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We have more on those stories below. But first, we’re going to take a break from the news and look at a milestone for musical theater.
Making a classic
The day after “Les Misérables” premiered at London’s Barbican Theater 40 years ago this week, its creative team gathered for a toast. But the celebration quickly “turned into a wake,” recalled John Caird, who directed the production with Trevor Nunn. As attendees read that day’s newspapers, it was clear that the musical had not won over Britain’s theater critics. The Evening Standard dismissed it as a “glum opera” more suited to Victorian times than 1980s Britain. The Daily Mail lamented that Caird and Nunn had transformed the “tidal wave of emotions” in Victor Hugo’s novel “into ripples of cheap sentiment.” Adding to the pressure, the show’s lead producer had 48 hours to decide whether to pay the deposit for a West End transfer. If he didn’t, the musical would vanish after just a few weeks. Fortunately for the team, the critics didn’t have the final say. Thanks to word of mouth, the Barbican had to expand its box office team to field phone calls from theatergoers seeking tickets. It was “two or three days” of worry, Caird said. “Then it became apparent this thing was unstoppable.” Today, “Les Misérables” — the story of Jean Valjean, a former convict, being relentlessly pursued by Javert, an unforgiving police officer — is an icon of musical theater. It has run for over 15,500 performances in London and is a staple of school theater programs. (In New York, it ran for more than 8,000 before closing in 2016.) It’s been translated into 22 languages and staged in 53 countries. Today’s newsletter is about how it came to be. Adapting an adaptation
The idea of turning Hugo’s sweeping 1,400-page novel about poverty and social upheaval in 19th-century France into a musical came from a French composer and a French lyricist. They staged it in Paris in 1980. When Cameron Mackintosh, an English producer, heard the music a few years later, he was blown away — particularly by what became “On My Own” and “I Dreamed a Dream.” But he and his directors knew it needed an overhaul: The show was little more than “a series of tableaux,” and required audiences to know Hugo’s book inside out. Their team read the book and decided to open the musical with a scene in which Jean Valjean steals silver candlesticks from a bishop, only for the prelate to forgive him. Suddenly, the character’s motivations were clear: Valjean believed in the New Testament idea of forgiveness, while Javert, his pursuer, adhered to a sterner Old Testament form of justice. “As a bunch of liberal humanists, we had tried to avoid every mention of religion,” Caird said, but “sewing God into the show was what animated the characters.” Even with such breakthroughs, progress was slow at first. The original librettist took so long that they had to delay the musical’s planned opening by a year. Then the musical continually changed in rehearsals. Just weeks before opening, for instance, the directors added “Bring Him Home,” a ballad for Valjean. During rehearsals, the new librettist changed the opening lyrics from “Do you hear the people sing? / Singing the song of common men” to “a song of angry men.” By the premiere, Caird recalled, everyone involved thought they had something special, so it was a shock when the critics disagreed. A musical’s meaning
Part of the appeal of “Les Misérables” is its political undertones, with scenes of students trying to overthrow the French government. In recent years, demonstrators in places like Hong Kong, Venezuela and Turkey have sung, “Do you hear the people sing?” Dann Fink, a producer who acted in the original Los Angeles production of “Les Misérables,” said he believed that the musical’s message of “fighting for what you believe in” struck a chord with audiences. He recalled one night in June 1989 when the cast, backstage during intermission, watched live TV news coverage of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square in Beijing as the Chinese government tried to stop student-led protests. That footage, Fink recalled, seemed to echo the musical’s story, and soon he was onstage, climbing up a barricade with a flag in hand. “We ran on feeling like we needed to vent our rage for what was happening to those people in China,” Fink recalled. “We were singing to empower them.” “I’ve never had a more charged night in a theater,” he added. See more photos from Les Mis, and read the full story.
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Why is the stock market soaring while the government is closed? The S&P has notched four successive records in the past week (until yesterday, when a weak financial report from Oracle snapped the winning streak). One reason is that Washington dysfunction is not the only thing investors care about. Artificial intelligence companies are making deals. The economy is growing. The government forecasts strong results for the rest of the year. In that context, the economic effects of a temporary shutdown “will be negligible and easily contained, even in the worst-case scenario where some federal workers are permanently laid off,” said Joao Gomes, a finance professor at the Wharton School. While the government is closed — speculators in prediction markets think it will last around 20 days — investors lose some important metrics they use to understand what’s happening: jobs numbers, inflation data, trade and so on. But investors don’t need those metrics to see that A.I. spending is the main event right now. Investors are taking a long view, and a few weeks seems like a blip. They’ve learned not to bet against 80 years of momentum: Generally, stocks keep going up.
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