Mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh is bringing the blockbuster musical Les Misérables back to Broadway next year, The New York Times reports, some eleven years after the original production closed, and six after a much maligned, reduced-size revival shuttered. Mackintosh cites the wild success of the Les Miz movie in his reasoning for the New York return of the show, which has been touring around the country successfully for two years. So will it be the same epic you wept through in 1989? Not quite, no.
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This is a new production of the Michel Schönberg/Alain Boublil musical extravaganza, featuring a new pair of directors, new orchestrations that blessedly won't be so heavy in the electro-piano-synth department, and, horror of horrors, no rotating set. Yes, the huge turntable that was one of the most iconic images of the original production will not feature in the new one, but as anyone who saw the biffed revival can tell you, a turntable does not necessarily a rousing show make. We're sure they can make this big, cheesy, turgid — but still great — musical as goosebump-giving as ever even without a magic rotating stage. Provided it has the right direction, anyway. What really remains to be seen, though, is if the show can draw a crowd. Interest in the piece is probably stoked by the movie, but that's right now. Will the momentum still hold all the way in 2014? Mackintosh seems to think it will. But "one year more" seems like a long time to wait.
