musical, which had started out at a fast clip, roars into full speed, the personal love story becoming entwined in the larger social arena of the bitter conflict between Roman Catholics and Protestants.
Almost all the plot and character elements of the new “Martin Guerre,” including a sweet, simple-minded village peasant, have been retained from the original version. But the action has been accelerated into a series of ever-escalating climaxes, the dances have been reduced to much enthusiastic jumping and clod-hopping, the songs have been furiously punched up in performance, and the English lyrics by Boublil and a new collaborator, Stephen Clark, have been dumbed down to basic, obvious rhymes.
All this has made the show’s story easier to grasp. Its themes, centering on the redeeming power of love, are forcefully presented. What’s more, with a smaller cast and orchestra, and with the former scenery of computerized towers eliminated in favor of designer John Napier’s slightly less complex, still ingenious set pieces of cannonades and firestorms, the show probably has a much better commercial future.
For this energetic version, Mackintosh has put together a strong cast of big voices, including several actors familiar to Chicago audiences: John Herrera as the village priest, Kathy Taylor as Bertrande’s mother, and Buntrock. They are all in overdrive most of the time, fervently belting out such thematic, oft-repeated numbers as “I’m Martin Guerre” and “Live With Somebody You Love.”
Still, despite the headlong rush of this relentless show, one misses the gravity and ambition of the earlier “Martin Guerre.” Whatever its flaws, that production was struggling to make its own music, create its own mystique. The new “Martin Guerre,” for all its energy, seems more of an effort to repeat the patterns of past hits.
It is now, more than ever, son of “Les Miserables,” not only in drama and music, but in the sequence and rhythm with which the songs and dramatic highlights are presented.
It is new, and it very well may work into a hit, but it is not the original and striking work it had once promised to become.
