Les Miserables at the Theatre Royal 25 September 1987.
Standing Ovation: The Cast of Les Miserables after their triumph. It was a
night of emotion, of the anticipation and fear, of nervousness, excitement and
finally relief. Photo: Paul
Mathews
Giles Hardie, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
How will it compare to the original? This is the
question many will be asking as they walk in to the cinema in the coming weeks
to see Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe in Les Miserables.
While there is a great history of adapting beloved
works for the big screen - arguably Les Miserables' greatest competition
at the box office is Peter Jackson's first film in the Hobbit trilogy - many
will walk in hoping to revisit the show they adored so many years before.
Sir Cameron Mackintosh, who has produced every
professional production of Les Miserables to date, as well as the movie,
remembers the first Australian production well.
“We were lucky,” says Mackintosh. “We sort of
brought together what became the next generation of stars with Anthony Warlow,
Marina Prior, Simon Burke. An amazing cast of people that have gone on to all
be the leading players in Australia.”
Burke, who played Marius for the Sydney premiere in
November 1987, remembers the show fondly. “It was a very emotional experience
for me to see the film. Les Mis was a huge turning point in my career
and I am forever grateful to Cameron and [Theatre, film and TV director] Trevor
Nunn for taking a punt on a young actor who had never been in a big musical
before.
“The bar that this musical sets for a performer is
and always has been incredibly high - it demands complete emotional truth and
absolute commitment to every beautiful note of Claude-Michel's [Claude-Michel
Schonberg] score, and the movie is even more so. Watching Hugh and co rise to
the challenges was completely thrilling.”
The movie is much more than a mere recording of a
star-studded cast performing the stage show. The creative team behind the movie
describe the process as stripping the show down to its parts and building
something entirely new. The music has been recomposed by Schonberg, including
the addition of a new song. That work was based on the 25th anniversary
production which already contained changes, such as a reworking of Gavroche's Little
People. Indeed, Gavroche is a changed character again in the movie, with
Daniel Huttlestone taking a more prominent role and the high parts in a
reworked version of Drink with Me.
The film almost contained a far more significant
shift, as the initial decision to include dialogue in the film (the stage show
is sung through) was rejected by director Tom Hooper.
“The very first draft of the screenplay that Bill
Nicholson wrote was dialogue interspersed with songs,” Hooper explains. “I
thought a lot about it and I thought the difficulty with going from dialogue to
singing and back is gear changes. The reality like ours and the reality where I
sing to you. I felt the gear shifts in this case wouldn't help the musical.
This is a world like ours but where people's primary form of communication is
singing. We're just going to commit to that and be brave about that.”
The transition to the big screen has also involved
many stylistic decisions. Hooper has adopted lengthy close-ups on actors who
would on stage have received spotlights. “The challenge I laid down to the cast
was 'can you find a way of telling the stories of these songs in the medium of
the close up?'” he says. “They found brilliant ways to do it. I honoured that
by staying close and meditating on the face and meditating on the emotions.”
“You can get behind the eyes of an actor and the
emotion that you simply can't do on the stage,” says Mackintosh. “You can show
what's going through the actor's mind. The trio of Cosette, Eponine and Marius
I think works even stronger in the movie. It's wonderfully cast in the movie
but you seem to understand that fated love trio even more, it's more powerful
because of the medium of cinema.”
Hooper actually found the wide shots more
challenging to justify. “A single person singing close-up you can say it's like
a prayer, it's like a soliloquy in a play,” he explains. “It's not that unreal.
Whereas 100 people singing in unison felt like a harder thing for the audience
to accept.”
That need for justifying the songs lies at the
heart of a film that seeks far more realism than the show. Jackman feels it
came from Hooper's never having worked with musicals before. “He very much
approaches it as 'sometimes I get embarrassed watching it, I feel
uncomfortable,' so he did it in a way where I think it feels very accessible.
He took some bold choices. It has a very muscular, real feel the way he shot
it."
Says Hooper: “I felt that the whole thing was a
tightrope walk between gritty realism and a kind of magical realism, a
heightened reality... The gritty realism anchors singing in a very visceral way
that I felt would help me, at the same time the heightened style allows you to
take the audience into an extraordinary world for this story.”
Australian actor Silvie Paladino certainly knows
the show, having played Eponine in Australia for two years from 1989 then
Fantine on the West End in the late nineties. She found the movie “very
emotional” but felt that gritty realism had slightly skewed the musical.
“There were some strange interpretations to the
songs," she says. "Schonberg wrote songs that mix a positive with a
negative, in the film they played with the negative not the positive. It works
better on stage. I thought it was wonderful on screen, but extraordinary on
stage.”
For Burke, those who loved the stage show have no
option. “If you have seen the musical and loved it as millions around the world
have, then you don't have a choice - you have to see it!”
Mackintosh feels the movie is a unique amalgam of
cinema and stage: “Everyone is saying how cinematic it is, yet in the cinema
people are applauding it as if it is a stage show.”
He even has a solution for those who fall in love
with Les Miserables for the first time on the big screen, as he plans to
start all over again by bringing his 25th anniversary stage production to
Australia “to find a while new raft of talent which I'm looking forward to
doing next year”.
