But the downward trend would not last long. Two megahits were taking shape in London. Both shows were set in Paris, one in the streets during the 1832 Paris Uprising, the other at the Palais Garnier opera house. And neither was heavy on choreography, relying instead on special effects and soaring dramatic music. The dance-driven American musical was about to give way to the British pop opera.
• • •
In 1983, a friend of Cameron Mackintosh’s gave the producer a tape of a concert version of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables that had been performed at the Palais des Sports. The songs were by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, who had both been influenced by the 1970 recording of Jesus Christ Superstar. Mackintosh had little interest in a French musical based on a nineteenth-century doorstop of a novel, but out of courtesy to his friend he listened to the tape. The score was thrilling. By the fourth song, he knew he had to do the show.3
But there were problems. The concert was under two hours—sort of a collection of scenes from the novel rather than a proper musical—and it was in French. Mackintosh asked the critic and poet James Fenton to adapt Boublil and Schönberg’s concert into a full-fledged, English stage musical. Fenton had never read the novel, so he took it with him on a two-month trip to Borneo. He read it as he was canoeing down the Kapuas River. To lighten his backpack, he ripped out the pages when he finished them, and tossed them to the crocodiles.
To direct the production, Mackintosh turned to Trevor Nunn and John Caird, codirectors of Nicholas Nickleby. Nunn was also the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (where Caird was a resident director), and was under fire in the British press for his lucrative outside work, mainly on Cats. He insisted that Les Misérables open at the Barbican, the RSC’s theater in London, as a coproduction between the RSC and Mackintosh. It was, wrote critics Sheridan Morley and Ruth Leon, “his way of squaring his conscience with the RSC leadership.”4 Mackintosh would put up $450,000 for the show. The RSC would kick in $240,000, about the cost of a major Shakespeare production.5 Mackintosh also had the right to move the production to a commercial West End theater if it was successful at the Barbican.
Les Misérables was scheduled to open in the fall of 1985, but Fenton, it turned out, was cavalier about deadlines. And though a fine poet, he was not a natural lyricist. He wrote evocative lines, but they were difficult to sing. “There’s a frost in the air, there’s a scare in the city,” is striking on the page but, because there are too many s’s, would sound like hissing when sung by a cast of twenty-five.
In January 1985, six months before the show was to go into rehearsal, Mackintosh decided Fenton needed help from a proper lyricist. He invited Herbert Kretzmer to join the so-called Les Miz team. A TV critic for the Daily Mail, Kretzmer was also a songwriter who had adapted Charles Aznavour’s French songs into English. Two—“She” and “Yesterday, When I Was Young”—were among Mackintosh’s favorites. Kretzmer read what Fenton had written and knew it wouldn’t work onstage.
“A poem is written to be absorbed at the reader’s rhythm,” he said. “You can absorb it into your being. A song doesn’t allow that luxury. A song is tyrannical. It has its own thrust. It doesn’t hang about for you to say, ‘OK, I’ve got it.’ A lyricist has to manufacture depth, so the listener gets an idea the song is offering profound thoughts when it may be doing nothing of the sort. It’s a bluff, really, but it’s an honorable bluff.”
It was clear to Kretzmer that Fenton was writing poetry. With the deadline looming, Kretzmer needed to know if Fenton would take instruction in lyric writing because “we didn’t have time to play around.” He made some discreet inquiries and learned that Fenton was a writer “who will fight for every word.” Kretzmer said to Mackintosh, “I am going to do it, but I am going to do it on my own. He who travels fast travels alone.”
Mackintosh agreed. Fenton was out. Kretzmer was now the English lyricist of Les Misérables.II
In February 1985, Kretzmer took a leave of absence from the Daily Mail and holed up in his apartment in Basil Street near Harrods, an apartment he took over from his friend John Cleese. He went to work on Les Misérables.
“I would sleep the morning away, and start writing at noon and work to two or three in the morning,” he recalled. “Time ceased to have any meaning. I had five months to write lyrics that rhymed and scanned. Important songs like ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ and ‘Castle on a Cloud’ needed English lyrics. Other songs, ‘Bring Him Home,’ for instance, hadn’t even been conceived yet when the cast started rehearsals in August.”
