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Oddly for a work so plot-heavy and meticulously told, Les Miserables began life as a score rather than a libretto, appeared as a record album before it reached the stage, and languished for five years between the French and British productions. The original creators, Composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and Lyricist Alain Boublil, owed little to French musical-theater tradition -- there isn't much of one -- and a lot to rock operas like Jesus Christ Superstar. In their 1980 version at the 4,000-seat Palais des Sports in Paris, the show ran little more than half its present length and consisted of a dozen tableaux vivants accompanied by incidental music during ponderous scene changes. A year later Mackintosh heard the record and found the score so inherently theatrical that he decided to produce an English-language version.
Four years of development followed, during which the show raised its total of credited writers to seven, among them Herbert Kreztmer, who translated the lyrics, and Co-Directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird, who asked for five new character songs -- several of which, notably Javert's meditational Stars and Marius' farewell to his slain companions, Empty Chairs at Empty Tables, became showstoppers. Nunn and Caird reconceived the staging, using one huge revolving turntable inside another -- on which sets come and go and characters move from one scene into the next -- to achieve a fluid, cinematic style. Also involved from the outset were Designer John Napier and Lighting Designer David Hersey, who provided the monumental look and characteristic haze that at key moments gives way to otherworldly bursts of white glare. Says Caird: "As to which of the creators are responsible for what, it is always impossible to disentangle the complexities of a true collaboration. You lose your contribution in everybody else's, which is one of the most exciting things about the musical theater." Another of the most exciting things about musical theater nowadays, in London or on Broadway, is Les Miserables.