New Yorkers have waited nearly 10 long years for “One Day More.”
And starting July 23, they’ll finally be reunited with singing French rebels Jean Valjean, Fantine, Marius and Cosette — only not at their former longtime stomping, er, marching grounds on Broadway.
A massive concert version of the ballads-and-barricade musical “Les Miserables” that has toured around the world is wrapping things up a couple blocks away at Radio City Music Hall for 22 performances.
Forty-one-year-old “Les Miz,” with its unapologetically tearjerker tunes by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, was a mainstay in NYC for decades. It opened on Broadway in 1987, won the Tony for Best Musical and ran till 2003 at both the Broadway Theatre and the Imperial. There were revivals in 2008 and 2014.
But this new cast will be masters of a much, much bigger and more famous house.
“I wanted to do what’s become an iconic concert in the most iconic way,” British producer Cameron Mackintosh told me in London of his splashy Midtown venue choice.
As much as the Radio City run marks the end of the international event, it’s also a beginning. Mackintosh pointed out that, while American fans are familiar with the show’s huge anniversary concerts from airings on PBS or on YouTube, one has never played the U.S. before.
Radio City is the first — and a rather grand kickoff at that.
“It’s its own animal,” Mackintosh, 79, said. “No other show probably could ever do it.”
In every way, size matters. There will be 52 actors onstage giving their lungs a workout. They includes a trio of nightly rotating Valjeans (Killian Donnelly, Alfie Boe and Geronimo Rauch) as well as a couple of pursuant Inspector Javerts (Bradley Dean and Jeremy Secomb) and 27 orchestra musicians at the 5,960-seat venue that’s home to some other “Lovely Ladies,” the Rockettes.
For those hoping that the spectacle is the first step toward “Les Miz” or “The Phantom of the Opera” returning to Broadway, don’t get your hopes up. It’ll be a while before tomorrow comes.
Mackintosh insists he has no plans to bring either of them back, even though both continue to run in London’s West End and “Phantom” is successfully touring the U.S.
The producer is put off by the dire financial situation on the Great White Way, with its rapidly escalating costs, and called it “a mess.”
He’s right!
Unlike his New York counterparts who publicly grin and bear it, and then whisper dourly at cocktail parties, Mackintosh has railed against the disastrous issue of profitability becoming a pipe dream as if he’s Enjolras in “Red and Black.”
Do we fight for the right to a night at the opera now?!
When The Post broke the surprise news in 2022 that “Phantom” would close, Mackintosh told me at the time, “Everyone thinks these shows can go on forever, but you can’t run a big show at these margins anymore.”
That’s true. The number of new Broadway musicals that have recouped over the past five years is in the single digits — even though, for the most part, barricades and chandeliers have been replaced by folding chairs.
And while there was loud speculation that Mackintosh would bring a more economical version of “Phantom” back to Broadway, that’s not the case. He’s happy with the tour.
Same goes for “Les Miz.”
Instead, his plan was that the recent end of the “Les Miz” national tour (separate from the concert) would allow professional regional theaters to produce the ever popular show for the first time since 2019. Mackintosh wanted to build anticipation.
“I learned from Walt Disney,” he said. “The magic seven years!”
He added of local professional houses, “They need the show as well, to do their own versions of it.”
Yet there remains a possibility the concert at Radio City, which the producer said is about 90% sold out for the first two weeks and 50% sold for the second so far, could have a longer life in the U.S.
Mackintosh is dreaming a dream, at any rate.
“It’s not impossible that I might, in a year or two, take this across America,” he said. “That’s not out of the question. But it’s got to be a big success.”
