A confession: I am a huge musical theatre fan. I can spot a show tune on three bars in. I once calculated I have probably seen more than 80 different stage musicals, some several times.
So interviewing Claude-Michel Schönberg, co-creator with Alain Boublil of the musical juggernauts Les Misérables and Miss Saigon was a complete labour of love.
We meet on Zoom as is the way these days.
Back in 1998 we’d met in person, in my hometown of Leeds when he and Boublil and Cameron Mackintosh were restaging their musical Martin Guerre.
His Leeds connections are strong. He composed the music for Northern Ballet’s Wuthering Heights and Cleopatra. He met his wife in Leeds as well — Charlotte Talbot was then Northern Ballet’s principal dancer.
Today we’re talking about his involvement in Regenerate, an online concert in which titans of musical theatre pick their favourite “lost” songs, those cut from the final versions of classic shows. The live-streamed event on Sunday 18 September is in aid of Mercury Musical Developments, an organisation that supports new young writers and composers.
Stars including Adrian Lester, Anita Dobson and Douglas Hodge will be performing.
Schönberg’s offering is Too Much For One Heart, a solo penned for Kim in Miss Saigon never heard in the actual show.
“It was written for Miss Saigon but in the middle of the rehearsals, Nick Hytner, the director, told us we had too much of someone expressing their state of mind and stopping the action and story progression,” he explains. “So, we needed to find something to improve the story. Instead of a solo song we went for a duet with Kim and John.”
It’s a beautiful lyrical song, once performed in concert by the original Kim, Lea Salonga, but he does not regret cutting it. “If we are improving the storytelling, that’s all that matters. Alain and I are very good collaborators, and we try to bend, and if there is a very good reason, we tend to agree.”
Boubil and Schonberg outside rehearsals for Miss Saigon in London in 1989
Schönberg, now 78 but looking easily a decade younger, has had a musical career spanning decades. He once wrote pop songs, and as a performer he had a No 1 record in the French charts for 16 weeks.
“I didn’t want to be a pop star!” he says. “It was 1974 and I wrote this song, Le Premier Pas, and no one wanted to record it. It was more than five minutes long with no chorus. Alain suggested I do it myself, so I did.”
Later he played the king in the duo’s first musical, La Révolution Française, but did not enjoy it. “After three nights I was bored to death! Doing the same scene over and over again.
“I understand for some it’s a passion, but it’s not for me.”
Composing was a passion that goes back to his childhood in Vannes, Brittany. His father, Doli, and mother, Juci, had left Hungary in the 1930s as antisemitism was on the rise and settled in France.
Originally an accountant, Doli became a piano tuner, so the family home always had pianos and music. As a boy Schönberg composed songs for his mother as birthday gifts.
“I was born like that,” he tells me. “It was always there. I didn’t have any doubts that this was what I was going to do.
"The only problem was I lost my father when I was very young, I was 14. When I told my mother I wanted to be a composer, she said it’s not a job, you have to be sure that you have a proper job. I finished my studies in economics and maths and I told my mother, ‘I’m going to do what I want.’”
Schönberg’s upbringing was not overtly Jewish.
The family pretended to be practising Catholics to escape detection during the German occupation. “My parents were protected by the town hall and by the church in Vannes,” he explains.
“Each time the Germans came to check identities of the people, the local police would tell my parents to go away for two or three days and then come back.
“All their papers were impossible to get from Hungary.
“The church said they would give them fake certifications. But they would have to go to church, to make it convincing. In case of enquiry or people watching, they had to act as if they belonged.
Colm Wilkinson in Les Mis
“We were in Brittany, and it was very dangerous. In France we had 76,000 Jews who went to the concentration camps. Half of my family died in Auschwitz. The position of being a Jew in a small city was very dangerous.”
The family never really practised Judaism, scared that similar events could happen again. Schönberg though certainly considers himself Jewish and has researched his lost family. “I went to the Shoah memorial in Budapest.
“I found the names of my uncles, I found a cousin, a name of a sister of my mother, her father.
"The names of two of my mother’s brothers. Half my family, some in the camps, some in the Hungarian ghetto. I was planning to go to Auschwitz, a couple of years ago but I had some health problems and had to cancel. I am still planning to go when I can.” On Desert Island Discs he said that his adult life had been shaped by his father dying when he was 14.
