“Les Miserables” is coming back to The Bushnell from Oct. 29 through Nov. 3 refreshed, restaged and with a new sense of realism invigorating its epic tale of romance, revolution and a stolen loaf of bread.
The 1970s and ‘80s were a time of massive musical theater spectacles on Broadway, from the celestial ascendance of “Cats” to the plummeting chandelier of “Phantom of the Opera” and beyond. The big musicals of that era endure, but new tours of those shows are generally only lightly revised versions of those original productions.
That’s not true for some of the shows overseen by British producer Cameron McIntosh. He and his team extensively reworked “Miss Saigon” a decade ago not just to improve its depiction of the Asian-American characters but to provide a new version of its most memorable stage effect, the landing of a helicopter.
Likewise, McIntosh’s 2107 revival of the 1980 musical “Les Miserables” by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel did away with the original production’s biggest design feature, a giant revolving circular stage area. Instead, it concentrates on the wall rather than the floor, bathing the show in giant projected images of 19th century France, some of them based on artwork by Victor Hugo, the author of the 1862 novel on which the musical is based.
Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman/MurphyMade
Nick Cartell returns as Jean Valjean in the national tour of “Les Miserables.” (Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman/MurphyMade)
This is the third time this “new” production of “Les Miserables” has been in Connecticut. Many theatergoers who have seen it have no experience of the original version, which ran on Broadway from 1987 to 2003. (The London production, which opened in 1985, is still running and has undergone numerous alterations in that time.)
The lead role of Jean Valjean is played by Nick Cartell, who played the same heroic part the last time “Les Miserables” was at The Bushnell seven years ago. Other aspects of the production may seem slightly different, from cast changes to tweaks in the material to special appropriateness to this day and age.
Jesse Robb’s job title with “Les Miserables” is “musical staging associate.” He helped implement the extensive changes to “Les Miserables” in 2017, as well as further restaging in 2022. He now maintains the quality of the existing tours of the show and helps launch new ones.
Connecticut previously saw Robb’s work when he was the resident choreographer for the national tour of a stage musical based on “Dirty Dancing.” That show (which is different from the “Dirty Dancing in Concert” tour coming to The Bushnell in January) played Connecticut three times.
“I was brought into the Cameron McIntosh world with ‘Miss Saigon,’ where I was the assistant to the great Bob Avian,” Robb said. When the restaging of “Les Miserables” began happening with Geoffrey Garratt and Michael Ashcroft revising the 2009 25th-anniversary production directed by James Powell, “I jumped from ‘Miss Saigon’ to that. We looked at a new structure.”
Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman/MurphyMade
Matt Crowle as Thénardier and Gregory Lee Rodriguez as Marius in the “Dog Eat Dog” scene from “Les Misérables” (Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman/MurphyMade)
The Bushnell was just the second stop on that 2017 U.S. tour. The show played at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven in 2018 and the Waterbury Palace in 2019.
The tour had to go on hiatus during the COVID pandemic, then was revised again for its return in 2022. Robb feels that, with the oversized projections, the show now “reads very cinematically,” perhaps as a subconscious response to the pandemic years which “made us comfortable watching TV.”
While the scenic design and staging of the U.S. “Les Miserables” tour has been essentially the same for the past few years, each cast can add its own personality and energy to the production. Just as the backdrops add “a vertical element to it, it’s the same with the humans,” Robb said. “The show is very athletic right now. There’s a more three-dimensional structure.”
The musical’s popularity has never waned. “We get an incredible turnout. It’s been non-stop since we came back in 2022.”
“Les Miserables” still travels with a massive cast of around 40 performers, but Robb emphasized that the show is purposely “less epically scaled” than it was in the 1980s. “There’s a realness, a pedestrian aspect. It’s more physicalized in a real sense.”
As for how the musical’s timeless themes of social justice, poverty, law enforcement and revolution play during a U.S. Presidential election year, Robb said “it’s so relevant.”
“Les Miserables” runs Oct. 29 through Nov. 3 at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m. $34-$174. bushnell.org.
