A few months before I saw the musical Les Miserables—actually a few months before it opened at the Kennedy Center last December—I heard it. The show’s publicist had sent me a tape of the London version. When I first listened to it, I felt disappointed. It sounded more than a little like Evita, with the strongest passages or the catchiest musical phrases not only cheaply sentimental but also repetitious in a manipulative sort of way.

Whatever its merits or shortcomings, Les Miserables was earmarked as a significant event for more than just the season. I felt privileged to obtain separate interviews with Cameron Mackintosh, its producer; Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, respectively the French lyricist and composer who together in 1978 conceived of the whole project; Herbert Kretzmer, the English lyricist; and Trevor Nunn and John Caird, the co-directors and the top two artistic minds behind the Royal Shakespeare Company, under whose auspices the English version premiered in London in the fall of 1985.

Back in September and October of 1986, I forced myself to listen to the tape again and again—occasionally as background music while I was revising my routine theater pieces, or perhaps more intently while I was sitting in traffic jams on the FDR drive hoping I’d still make the 8:05 curtain. And then gradually, imperceptibly, it began to happen. The music started to grow on me and assume the subtlety and the distinctive sound of a musical comedy.

When I spoke with Mr. Nunn during the rehearsal period for the American production, he claimed that it was Mr. Schonberg’s score which first interested him in the project. “What one was able to respond to was the sweep of the music,” he explained. “One could tell that the composer had got hold of something, because there’s something that is very contemporary in the feel about the music, yet we could imagine people singing it in period costume without being embarrassed.”

But before my interview with Mr. Nunn, when I had my own little musical epiphany, I suddenly remembered that when I was growing up in Ohio I used to listen to the albums of musicals countless times before I would actually see them. I realized I could sing the entire scores to dozens of shows long before I saw them. My family made annual—sometimes biannual—pilgrimages to New York, which meant to Broadway. Invariably, these visits consisted of seven shows in five days, sometimes more, when we were fortunate enough to stay longer. Much of the excitement essential to the success of a musical depended on the sensation of hearing an old friend.

It doesn’t really matter that I understood little of what the lyrics meant or what the sentiments represented. The point is that until the 60’s a musical comedy was something to be listened to again and again, until its personality and its character, its woofer and its tweeter, its sparkle and its fizz took root in that magical recess of being where tunes lie dormant and a sense of all being right with the world is formed.

Has anyone else noticed that the greatest musical comedy hits of the past 15 years have usually shown up as records, before they were produced on stage? This was true of Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, Song and Dance, Starlight Express, and now of Phantom of the Opera—which collectively represents the Andrew Lloyd Webber oeuvre. Indeed, it was also true of the initial, French version of Les Miserables. It first appeared as a double album in Paris before it opened for a limited eight-week run (extended to 16) at the Palais de Sports in 1980. But as obvious as this formula for success may appear, today’s vast majority of musicals are lucky if they get recorded even after they open—they close too fast to justify the expense.

In our era, the musical comedy has been ridiculed, reviled, “tried-out,” panned, workshopped, revised, imitated, reworked—in short, everything but loved, and so rarely recorded. Some of the best songs written for the stage in the past decade are lost, since no albums were made to preserve them. Gait MacDermot’s 1983 score for The Human Comedy (based on the Saroyan novel) instantly comes to mind as a good production that evaporated when its book idea was panned. Sondheim’s best score, for Merrily We Roll Along, survived only because he is Stephen Sondheim and because he has a champion in Richard Shepard, a record producer at RCA.

But, back to Les Miserables. I was shocked to hear Cameron Mackintosh, the show’s producer, admit he had never read the novel. Hugo’s classic was required school reading for my father when he grew up in Hungary during the second decade of this century and was one of the few novels he insisted I read before I went off to college. While the images of its two key figures, escaped convict Jean Valjean and police inspector Javert, now seem mostly to stem from their portrayals by Frederic March and Charles Laughton in the 1935 film version, my memory of the story’s majestic spread still came from the summer I spent with the 1,200-page novel itself.

But no matter how irresponsible Mr. Mackintosh seemed to me for his failure to read Les Miserables, his knowledge of its history was impressive. Even more worthy of respect was his knowledge of, and his love for, musical comedy. At the relatively young age of 41, Mackintosh has become perhaps the most successful producer of musicals in our day. He has sponsored and supervised over 150 productions, including Cats, Little Shop of Horrors, Song and Dance, and now Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera, as well as the imminent revival of Sondheim’s Follies. What I didn’t know until I met him was that he worked his way up through the ranks, beginning with his youthful stagehand experience on Oliver. What I also didn’t realize until the second time I saw Les Miserables was the extent to which Mr. Mackintosh’s personal obsession with Oliver may have influenced, no matter how obliquely, the winning effect of Les Miserables.

