`Les Miserables' Returns In Hit Form

"Les Miserables." Text by Alain Boublil, music by Claude-Michel Schonberg, lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer. Directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird.At The Fifth Avenue Theatre, 1308 5th Avenue. Tuesday-Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m., through Aug. 30. $15-$47.628-0888.

That theatrical megahit, "Les Miserables," is back in town, starting last night at The 5th Avenue Theatre, where the show played a successful seven weeks last year. From the quality of the returned production and the enthusiasm of the capacity opening-night crowd, "Les Miserables" will duplicate that success this time around.

By now everyone remotely interested in theater knows about the phenomenal success of "Les Miserables," right from its beginnings as a pop-opera recording in France, prior to 1980. It went on to be a successful stage production in Paris, before falling into the hands (clutches?) of theater whiz Cameron Mackintosh who helped create the English language premiere with the Royal Shakespeare Company. It's been playing in London since 1985; the American version has been playing in New York since March 1987, where it nabbed eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

This was my first exposure to "Les Miserables," outside of the American and French recordings, so I tried to figure out what has turned this 19th century Victor Hugo potboiler/classic into this huge theatrical success. Why do audiences, especially American, respond so eagerly to Hugo's intricate story about a police official who vows to get his man, a pathetic orphan and a student uprising?

As Yul Brynner used to say in "The King and I," back when musicals had music, "Tis a puzzlement!"

In some ways, "Les Miserables" has much the same excitement as "Nicholas Nickleby," the 19th century Dickens novel Trevor Dunn and John Caird turned into a mesmerizing theater experience. Dunn and Caird, who jointly share direction and adaptation, attempted to work the same magic with "Les Miserables" and while they haven't experienced the same unqualified success, they've duplicated it in some ways, especially in the first act of "Les Miserables." At the heart of the story is the pursuit of Jean Valjean, the petty criminal, by the police official, Javert, who gives new meaning to the term "obsession." Then there's the beautiful, abandoned Fantine who must turn to the oldest profession to support her daughter, Cosette. When Valjean becomes a successful bourgeois (never explained) he takes responsibility for Cosette - a chance for a wonderful death-bed scene! - and Cosette falls in love with one of the student rebels, Marius. Threaded throughout are recurrent meetings between Valjean and Javert (who sometimes recognizes Valjean, sometimes not.)

While "Les Miserables" veers somewhere between Illustrated Classics and a pop operetta, it does offer continually surprising stagecraft, thanks to Nunn, Caird and designers John Napier and David Hersey. The set employs a turntable which really gets a workout and the scenes change with cinematic swiftness and variety. (Never mind that the barricade set, coming together on stage, tends to look like a duel between those lumbering creatures from "Star Wars.")

In fact, the stagecraft is so impressive, "Les Mis" would be a lot more effective if one could just dump Claude-Michel Schonberg's music and Herbert Kretzmer's lyrics and treat it as a stage play. Too often everything slows down for one more song - and it's difficult to tell which one it is since Schonberg is positively brilliant at rewriting the same tune.

For the most part, this production of "Les Miserables" has a cast that is vocally first-rate, although not always dramatically. Dave Clemmons has the plum role of Valjean, and while he has a terrific voice, his Valjean is hollow. Clemmons never projects the inner turmoil of this man, settling instead for a lot of bluster and shouting. (The fact that all of Schonberg's songs force the performers to reach degrees of hysteria in each and every song isn't much help.)

Chuck Wagner makes an impressive Javert, and Jill Geddes is a lovely Fantine. Also impressive was Angela Pupello as Eponine, Ron Sharpe and Christopher Yates as Marius and Enjolras, two of the student leaders. Tamra Hayden is a pretty Cosette but the script doesn't allow her to do much more than look anxious. Gina Ferrall and J.P. Dougherty are crowd-pleasers as the Thenardiers, a conniving couple who have two musical numbers which the audience loved but which are outrageously overdone.