“You are right, sir, when you say that Les Misérables is written for a universal audience. I don’t know whether it will be read by everyone, but it is meant for everyone.” – Victor Hugo
It is hard to admit this as the director of this musical, but I had never seen either the Broadway musical or film before we began. I’ve taught the solos to voice students over the years, I knew the movie had been made, I may even have been in New York at some time when it was playing… Somehow, seeing this show never quite synced up in my schedule. I came to Les Misérables through Victor Hugo’s writing. This season being our anniversary season, the creative team and I were exploring our options, ordered it along with other perusals, and I, who had just finished reading all of the works of Alexandre Dumas, began reading the book by Victor Hugo. (To give you an idea, I think the kindle sample is about 400 pages.) When we held auditions I think I was still meeting the Bishop of Digne and his sister, and I already loved the writing and the imagery. In my research I discovered the story was at one time or other panned by critics, banned by the Vatican and the kingdom of France, and feared by conservatives as a threat to society. The Constitutionnel, a French newspaper of the day, said, “No part of the social order would remain standing” yet there were traffic jams and long lines to buy one of the 48,000 copies put on sale the first day in 1862. The book was serialized in magazines and read by soldiers on both sides during the American Civil War. The story was inspired when, on the street of Paris in 1845, M. Hugo witnessed an impoverished man being arrested for stealing a loaf of bread. While the man was there in the street, an ornate carriage with a wealthy woman and child inside was totally unaware of the man. Hugo wrote of the incident, “I saw this man as the specter of misery, the ghostly forewarning in full light of day, in the sunshine, of the revolution still plunged in the shadows of darkness, but emerging from them. The moment he became aware of her existence, while she remained unaware of his, a catastrophe was inevitable.” Look at the date again of this quotation. It is two years before the founding of this Jesuit school in New Orleans, and less than a decade before the Dramatics Society that became the Philelectic Society was formed.
