After nearly 20 years, you would expect the musical “Les Miserables” to show some wear and tear, some unretouched gray roots or a few signs the cast has gone around that turntable one too many times.
It is associate director Jason Moore’s job to make sure “Les Miz,” now at the National Theatre through Jan. 21, is as potent and fresh an experience as when the show’s logo — a sad-eyed waif with streaming locks — first appeared in New York in 1987. The 35-year-old director — who was in high school when “Les Miz” premiered — is producer Cameron MacIntosh’s eyes and ears. He drops in at least once a month while “Les Miz” is on the road to see that Inspector Javert doesn’t suddenly burst into “Melancholy Baby” or Jean Valjean decides to substitute “My Humps” for “Bring Him Home.”
For the past six years, Mr. Moore has supervised the Broadway production and tour. “I am responsible for maintaining the artistic integrity of the show,” he says during a phone interview from New York. “I rehearse the cast replacements, hire the cast and keep an extra eye on the show from time to time.”
Mr. Moore has seen “Les Miz” at least 500 times, which, he says, “doesn’t make me the most objective person in the world, but I try. I make sure that the portrayals of the characters are real and true and that the actors are singing it correctly.”
For the 10th anniversary of the show, Mr. MacIntosh ordered a complete overhaul of the musical, fearing that repetition was turning this story about 19th-century revolutionary France into a dusty relic. Part of the renovation was giving the actors more leeway in interpreting roles rather than trying to copy what predecessors had done with the characters of Valjean, Javert, Cosette and Fantine in particular.
“The show needed a freedom to it, a new energy,” Mr. Moore says. “It is not much fun for the actors to do over and over again what somebody else had done with the role. And ’Les Miz’ is so dramatically intense you can’t bluff your way through the emotions the way you might be able to do in a lighter musical.”
Mr. Moore spends at least a week a month on “Les Miz,” seeing the show and giving notes to the cast. “Sometimes the cast knows I am coming, but I also drop in unannounced,” he says. “Not necessarily to baby-sit them, but to fine-tune things. We had behavioral issues with motivation and work ethic about five years ago, and we had to address that. But not now.”
He also gets help from obsessive fans — who have seen the show nearly as many times as Mr. Moore has — who monitor “bloopers” and changes on Web sites and blogs. “It is staggering,” he marvels, “what they take note of — a turn of the head, a hand gesture.”
The “Les Miserables” tour is slated to end in 2006, but Mr. Moore says that it might live on in “some form.” Where it is not going is Las Vegas, where “Avenue Q,” “Phantom of the Opera” and “Mamma Mia!” have found a permanent home.
Mr. Moore directed both the Broadway and Vegas versions of the Tony-winning “Avenue Q.” “I don’t think ’Les Miz’ could ever run in Vegas — it is too long, for one, and the subject matter is not what you associate with a Vegas show,” he says.
Mr. Moore continues on the live theater path with an adaptation of the movie “Shrek” for Broadway. “We’re writing it now, but it is a slow process, since it was not a musical in the first place, although many people think it was,” he says. “It was actually a medieval world where the characters sang Joan Jett. We’re trying to make it more theatrical while keeping what made ’Shrek’ popular and accessible to so many people.”
He is also directing a live-action movie version of Disney’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” for ABC television. “I love it — it is Alan Mencken’s most sophisticated score — and I admire the dark underbelly of the piece,” he says. “I believe this is a musical that has not found its perfect form yet.”
For the next couple of months at least, Mr. Moore will continue monitoring “Les Miz.” “It’s a show I love working on — it is a touchstone for me,” he says. “I had the poster in my room when I was growing up in Arkansas.”
“Les Miserables” will play at the National Theatre through Jan. 21. Tickets range in price from $36.25 to $83.25 and can be purchased by calling 800/447-7400.
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