Broadway stars of today and young stars of the future combine to present the world's longest-running musical, Les Misérables, at Northern Stage from December 10, 2008-January 4, 2009.

Heading up the cast are three veterans of the Broadway production, which picked up eight Tony Awards during its acclaimed 16-year run—the third longest in Broadway history.  Timothy Shew reprises his starring role as Jean Valjean, Mary Gutzi—Fantine on Broadway—returns to the show as the unscrupulous Madame Thénardier, and Kevin David Thomas revisits his National Tour role of the romantic Marius.  Thomas also appeared in the Broadway production as Joly.  Shew's other Broadway credits include Sunset Blvd., Wonderful Town, Guys and Dolls and five other Great White Way productions.  Gutzi has toured the country in Ragtime (as Emma Goldman), Sunset Blvd. (as Norma Desmond) CATS (as Grizabella) and Pump Boys & Dinettes (as Rhetta), in addition to serving as a tour back-up singer for Cher.

With Broadway vets David DeWitt (Phantom of the Opera) and Dan Sharkey (The Music Man) also aboard, the cast collectively has appeared in 12 Broadway shows, 25 National and International Tours, and one Oscar-winning short film.  Actors returning to Northern Stage include Elena Gronlund (A Chorus Line, Cabaret, Guys and Dolls, I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change) and BJ Scahill (Gus the Theatre Cat in CATS). Quite a lineup!

Joining these seasoned professionals are five young Upper Valley performers: Emma Brooks of Quechee, VT; Mollie Brown of Wentworth, NH; Sydney Johnstone of Plainfield, NH; Simon Kahan of Hanover, NH; and Hannah Rose Marks of Lyme, NH.  Kahan, who served as an understudy for the Northern Stage production of The Full Monty, plays the critical role of Gavroche, the streetwise urchin who enjoys his own vocal solo.

Les Misérables, based on the novel by Victor Hugo, takes place in Paris in the years following the French Revolution.  Jean Valjean, after 19 years in prison (five for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family and the rest for escape) breaks his parole and starts a new life, relentlessly pursued by the vengeful Javert.  Meanwhile, he keeps a promise to look after the orphan girl Cosette and heroically joins the students on the barricades as they fight for justice against the tyrannical government.

Les Misérables, directed by Artistic Director Brooke Ciardelli, runs live on stage at the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction from December 10, 2008-January 4, 2009.  Performances are most evenings at 7:30 p.m., with lots of 2:00 matinees on weekends AND weekdays.  For tickets and information, call 802-296-7000.  Tickets are also available through the Northern Stage Web site, www.northernstage.org.

The Northern Stage production of Les Misérables is sponsored by White River Toyota and Coldwell Banker Redpath & Co. Realtors.

About the Director
Brooke Ciardelli founded Northern Stage in 1997, funded by a blind solicitation that netted about $7,000, and since then she has guided the company to an annual budget of well over $2 million.  The company's growth has been fueled by Ciardelli's unerring artistic vision and careful management.  During that time, Northern Stage has produced nearly 80 works, with nearly half directed or co-directed by Ciardelli.  She introduced the U.S. to the play The Strange Passenger and won the Moss Hart Award with her direction of All My Sons.  She collaborated with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller on a staged reading of his then-unpublished play Resurrection Blues and directed Patrick Stewart and Lisa Harrow in a staged reading of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  Her other directing credits include a visually stunning version of A Midsummer Night's Dream set in 1929 Harlem and the regional premieres of The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Wit.  Her World Premiere adaptation The Shrew Tamer earned the attention of the Boston Globe, and her original adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, originally staged here in 2002, appeared again as The "O" Myths in a stunning outdoor production on the Dartmouth College Green in 2007 with an international cast.  She took her production of I Am My Own Wife to the Harare International Festival of the Arts in Zimbabwe and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland and was instrumental in producing the off-Broadway run of Tom Crean, Antarctic Explorer.

About the Authors
Les Misérables represented the second collaboration between Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg; the first was La Revolution Français in 1973, billed as the first-ever staged French rock opera.  Boublil, who developed the concept for the musical version of Les Mis and wrote the book for it, was born in Tunisia (a North African country bordered by Algeria and Libya) and emigrated to Paris at the age of 18.  After spending some time as a pop lyricist, he tired of that format and teamed up with Schönberg, a singer and songwriter who was the son of Hungarian parents.  After Les Mis, the two went on to write two more hit musicals, Miss Saigon and Martin Guerre.  Boublil now lives in London with his wife and four sons; Schönberg lives in Paris with his wife and two children.

Herbert Kretzmer, the lyricist, is a native of South Africa.  He moved to London in the 1950s, where he worked as both a lyricist and a journalist, including 18 years as the chief drama critic for the Daily Express and eight more writing about television for the Daily Mail.  His songwriting collaboration with French star Charles Aznavour has produced standards such as "She" and "Yesterday When I Was Young"; the latter has been recorded by such diverse artists as Dusty Springfield, Andy Williams, Shirley Bassey, Roy Clark (who sang it at the funeral of baseball great Mickey Mantle) and Marc Almond (half of the 1980s synthesizer group Soft Cell).  He has been elected a Chevalier of L'Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres.

