JOHN DAVID PITTMAN
LES MISERABLES: Mary Little, Douglas Webster, Caleb Reese, Matthew Hugg, Sydni Whitfield, Karenssa LeGear and Christopher Behmke star in The Rep’s production.
‘Les Mis’ returns to Rep BY WILL STEPHENSON
V
ictor Hugo published his novel “Les Miserables” in 1862, and the reviews were mixed. Flaubert said it was “infantile,” and Baudelaire is supposed to have called it “tasteless and inept.” Since then, the book has become many things, in the process garnering a whole spectrum of positive and negative responses: a 1930s Hollywood film starring Charles Laughton, a seven-part radio serial directed by and starring a then-22-year-old Orson Welles, a Japanese manga. Most famously and perti-
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MARCH 6, 2014
ARKANSAS TIMES
nently, it became a musical. “Les Miserables,” the musical which first premiered in Paris in 1980 and was then translated and reworked for an English-language audience five years later, today occupies a rarefied space in the world of theater, having become one of those token crossover successes that appeal to even those otherwise uninterested in Broadway. It is a cultural behemoth, a force of its own, and this week it returns to Little Rock. The Times interviewed the direc-