“Bring Him Home,” protagonist Jean Valjean’s eleven o’clock number in the second act, gave Kretzmer more trouble than anything else in the show. It was meant to be about the rage and sexual jealousy Valjean feels toward Marius, with whom Cosette has fallen in love. Kretzmer wanted an agitated melody to reflect Valjean’s fractured state of mind. But Claude-Michel Schönberg turned in “a wistful stately little tune,” Kretzmer recalled. It was wrong for that moment in the show, but it did show off the gorgeous Irish tenor of Colm Wilkinson, who was playing Valjean. The creators tried to figure out what to do with the stately tune late one night in Kretzmer’s Basil Street flat. As he was leaving, John Caird remarked, “It sounds like a prayer to me.”
“I thought, of course it is—it is a prayer!” Kretzmer said. “It doesn’t have to be about sexual agitation. It’s about the soul of the man, his altruism. He loves the girl, the girl has fallen in love with another man, so he will transfer his love, his protective love, to the other man. ‘Bring Him Home.’ ”
Kretzmer wrote the lyrics—three-note phrases, “God on high/Hear my prayer/In my need”—between one and three in the morning “after weeks and weeks of total anguish on my part,” he said.
There was much more anguish to come.
Kretzmer sat through the first run-through of Les Misérables at the Barbican in August and “my heart sank to my boots,” he said. The lumbering show lasted nearly four hours. “Overplotted” and “interminable” were the words roiling in Kretzmer’s head. “Disaster was staring us in the face,” he said. “We’d really bought it this time.”
Kretzmer wasn’t alone in thinking Les Misérables would never make it. The Shuberts arrived in London to check out an early performance of Mackintosh’s latest musical. Everybody but Phil Smith hated it.
“I liked the music, and I thought it was very effective,” Smith recalled. I told Bernie, and he said, ‘Phil, have you lost your mind?’ ”
Mackintosh was surprised he did not hear from Jacobs after the Shuberts saw Les Misérables.
“They came on a Thursday, I heard nothing. The following Monday, I got through to their office in New York,” Mackintosh said.
“Why didn’t I hear from you in London?” Mackintosh asked.
“Cameron, you know I love you,” Jacobs replied. “Obviously, you just have to move on.”
“Pardon? So you didn’t like Les Misérables.”
“Cameron, we think it’s a pile of shit.”
Les Misérables opened at the Barbican on October 8, 1985, to blistering reviews—“witless and synthetic entertainment” (the Observer); “the reduction of a literary mountain to a dramatic molehill” (Sunday Telegraph); “Les Glums” (Daily Mail). A panel of literary critics on the BBC reviewed the show as well. “You’d have thought we’d stuffed a stinking fish up their noses,” said Kretzmer. “They could barely contain their disgust.”
The day the reviews came out, Mackintosh hosted a luncheon for the creators at the offices of his ad agency, Dewynters, in Mayfair. It was supposed to be celebratory—everyone was given a bottle of champagne with a Les Misérables label on it—but the mood was gloomy. Mackintosh had to make a crucial decision that afternoon. He’d secured the Palace Theatre, which was owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, for a nonrefundable fee of fifty thousand pounds. If he didn’t move the show, he was out the deposit, plus the $450,000 he’d already invested.
“I remember Cameron running from
room to room, agitated, not knowing what to do,” Kretzmer said. “And then he came into lunch covered in sunshine. He was beaming. ‘We’re coming in!’ he said. ‘We’re coming in!’ ”
Before making his decision Mackintosh had called the Barbican box office to see what ticket sales were like.
“I don’t know how you got through,” the box office treasurer said. “We’ve never had a morning like this at the Barbican. We’ve sold five thousand tickets. Things are going crazy here.”
The public had spoken—and Mackintosh had the public’s taste.
• • •
Les Misérables opened in New York on March 12, 1987, after a sold-out run in Washington, D.C., at the Kennedy Center, which, because the Shuberts had passed on coproducing, became one of Mackintosh’s American partners. But the Shuberts did secure it for one of their theaters, the Broadway, where it racked up the largest pre-opening night advance in Broadway history—$11 million, double that for Cats.
