Old Vic theatre, London
Matthew Warchus directs a radical and intimate revival of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical about a Frenchman who flees home
Some revivals overstate their revisionism but Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical, which premiered 16 years after their 1980 hit Les Misérables, has had a radical overhaul here.
The story, set in 16th-century France, has been restructured with new lyrics by Boublil, Annabel Mutale Reed and Paul Hodge and folkier orchestrations. It has been cut down to be performed in an hour and a half without an interval, on the floor of the theatre’s returning show, A Christmas Carol. A miniature Les Mis in spirit, it is filled with the same booming melodrama and preoccupations with crime and disguise.