I ask if he still believes that to be true. “Yes,” he says, “in those days you didn’t really talk to your father as people do now. So, from then on I didn’t have that kind of person for advice or shaping. I had to do it for myself.”
But one thing he’s certain of. “I’m sure my father would have said ‘no’ also if I’d have said I wanted to be a composer!”
Boublil was working as A&R man for a record company and heard a song that Schönberg had written. The pair met and became lifelong friends and working partners.
Their interest in musical theatre started when Boublil saw a production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar.
“He said ‘There are two guys in England doing the same things as us. Why don’t we try to write a musical?’ He loved history, the French Revolution, so we wrote La Révolution Française about the 1789 revolution, and it was a huge success in France.”
Lea Salonga and David Platt in Miss Saigon
Another British musical — Oliver! — acted as inspiration for Les Misérables. “When Alain saw the young boy he immediately thought of the character Gavroche in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.
“We read the book twice, and we started to write the story of the musical… We spent two months doing this, and two years to write the original French Le Mis.”
It was eventually a success in France and they recorded a concept album that a director friend from Manchester, Peter Farago, said he would give to the impresario Cameron Mackintosh. But his reaction was not positive — “A French musical? A contradiction in terms!”
It was thanks to the British weather that Les Misérables was ever staged.
“One rainy Sunday afternoon, he was trying to reorganise all the records he had at home. He took the French album and said to himself, ‘I’m going to try to listen to this.’
By the time he got to the second track he was totally upside down. He said the only other time he had had the same feeling was the first time he heard West Side Story. He decided immediately that this would be his next project.”
Mackintosh was also initially sceptical about Miss Saigon, based on Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and set in 1970s Vietnam. “When we first showed it to Cameron he was a little afraid — ‘I imagine you are going to have GI’s dancing here on stage during the Vietnam War, hmmm?’”
But Mackintosh was won round. Miss Saigon has won more than 70 awards and been seen by some 36 million people. Audience figures for Les Misérables are 55 million people in more than 42 countries.
Schönberg is sadly all too aware of Miss Saigon’s contemporary relevance. “Last year when I watched the scenes from Kabul, with people desperate to get on the American planes, it was just the same as our scene in Miss Saigon in Vietnam. Nothing changes.”
Schönberg’s son, Thomas, from his first marriage to former TV news anchor Béatrice Szabo, is now an executive producer in the Mackintosh organisation. “He’s running the show! Now when I ring Cameron about a problem, he says ‘You need to talk to the boss!’” says Schönberg, full of paternal pride.
Béatrice and he adopted a daughter, Margot, who works in the costume department of The Phantom of the Opera. With Charlotte he has a daughter, Lilly, who is his fiercest critic.
“Lilly’s still at school, she’s 16. Yesterday she went to see Les Mis with some friends and came back home with thousands of notes; what they have to do, don’t have to do. She has a very good eye. She knows it by heart.”
He met Charlotte when working on Wuthering Heights with Northern Ballet, but they didn’t begin dating until after the production ended. “It was meant to be. I didn’t think it was proper whilst the ballet was running. So, we didn’t speak for one year, except fleetingly.
After a year when we finished the run, I invited her to have lunch in London and at the end of the lunch we knew. Kismet.”
The couple live mainly in London and he’s an avid theatregoer. How do today’s musicals match up to his and Boublil’s?
“I’ve seen Hamilton twice, it’s a very, very good show. First of all, you learn something. I know Lin-Manuel Miranda very well and he has such admiration for Les Mis. He told me he used some structure of Les Mis to write Hamilton.”
He also enjoyed Six, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s concert-style musical about the six wives of Henry VIII. “It’s a brand-new format,” he says. He’s more critical of traditional shows such as South Pacific.
“Great production but I learned nothing. Loved the voices and performance but…”
Does he feel he still has a story to tell? “There are still great stories to be told if I had some more time,” he says, with a hint of sadness. But ultimately he’s satisfied.
“I know the privilege of my position. If I had to do a conclusion of my life, I managed to realise all my dreams from childhood, that is a privilege, it’s very rare someone can say they have realised all their dreams.”
Regenerate: Lost Songs From The Musicals is on Sunday 18 September at 7pm. regeneratemusicals.com
For information about “Les Misérables” in London and touring, visit lesmis.com
