The Les Misérables Original Broadway Cast - Les Misérables

Real musical theatre heads know that the Original Cast isn’t the same as the Original Broadway Cast - Les Mis first premiered at the Dôme de Paris in 1980, and the first English translation was performed on London’s west end in 1985. I saw the play myself on Broadway in 2018 or 2019, I can’t remember, but I really enjoyed the high melodrama, the orchestral grandeur, and the wandering narrative. None of those qualities I loved come across all that well on this cast recording.

Let’s work backwards. The narrative is cut short because all the spoken word sections, interstitial music, and dance sections are cut out of this record. It makes sense from the perspective of “listening to a record” rather than “listening to a short audiobook with a kickass soundtrack”. Because the dialogue from the first act is cut, we don’t know Eponine’s relationship to Monsieur Thenardier and Cosette. We don’t see Cosette and Marius’ first glimpse of each other. We don’t see Marius and Jean fall out, or the reason for their reconciliation. Still, even with the cuts the plot and characters are far more intelligible than, say, a Coheed record.

Les Miserables (Original Broadway Cast) was recorded in 1987, and it sounds dated even by the standards of that day. It’s been completely Andrew Lloyd Weber-ified with the corny e-pianos, synths, and organs. In the first act up through “At The End Of The Day”, I took the approach that I was listening to a progressive rock take on the play, as opposed to the highly orchestral version I was expecting. Once I got to the chorused nylon guitar synths of “I Dreamed A Dream” (which also has a noticeable skip in it around 1:50, even on S******), that take fell apart. The maudlin and weak production cannot support the intended emotional weight of the song. Major emotional points of the music are failed by the production over and over again. There’s overall not enough rubato. Nothing swings. “Who Am I?” and “Stars” (which are too fast), “Do You Hear the People Sing?” (which is too slow), “Javert’s Suicide” (which is overly jaunty and comic), all ruined by bad conducting and miserably dated production. The only places where the 80s guitars and chorused wurlitzers work are “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” and the first songs of the first act, and maybe “Plumet Attack”.

The leads are mostly good to excellent. Fantine, Marius, Monsieur Thenardier, and both grown and young Cosette all embody their characters very well through their voices. Jean Valjean is appropriately weary and operatic at most times, but gets a little bit too rock and roll with the high belts for my taste. Javert is too hollow and heady everywhere except for “Stars”. Both Gavroche solos make my skin crawl. Madame Thenardier is far too put upon and plain. The various friends of the ABC are bland non-entities.

The real miscast here is Éponine. They chose a pingy pop singer and threw her in a cast of voices full of classical pretense and a libretto of high drama. She’s not as raspy and bawdy as her book character is depicted, and not as melodramatic and full as the version I saw on stage. She sticks out like ‘un pouce endolori’. She feels so out of place as the only one (besides Gavroche) without any vibrato or depth of character to their voice that it almost feels like a prank played on the listener. Worst of all, she’s miserably flat during the Finale while she’s harmonizing with Fantine and ruins the whole song.

This is a chunky double album in the old hardbacked style, more than double-wide and with a thick plastic divider in the middle. The corner of the centerpiece is bent upwards, so the top cover falls off whenever it’s opened. The inner booklet is thick, but cheap. The photos are blurry and unprofessional. There is a synopsis and a booklet of lyrics, but none of the missing dialogue (one wouldn’t want to give the script away, given the huge licensing fees they charge community theatres to run it). Decca saved money on the booklet by keeping the interior black and white and printing all the text as small as they can.

I’m willing to sit and listen to something like this for longer than I would an album of the same length. The addition of a good plot and the song/act structure of a musical keeps my attention, so I don’t mind the double album length. I just mind the fact that this particular double album fails to capture the magic of the stage play. While this cast must have been superb for Les Mis to have run for as long as it did on Broadway, this original cast recording just isn’t. It is poor simulacra.

Les Misérables by The Les Misérables Original Broadway Cast is a bad album, and I don’t like it.