By the time I saw Les Miserables the first time, I had already interviewed the six people who were primarily responsible for creating it. I was so steeped in the score and in the involved history of this international extravaganza that I expected to be disappointed with the result. But I wasn’t.

The pivotal element that sets this musical apart from others was the one that held it together—the ingenious staging of the story as a seamless series of episodes, eclipsing years in the process. In respect to this, Les Miserables owes its greatest debt to the recent stage version of Nicholas Nickleby—also the brainchild of Mr. Nunn and Mr. Caird and the Royal Shakespeare Company. But in retrospect, the cinematic devices, the vignettes and tableaux invented to reveal Nickleby seem crude compared to the perfection of these techniques in Les Miserables.

I saw Les Miserables again the night after it opened on Broadway. What I realized then, five months after my session with Cameron Mackintosh and two months after I first saw it, was the crucial importance of the massive, rotating stage. Many of the scenes are prepared in the rear of the stage before they rotate to the front. Event melts into event, aria into aria, realizing the incredible 16-year sprawl of Hugo’s novel in a mere three hours. Whether or not Mackintosh conceived the rotating stage, or whether it was entirely set designer John Napier’s contribution, the first time I know a rotating stage was used so extensively was in Oliver, in 1960.

If the huge success of the musical version of Les Miserables suggests a revival of the romantic sensibility, it also implies renewed life for the musical comedy. The most vociferous detractors of the genre would be amazed to learn what Eric Bentley had to say about it over 30 years ago: “The dialogue is seldom fine but often racy; there is enough plot for half a dozen ‘plays,’ and the action goes ahead in great leaps and bounds from setting to setting, interior, exterior, New York, Havana, all points East or West. If you proposed to do in a ‘serious’ play the things that are done all the time in musicals, your producers would dismiss half of them as impossible, the other half as arty and avant-garde.”

In the same article, Bentley underscores the strictly American character of the musical. “Musical comedy is a very free form. You can try anything, and you must try many things. . . . The musical is significantly American not because of its famous tempo, nor the mechanical efficiency that is the basis of that tempo, but rather because of its texture: here is the thick and slab gruel of American life (not the most delicate of dishes, but a nourishing and tasty one) served up by chefs with shrewd heads and open hearts, for all the world to relish.”

Aside from three or four landmark developments, the musical has remained remarkably unchanged during the past century—true to its form and its formulas, dedicated to its vision of a fantastic reality, a special sensibility, and obsessed with the happy ending. This resistance to change has been both its curse and its blessing. As much as anything else, such a quirk—a tenacious grip on ebullience and optimism—became the single feature that detractors of the form found unacceptable in recent years.

The musical comedy became increasingly dismissible and less viable when the nation’s mood did an aboutface in the 60’s. Despair, angst, and cynicism had little use for hopefulness and even less tolerance for blatant escapism, the birthright of the musical. Confronted with such a dilemma, the form has been in turmoil ever since. Seeking a contemporary messiah, a number of critics have turned to Stephen Sondheim for proof that the form was not dead, but only in a period of transition. Only Sondheim, with 12 works to his credit (and the lyrics to three earlier ones), has addressed the concerns of a presumably more sophisticated audience with any consistency and relative frequency. But that “more sophisticated audience” has proven insufficient in number to support the cause.

Indeed, Sondheim has yet to write a show whose run approaches Evita‘s, Grease‘s, Hello Dolly‘s, Fiddler on the Roofs, or even Dreamgirls‘, let alone A Chorus Line‘s. Of the more than 40 musicals which had made the list of Long Runs, with over 1,000 performances, more than half premiered during the past 20 years (contrary to the expectations of many prophets of doom); yet, Sondheim is not responsible for a single one.

If our era has forced America to relinquish its proprietary interest on the musical comedy and welcome a new British breed—not only the rock-operas of Andrew Lloyd Webber but also a magical revision of the 30’s (Me and My Girl)—it now must make room for this French and English hybrid. Before, the French were notoriously uncongenial to musical comedy. Reportedly, the French today have more respect for the English Les Miserables than they did for the original two-hour version that Boublil and Schonberg staged there in 1980. It will all come full circle when the Mackintosh rendering is translated back into French and opens in Paris next year, as part of an international schedule that has already booked over 20 productions in as many languages.

All of us will have to await the next Boublil and Schonberg collaboration which Mackintosh is committed to produce in the fall of 1988: Miss Saigon, an update of the 1887 novel, Madame Chrysantheme, by Loti, from which Puccini derived his opera Madame Butterfly. A key question entails hundreds of implications: Will it open in London or New York?