Les Misérables, adapted from Victor Hugo's 1862 novel, won eight Tony Awards including Best Musical in 1987, and its London production has run continuously since 1985.
The most recent Broadway revival closed in 2016, so New York isn't the place to catch it now — the West End or a touring production are better bets.
The show began in French. Claude-Michel Schönberg wrote the music to a libretto by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, and it was staged in Paris in 1980 as a concept piece before Cameron Mackintosh brought it to the Royal Shakespeare Company. Trevor Nunn and John Caird restructured it heavily for the English version that opened in London in 1985, with new lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer. The London notices were poor. Critics called it lurid Victorian melodrama, and were not entirely wrong; the audience decided otherwise within weeks and has not changed its mind since.
It is sung through, with essentially no spoken dialogue, and its method is the recurring theme rather than the standalone song. A melody introduced as a prisoner's complaint returns as a policeman's creed and again as a deathbed prayer, so that characters who never agree about anything end up sharing tunes. John Napier's original staging turned on a revolve: the barricade rotated to show its far side, which meant an audience watched the same fight from both positions without a scene change. The 2014 revival dropped the turntable entirely in favour of projected imagery adapted from Victor Hugo's own drawings.
The Broadway production opened in March 1987 at the Broadway Theatre and won eight Tony Awards from twelve nominations, including Best Musical, Best Book, Best Original Score and Best Direction for Nunn and Caird. It ran until May 2003, closing after 6,680 performances. Later Broadway revivals played the Broadhurst from 2006 and the Imperial from 2014, the latter closing in September 2016.
Hugo's 1862 novel is a thousand pages of argument about poverty, law and mercy, with a long digression on the Paris sewers. What the musical retains is the argument's shape — a man pursued for a small theft by an officer who cannot conceive of grace — and it is that, rather than the barricade, which has given the piece its staying power across four decades of productions.
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Les Misérables, colloquially known as Les Mis or Les Miz, is a sung-through musical based on the 1862 novel by Victor Hugo. It is one of the most popular and highest-grossing stage musicals of all time. Set in early 19th-century France, Les Misérables tells the story of Jean Valjean, a French convict, and his journey of redemption. After stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's starving child, Valjean is imprisoned for 19 years and released in 1815. When a bishop inspires him with a tremendous act of mercy, Valjean breaks his parole, changes his name and starts his life anew. He becomes wealthy and adopts an orphan, Cosette. A police inspector named Javert pursues Valjean over the decades in a single-minded quest for "justice." The plot leads the characters to Paris, where they are swept up in the events of a revolutionary period in France, as a group of young idealists attempts to overthrow the government from a street barricade.
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