On his way into the theater on opening night, Mayor Koch said to Leslie Bennetts of the New York Times, “I expect it to be the best show I’ve ever seen.”
Mackintosh threw a lavish party at the Park Avenue Armory. Schoenfeld came over to his table, beaming. “Cameron, you are a genius,” he said. “What you have done to turn what you had in London into this glorious Broadway hit is phenomenal. The changes you’ve made are extraordinary!”
Mackintosh replied, “I’ve made no changes at all other than take ten minutes out of it. It’s exactly the same show you both thought was a pile of shit.”
• • •
In the summer of 1984 Andrew Lloyd Webber was walking down Fifth Avenue when he came to the Strand bookstalls at Fifty-Ninth Street. He browsed for a bit, picking up a worn copy of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 thriller, The Phantom of the Opera. A year before, a producer had approached Lloyd Webber’s new wife, Sarah Brightman, about appearing in a musical adaptation of the book. It was being staged at a small theater in London, and Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh went to check it out. They didn’t think much of it. It was silly and a little camp. A friend, though, suggested that the story of the disfigured Phantom and his love for a beautiful young opera singer might make a musical romance, suitable to Lloyd Webber’s gift for soaring melody. Lloyd Webber didn’t think so, but the idea of writing a romantic musical began to take hold. He’d never read Leroux’s novel but with an afternoon to kill, he bought the book and read it in his hotel room. “It was a very confused book,” he said, “some of it sort of a detective story, some of it sort of a horror story. But the thing that struck me is this big love story going through it.”
That night, at a dinner for Tony Award nominees at the Plaza Hotel, Lloyd Webber ran into Hal Prince, who had directed Evita. The dinner was dull and at one point Lloyd Webber said to Prince, “I think we ought to get out of here and go have a drink somewhere, don’t you?” They ducked out, and over a glass of wine, Lloyd Webber said he’d just read The Phantom of the Opera and thought it might make a musical.
“Go on,” said Prince.
“But Hal, it’s not for you,” Lloyd Webber said. “It’s high romance. You don’t do high romance.”
Lloyd Webber was right: Prince was famous for his association with Stephen Sondheim, whose musicals—Company, Follies, A Little Night Music—cast a cynical eye on relationships.
But Prince surprised Lloyd Webber. “I’ve been wanting to do a romantic musical for years,” he said. “If you finish this thing, play it to me. I’m in.” Many years later Prince would say, “There hadn’t been a romantic musical in years. Everybody thinks musicals are romantic, but you had to go back to South Pacific. And Andrew and I both worship South Pacific. I wanted to do it right away.”
Lloyd Webber returned to London and, working with lyricist Richard Stilgoe, with whom he had written Starlight Express, a musical about toy trains, started sketching in The Phantom of the Opera. He would write it for Sarah Brightman, who had a gorgeous soprano voice. Some of it was written in London, some of it at his house in the south of France on a white Yamaha piano.
In June 1985, Lloyd Webber, working with designer Maria S. Björnson, produced the first act of Phantom at his annual Sydmonton Festival. It was, as always, a jolly occasion, attended by the Shuberts and the Nederlanders. They were there to see what the man who had written Cats was up to next.
The premiere of the first act of The Phantom of the Opera took place at a church on the property that Lloyd Webber had converted to a theater. Björnson had rigged up a little chandelier that came down at the climactic moment. She also built a boat in which the Phantom, played there by Colm Wilkinson, ferried Christine, the woman he is obsessed with, to his underground lair.
The reaction to the presentation was mixed. Bernie Jacobs liked what he saw. He called Phil Smith in New York the next day and said, “This looks like a hell of a show.” But Lloyd Webber was not pleased. The show lacked the high romance for which he was aiming. A retooling was necessary, probably with someone other than Stilgoe, who was fast and clever but, according to Lloyd Webber biographer Michael Walsh, had no feel for romance.6
Lloyd Webber invited Prince to Sydmonton, but the director was at his summer home in Majorca. He had the score and the script, neither of which impressed him. Later, Lloyd Webber sent him a tape of the Sydmonton presentation.