About Victor Hugo
The origins of Victor Hugo (1802-1885) are rather ironic; he was the son of an Army general who idolized Napoleon (whose family Victor came to despise later in life), and he married the daughter of an officer at the Ministry of War.  Raised by his mother in Paris after his parents separated, he began writing poetry and translating works of Virgil in his teens.  He first reached prominence in 1831 with his fourth novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  He later turned to poetry and then politics, as a supporter of republicanism and an opponent of the last of the Bourbon kings, Charles X and Louis-Phillipe, and later Emperor Napoleon III.  Fearing for his life after Napoleon III's coup d'état in 1851, he fled to Brussels and later to the English Channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey, where he wrote Les Misérables in 1862.  After stints in France, Belgium and Luxembourg, he returned to Paris, where he was elected senator.  His funeral in 1885 was attended by two million people, and he was interred in the Pantheon.

About the Play
The constitution was threatened by the heir of a previous government. His unilateral actions provoked protests in the street.  The economy was in recession, the price of basic food items skyrocketed, wages dropped, and unemployment soared.  The people, longing for a change, installed a new leader.  Sound familiar?  That's what you might read in the papers in the U.S. these days, and that's what you might have read in the papers in Paris in 1830—if they had papers, and if the general public could read.

"It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get where we are today, but we have just begun.  Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today."

"Emergencies have always been necessary to progress.  It was darkness which produced the lamp.  It was fog that produced the compass.  It was hunger that drove us to exploration.  And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job."

One of these quotes comes from Victor Hugo; the other comes from Barack Obama.  Both speak to the darkness before the light, the immense struggle to overcome indignity and seek a better life.  Each reflects life in 19th century France or the 21st century United States.

Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables spans the years from 1815 to the student uprising of 1832.  While the characters are fictional, the events reflected in the musical were real.  During this period in France, society seethed with the injustices and inequalities that were never resolved by the Revolution.  Hope was kept alive in a society teetering toward despair by those who saw a better future.

Northern Stage chose to stage a brand new production of the musical Les Misérables during this critical election year to remind its audience that a society is only as good as its citizens.  Democracy works because people have the freedom and courage to speak their minds, to debate the issues, to cry out in the streets (or even on the Internet) for a better life.  The courage and perseverance of Jean Valjean against seemingly insurmountable odds reflects our daily struggles.  This show vividly demonstrates that the power of the human spirit can drive an individual man to make extraordinary sacrifices to right an individual wrong and can propel the citizenry to make extraordinary sacrifices to combat an unjust government.

It is a cliché that history repeats itself; like all clichés, this aphorism has the ring of truth.  The struggles of the past guide our future.  The fight for human dignity never ends; only the players change.  That is why the story told by this musical adaptation of Victor Hugo's epic novel resonates with today's audience.

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for.  We are the change that we seek."
—Barack Obama

"What is history?  An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past."
—Victor Hugo

Les Mis was composed in 1980 and has become the world's longest-running musical.  In October of 2006, it set a record as the longest-running West End musical in history; it's still running, now at the Queen's Theatre in London, after 23 years.  Originally written and performed in French, it debuted at the Palais des Sports in Paris in 1981.  A somewhat reluctant Cameron Mackintosh, whose CATS was already a hit, agreed to produce it in English.  Kretzmer translated a portion of the French lyrics, adapted a portion, and wrote some additional material, including the Prologue.  The Royal Shakespeare Company production opened in October of 1985 at the Barbican Arts Centre in London, later transferring to the Palace and then the Queen's.

The Broadway production opened in 1987; nominated for 12 Tony Awards, it won eight, including Best Musical and Best Original Score, and it ran until 2003, making it the third-longest-running show in Broadway history (after Mackintosh's Phantom of the Opera and CATS).  A revival opened in 2006 for a six-month run that ended up lasting over a year.  The show has been seen by over 54 million people in 38 countries and 21 languages.

About Northern Stage
Northern Stage has come a long way since Founding Artistic Director Brooke Ciardelli began staging shows in various venues in Burlington, VT in 1992.  Since relocating to their new home at the Briggs Opera House in 1997, Northern Stage has offered over 70 productions, including World Premieres such as The Shrew Tamer, Ovid: Tales of Myth & Magic and A Christmas Carol: The Musical.  Other highlights include a staged reading of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" with Patrick Stewart and Lisa Harrow and a reading of Resurrection Blues, with the playwright, Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Miller, in attendance.  The company has twice been honored with Moss Hart Awards for Excellence in Theater from the New England Theatre Conference, for productions of To Kill A Mockingbird (1999) and All My Sons (2004), as well as an Addison Award for The Shrew Tamer (2004).  Most recently, the company toured their acclaimed production of I Am My Own Wife to the Harare International Festival of the Arts in Zimbabwe and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.

Community support has enabled the company to sell over 32,000 tickets in downtown White River Junction each year to enjoy entertaining and thought-provoking professional theater and theater education here at the crossroads of northern New England.  They have also reached out to offer residencies and workshops at over a dozen area schools.  The company initiated "Project Playwright," a literacy program for fifth and sixth graders, which has resulted in over 750 original plays written by that age group.

For information or tickets, call 802-296-7000, or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  The Box Office at the Briggs Opera House is open from 5:30-9 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, 1:00-9:00 p.m. on Saturday and 3:00-7:00 p.m. on Sunday during show weeks; tickets for all shows are available by phone or at the Northern Stage administrative office at 28 Gates Street, White River Junction, Monday-Friday from 10 am.-6 p.m.  or via the Northern Stage Web site (www.northernstage.org). MasterCard and VISA are accepted.