A secret behind Les Miserables: Victor Hugo's paintings

Les Miserables, original novel by Victor Hugo turned into musical, has been already 29 years succeeding on stage. Since the première at the London Barbican Theatre in 1985 it has been continuously represented around the world, while starting to be an important part of the history of musicals as a theatre type. The Spanish production of this play is now on tour around the Mediterranean country, garnering a great success.

How come could its creators, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, think that their work would be represented around the world in the most important theatre and would win various awards, including eight Tony. Furthermore the stage fame turned the play into a movie which won three Oscar under Tom Hopper's direction.

But one of the more relevant facts we want to talk you about is the scenic renovation on the sets assembly, which hits the original novel essence and spots a new difference. This material change took place four years ago, in occasion of the 25^th anniversary on stage. Cameron Mackintosh present us in this new production some fresh air to renew the interest and passion for this realist, passionate and human literary work. The atmosphere in general terms changes from a light and coloured area to a gloomy and grey environment, mimicking with the feeling of the characters and the real historical situation. The new use of these colours does not create monotony in the plot but on the contrary: it gives a poetical depth.

However, there is another key aspect to high-light the misery and poverty atmosphere: Victor Hugo's paintings projected at the back of the stage. Although he is mostly known as a poet, novelist and playwright, Les Miserables author worked also with fine art. As a result from his autodidact character the French poet and painter created a whole fine art production based on watercolour and charcoal techniques, which according to coetaneous sources helped to inspire him. As they were conceived as a sort of rehearsal and not for the public audience, Victor Hugo never showed them for fear of the critics as it could shadow his literary production, which was the one that really succeed.

Who could have told to the author of Les Miserables that his novel would had triumphed as a stage musical and that his paintings would be projected! We can only add to wish to to enjoy the play if you ever had the chance to see it.

Antoni Obiols

Then

During the last month of February it was held in London the second edition of the Waterloo Vaults Festival. For six weeks the labyrinth of tunnels under Waterloo station were filled up with concerts, art and alternative theater. We enjoyed so much Then, the new show written by and starring Yve Blake supported by the Young National Theatre Studio.

Entrance to the Waterloo Vaults Festival

The stage is almost empty: a microphone stand, a computer, a projector and a curtain for the few but effective costume changes. But as soon as the show begins Yve Blake takes care of covering the entire stage with monologues, interacting with the projections, singing, dancing... and she even dares to go with rap!

The show begins with three questions: Who are you? Who you'll be? And, most important, who you used to be? It is from this last question that the the full show is developed. We are always the same throughout our lives? Or the situations we live make us change gradually while we grow up? Then talks about the past we used to live in, but also invites us to reflect on what this implies about changes and about life .

The project started well before staging with the creation of the website Who Were We where people around the world was invited to anonymously submit their stories, pictures or memories about the people who they used to be in the past. From there the artist created a speech including more than a hundred of the stories received to make us think about ourselves, as most of them are stories which anyone can feel identified with, putting aside a comedy look that turns the reflection in a fun and entertaining show.

Promotional image for the show

Many of the stories are read by the interpreter from behind her computer, some of them accompanied with images from the projector, while others are put together into songs linked by themes and tidying up the speech by age of this past persons. So throughout the show we see our thoughs when we were infants, how we saw the world when we went to school and the problems of becoming a teenager. The last part of the show, however, brings together the reflections of older people who also collaborated on the website and give us an idea of how they see it was their life when they were 20, 30 or 40 years old.

One of the positive parts of this structure is the increase in the intensity of emotions. Leaving the reflections of older people for the end of the show allows it to start in a much lighter and fun way, including the preference for sandwiches without crust, to gradually pass to the typical adolescence body concerns and self-acceptance. Getting to the end of the show one of the most tender and sweet songs is “You grow me up, now I'll grow you down” where, without leacing completely aside the bold and fun touch of the show, we can reflect about elderness and how generation after generation some help us to make the road to success in life while in exchange, sooner or later, we will have to help them rid the road of life.

Finally, the show concludes with a final song bringing the most interesting responses to this particular question from the site : If you had five minutes with your past you, what would you say? We invite you to answer it yourselfs.

Ricard Gispert
@ricardgispert

Theatre evening

Going to the theatre is a whole experience for me. It is not only to sit on a more or less comfortable sit and watch a play on the stage. There are a lot of little sensations that enhance the theatre experience.

The evening can start easily with your companions having dinner together or sharing some drinks before the play. Usually catching up or any new topic fills the conversation and you almost don't talk about the theatre, it is not time yet.