“Well, there was this little chandelier, and the audience had the time of its life laughing at it,” he said. “That’s not the point of what I thought we were going to do. I would not like to clock the laughs in Phantom of the Opera, if you know what I mean.”
Prince decided to go to Paris and visit the Opéra itself for inspiration. “I knew a lot of people there, and they couldn’t have been nicer,” he said. “They took me all over the place. They took me to the roof, and I straddled [the sculptures] on a windy day.” The opera house was built over a subterranean lake. Prince went down to take a look at it. “I dropped a coin through a grate and I heard a tink. That was wonderful.”
Prince began researching the history of the opera house, its architecture, the kinds of operas that were performed there during Leroux’s time, the scenic designs, the special effects. He wanted to use as many authentic Victorian stage special effects in the show as possible. He envisioned trapdoors, curtains, candelabras, and, of course, that mysterious lagoon beneath the opera house.
Back in New York that fall, Prince got a call from Cameron Mackintosh inviting him to breakfast. Prince arrived with a folder bulging with his research on the opera house. Before the coffee arrived Mackintosh said, “I’m sorry, but you can’t direct the show. It must be an English director. We’re going with Trevor.”
Prince picked up his papers and said, “I’m not going to have any breakfast.” Back at his office, he told his assistant, “Put all these in a file. They’ll be back.”
• • •
Trevor Nunn was, in the 1980s, the most sought-after director in the world. He had staged Nicholas Nickleby, Cats, and, London’s newest sensation, Les Misérables. Prince, though a Broadway legend, had not had a hit since Evita in 1979. His track record of late was abysmal: Merrily We Roll Along, A Doll’s Life, Play Memory, End of the World. All had closed soon after opening. Mackintosh wanted Nunn. Complicating matters, Nunn had started work on a new Lloyd Webber show—Aspects of Love—before Lloyd Webber shelved it to work on Phantom. Nunn was annoyed to hear some of the Aspects tunes recycled for Phantom at Sydmonton.7
A power game was now playing out. With the success in London of Les Misérables, Mackintosh had established himself independently of Lloyd Webber. But he knew Phantom was a good property, and he did not want to let it go. Lloyd Webber could produce Phantom himself, but he’d had his biggest success with Mackintosh, who was turning Cats into a worldwide sensation.
In the end, the composer defeated the producer. “I wanted Hal because I thought he had the showmanship to stage it,” Lloyd Webber said. “Trevor would have intellectualized the whole thing.”<
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Nunn was out, Prince back in. By this point, Lloyd Webber had a reputation for switching book writers, lyricists, and directors almost on a whim. Don Black, who was in and out of several Lloyd Webber shows, joked, “You have to admire Andrew. If you don’t, you’re fired.”
Prince came back in with a price. He negotiated a royalty from the show of 2.55 percent, much higher than most directors receive.8 And if the show moved to New York, Prince had theater approval.
On that little clause would turn tens of millions of dollars—for the Shuberts.
• • •
Lloyd Webber spent the better part of 1986 retooling Phantom. He found a young lyricist, Charles Hart, who could write romantic lyrics. They came up with “The Music of the Night,” whose sensuous melody Lloyd Webber had used for a song called “Married Man” in his shelved Aspects of Love. Put to Hart’s lyrics—“Turn your face away/from the garish light of day”—it became the most romantic song in the show, one of the most romantic songs in musical theater history.
Colm Wilkinson was unavailable to play the Phantom because he was committed to Les Misérables. Sarah Brightman suggested a friend, Michael Crawford. Best known in England as a comic actor, Crawford was a classically trained singer. He was also agile, charismatic, and handsome (though his face would be covered by a mask).
The early previews of Phantom at Her Majesty’s Theatre in October 1986 were choppy. Technical issues, such as the falling chandelier, had to be worked out. But it was obvious from the first preview that the audience adored the show. Women especially were falling for Crawford’s sensitive, childlike Phantom. At the box office, the show started off slowly—Chess was the big draw that season. But by opening night, with the town buzzing about the show, there was nearly $2 million in the till.
The Shuberts flew to London to attend the opening. That morning, Jacobs and Smith met Cameron Mackintosh for breakfast at a sidewalk café in Mayfair. Mackintosh wanted to know if the Majestic Theatre in New York was available.
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