Volume 34, Number 8 · May 7, 1987
Jean Valjean, Superstar
By Luc Sante
Les Misérables
a musical by Alain Boublil, by Claude-Michel Schönberg, based on the novel by Victor Hugo, music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, original French text by Alain Boublil, by Jean-Marc Natel, additional material by James Fenton, directed and adapted by Trevor Nunn, by John Caird
at the Broadway Theatre, New York City
The Broadway Theatre, where Les Misérables opened on March 12 amid great fanfare and with a record-breaking $11 million in advance ticket sales, is situated on the Fifty-third Street corner of The Great White Way. Much of the area to its south, Times Square and the Broadway hub, is soon to be demolished by authority of the Times Square Redevelopment Corporation. This destruction, like Baron Haussmann's revision of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, is intended to make way for clean façades and pleasant prospects. Gone will be, among other things, the row of edifices on Forty-second Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, that already look like so many rococo, Victorian, and Moderne gravestones. That leaves their population of teen-age hustlers, whores, crackheads, beggars, vagrants, and outpatients. By removing the buildings and replacing them with featureless slabs, the city imagines that the life now present in the area will simply disappear, into history or, if that is not possible, into some other jurisdiction.
Review, 3007 words
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