The anniversary 'Les Misérables' cast celebrates 40 years of glorious revolution

Forty years on, the world’s most popular musical is only getting more popular. We meet four stars from the anniversary cast: Killian Donnelly, Katie Hall, Jac Yarrow, and Jordan Shaw.

Summary

• London Theatre Magazine sat down with four of the Les Misérables anniversary cast members
• More than 130 million people have seen the musical
• Les Misérables is celebrating 40 years in the West End

The landmark musical Les Misérables celebrates its 40th anniversary in London this autumn, and the facts and figures are simply astounding, with more than 15,000 performances in the West End and over 60,000 worldwide (that last figure achieved via 452 cities in 55 countries and regions).

More than 130 million people have seen the musical, which opened at the Barbican on 8 October, 1985 — a performance at which I happened to be in attendance. An array of talent culled from the ranks of the RSC, Broadway, and Ireland sent the Victor Hugo musical soaring on its way and earned cast members such as Colm Wilkinson, Roger Allam, Patti LuPone, and Michael Ball a place in music theatre annals. Not every performer can boast joining a show that, as now seems evident, may well outlive many of its creators. (Its wonderful English-language lyricist Herbert Kretzmer, for one, died in 2020, aged 95.)

But it’s the way of the theatre to look always forward – not least in a musical whose anthemic lyrics (“one day more”, “another day, another destiny”) promise exactly that. So it seems right that, as a part of the show’s 40th anniversary celebrations, the London production should be boasting a dazzling lineup this autumn made up of some of the show’s most celebrated performers in key roles. I spoke with four of them.

“This is really big and enormous,” says Killian Donnelly of being chosen to play Jean Valjean at the 8 October gala performance: he will share the Herculean role throughout this starry eight-week run at the Sondheim Theatre with Ian McIntosh, both men seasoned in this most vocally and emotionally demanding of parts.

“It’s the benchmark,” the ever-engaging Donnelly says of a show in which he has worked his way up through the ranks, from a swing covering multiple roles and on to the revolutionary Enjolras and the hunted fugitive Valjean. (His CV includes three years in the show without a break.) Donnelly was 11 when his father first handed him a CD of songs by fellow Irishman Colm Wilkinson, the original English-language Valjean, and young Killian was hooked: “Track seven was ‘Bring Him Home’, and I said, ‘What is this?’ Here was a song written by a Frenchman for an Irishman that went from G to C up to an A in which [Valjean] is whispering on a barricade praying to God and then the music takes over.” The result is one of the most soul-baring songs in any show going, as Donnelly knows from the inside out. The musical’s defining part is “Mount Olympus from a singer’s point of view,” continues Donnelly, “but I always approach it as an actor. Cameron Mackintosh [the show’s legendary producer] likes to say that the music will carry you – that the score carries you through, and it does. You’ve got to be able to sing the notes, of course, but you’re in conversation with God, as well.”

Impressively, Donnelly has read the Victor Hugo source novel “back to front”, despite it being 1488 pages long, and spent nine weeks on the 2012 movie version, during which he would spend his days dying on the barricades as the impassioned Combeferre and then singing Raoul onstage in The Phantom of the Opera (another Mackintosh production) at night. Les Misérables, Donnelly says unabashedly, has shaped his career. “It’s my home away from home,” says the actor, whose actual home is in Dublin with his wife, two children, and their dog. “I never say with this show that I have to go to work; I get to go to work. I’d rip tickets at Les Mis for the rest of my life, if that were needed,” he adds. That scenario, it’s fair to say, looks unlikely.

Donnelly, aged 41, is a year older than the production he is fronting. But there’s a younger generation who exhibit the same zeal for the musical that has shaped them. Jac Yarrow, the anniversary production’s 27-year-old Marius, was appearing in the Mackintosh production of Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends when he was first asked to take on Michael Ball’s original part. “I bang on about being obsessed with Les Mis but it’s really true: it’s a show I loved so much as a kid that when it came time to actually do it, wearing those iconic costumes and standing on those iconic steps, it felt as if I was fulfilling a childhood dream.”

What does Yarrow make of this particular role? “Marius goes on arguably the longest journey of anyone in the show, starting off as this naive young lad outcast from his family who meets a girl [Cosette] and falls in love and realises that there is so much more to life than money and class. [The character] often gets misrepresented as this young doe-eyed romantic lead, but he’s not that. He’s romantic, yes, but he has so much more depth to him.”

That’s made doubly special, says Yarrow, by the context in which Marius exists. Les Misérables, he says, “isn’t just a musical; it’s a cultural phenomenon. It should always have a spotlight on it, and always exist. It lights up a passion in everyone, myself included.”

Katie Hall, 35, has been playing Patti LuPone’s original role of Fantine off and on since 2018 and readily admits that “this show has been such a huge part of my life” – pre-dating, for starters, her two children, who are aged four and nearly three. Hall played Cosette in the 25th anniversary gala performance before graduating to the ranks of the doomed Fantine (for which Anne Hathaway won an Oscar onscreen), which she was already playing at the Sondheim before being asked to sign on for the 40th birthday run: she and Adam Gillen (Thénardier) are the only cast members doing this double duty.

“When I first came to Les Mis auditions, I knew every word,” says Hall, as one might expect from the daughter of performers: her father is the distinguished operatic tenor John Graham-Hall. Her West End entrée came via the part of Christine in Phantom opposite her current Valjean, Donnelly. “Killian and I have a lot of history, and I think you can’t fake that; it makes our relationship more believable onstage.” As for the piece itself, “I don’t think there are that many shows you could continue performing and still really feel it deeply and not have to manufacture [your performance] at any point. Les Mis is such a very human story, and the West End wouldn’t be right without it.”

Jordan Shaw, this cast’s Enjolras, had grown up watching the 10th and 25th anniversary performances before being tapped to play the firebrand character prior to Covid and returning to the show now. “When you’re younger and stepping into a lead role, sometimes there’s a desire to prove that you’re worthy of doing it, and so to be invited back is such an honour and a huge compliment.”

He is pleased as a performer of colour to think, he says, “of the younger generation coming up, and perhaps a brown boy will see this and think, ‘Maybe I can do that one day.’ When I go out the stage door and meet a Black boy training at drama school and they say, ‘I want to do that’, it’s the most touching thing to hear because I remember how I felt at that age.” It helps, Shaw says, to be part of what he terms “the perfect musical: the songs and stories are timeless, and you go on such an epic journey.” One day more? At this rate, more like several decades: roll on the 50th, 60th, and 70th...

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Photo credit: Killian Donnelly, Jordan Shaw, Katie Hall, and Jac Yarrow. (Photo by Matt Crockett). Inset: profile images, also by Matt Crockett, and West End production imagery. (Courtesy of production)

This article first appeared in the special Les Misérables 40th anniversary issue of London Theatre Magazine.