THE MUSICALS

La Révolution Française premiered at the Palais Des Sports, Paris in 1973 following the release of a chart-topping concept album, and was a triumphant success. It was the first ever French rock opera. Claude-Michel Schönberg played Louis XVI in this production – the only time he has appeared in one of his shows.

Les Misérables is the world’s longest-running musical, seen by over 130 million people in 426 cities in 53 countries around the world, and has been translated into 22 languages. It has won more than 160 international awards which include Olivier, Tony, Grammy, Golden Globe and Academy Awards. Still playing to packed houses in London, the 25th Anniversary Production has taken the world by storm, playing in the UK, Japan, Korea, Australia, Spain, Philippines, Singapore, Canada and on Broadway. There have been 47 cast recordings of Les Misérables.  Both the Original Broadway cast album and the Complete Symphonic Recording won Grammy Awards.  The largest single live audience for Les Mis to date was 125,000 at the 1989 Australia Day Concert in Sydney.

Miss Saigon premiered in London in September 1989 and closed ten years later. It is one of the most spectacular and technically complex productions ever staged. 266 people worked on the original London production at each performance and of those only 47 appeared in front of the audience. Miss Saigon has been seen by over 37 million people in 373 cities in 32 countries and translated into fifteen languages. There have been more than 25,000 performances of Miss Saigon around the world. The show has won more than seventy major theatrical awards including three Tonys and two Olivier Awards. There have been fourteen cast recordings including the Complete Symphonic Recording. Miss Saigon returned to London’s West End in 2014, once again breaking box office records and opened on Broadway before commencing an extensive tour of the United States. The 25th anniversary performance was recorded live and released worldwide.

Martin Guerre opened at the Prince Edward Theatre in London and played for 675 performances. The revised production enjoyed considerable success at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and on tour before opening in the United States. The show was voted ‘Best Musical’ during the 1997 Laurence Olivier Awards. Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil are currently working on a revised version of the show.

The Pirate Queen tells the story of the 16th century Irish Chieftain and seafarer Gráinne (Grace) O’Malley, ‘the most notorious woman on the coast of Ireland’. The production, presented by the producers of Riverdance, in collaboration with Alain Boublil & Claude-Michel Schönberg, premiered at the Cadillac Theatre in Chicago before opening on Broadway in 2007. In 2010, the first foreign-language production of the show opened in Japan.