Afterwards you get to the theatre building, normally with a magnificent entrance. It doesn't matter if the theatre is in the big city or in a country village, the main door has always a look of greatness, full of people and light. For me it has a kind of class that you can not find in the cinema. Even if both of them are cultural business, for me the cinema looks more like an enterprise (more capitalist), more contemporary. The entrance to the theatre, instead, has a more classic feeling, a remain of old centuries, maybe even a bourgeois style. All together it seem VIP, as if it was an elite reunion, even if the audience dresses in the most miscellaneous ways: from the young ones in jeans to the elder marriages dressed up as if they were going to church, or the romantic couples boarding on a date shared with the stage. There, at this cultural VIP entrance, between the lights, the perfumes and a bit of a smell of tobacco is where the theatre experience starts.

Magnificent entrance to the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (Barcelona)

As it has been said a theatre is a business company, so it is very usual nowadays to find a shop or a stand at the very entrance of the building giving you the chance to buy the booklet or various merchandise. That is also an extra point of the theatre experience. I like to take a look at this little shops even if I won't buy anything. I don't want to buy a t-shirt with the show's poster printed on top, specially if even before buying it I already know it will end up being a summer pyjamas; but instead I like to collect the booklets, this little dictionaries of the play where you can find out a lot of things about the show or the actors, and sometimes they also include interviews to the director or the main stars.

At the shop we can also buy sweets, candy, chocolates or popcorn (although we associate this las ones to the cinema). All of them, anyway, the perfect companion while you access to the stalls area, feeling butterflies in your stomach while you look for your sit. First the row, then the sit number. Dammit! Is in the opposite site. Better if I go back that way. And probably the first thing you do once you are already sit is to look at the stage to see how you see it, if you see it. When you bought the tickets online the row seemed closer to the stage, or the sit more central. That is very possible, the stalls map they show you usually has strange and delusional optical effects. But soon or later you get use to it and you convince yourself that after all you will enjoy a good view of the show.

As the room gets crowded it starts to be loud and quackery. At the beginning it's only a few whispers but soon the voices get louder and for a moment you think you will hear nothing from your far position if they don't shut up all together. That can maybe be followed by a little moment of internal reflection, voluntary or not, when you hope you are going to enjoy the show you have chosen for that evening, and after you realise how much you like this atmosphere and decide you should do your best to go more to the theatre. And while I think about all this feelings and thoughts that the theatre experience brings to me I also think if they are the same for everyone. What are your feelings when you go to the theatre?

But slowly the lights turn off and they take with them all the chatty voices leaving only, again, a whisper in the aire. The curtain opens.

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert

Don't Cry For Me Argentina

 “Don't Cry For Me Argentina” as it was sung by Madonna in the 1996 film version of the musical Evita (1976), a work by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. If I were Argentinian I would cry too, but because of the musical. I'm not talking about technical or theatrical reasons, and even less about the music, I'm complaining for the historic facts that Evita represents, or rather for HOW these are represented.

It is true that, even if for me Eva Perón (1919-1952) was a fighter with very modern ideas, when she was alive she already was object of controversy and her followers were as many as her detractors; but that just gives even more reason to be careful when making a musical of her biography. However, the British duo based their work in The woman with a wipe, the first anti-peronist biography written by Mary Main in 1952 when cancer killed the Argentinian actress and politician. The result is a booklet in which the morality of our protagonist is in doubt: a woman who leaves home as the lover of a guitarist man, who uses men to move forward in her artistic career, who marries Juan Perón because of the social advantages and who runs charity events only for her own benefit. No wonder that shortly after the musical's première Nicholas Fraser and Marysa Navarro published a more neutral biography: The Real Lives of Eva Perón.

Hence Evita is one more example of the importance of the historians (Hollywood gives us examples with almost every historic film they produce). It is not enough to have a good story it also needs to be accurate with the historic facts; and that implies that one source of information isn't enough to get to the true. We can never know which flaws might have the source and that is why is necessary to contrast it. Even if in 1976 Rice and Webber could only count on Mary Main's work as the only written biography existent, sure they could had newspapers or even witnesses to talk to. Or at least they could have drawn a profile of the book's author so they could know how accurate it would be. But of course they chose a much easier path. And now I ask you: how would have British people reacted if two Argentinian had made a musical trivializing Margaret Thatcher? I guess it's something unthinkable in the 70's when the north hemisphere had some kind of absurd moral superiority against the south hemisphere, but what would happen nowadays? Has the situation changed enough?

Ricard Gispert
@ricardgispert