LOS ANGELES — Before “Les Misérables”, before “Miss Saigon,” before Tonys, Grammys and worldwide acclaim, a young Alain Boublil didn’t know what musical theater was.
“Being born in Tunisia and having lived in France, the art form did not really exist,” he explained.
Then one day, he saw a production of “West Side Story” in Paris and says he was so moved, he couldn’t sleep for several days after.
“It was a revelation, like an epiphany… I just could not imagine that you could do all this on one stage,” he recalled. “Musical theater was certainly an answer to a question I didn’t know I was asking.”
At that time, he didn’t dare to dream a dream that writing a musical was something he’d be able to do, but fast forward a few years and there is no question this was his destiny. Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg are behind some of Broadway’s biggest blockbusters. But in the early 2000s, there came a time when both “Les Misérables” and “Miss Saigon” had closed after long and successful runs.
“I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with I was these songs, which I could that everyone knew,” Boublil said. “At the same time, I was kind of afraid they would be forgotten, maybe. I don’t know.”
Not a chance. Those songs and more have been sung on stages around the world and this weekend will hit the Hollywood Bowl in a concert he helped conceive called “Do You Hear the People Sing?”
“Not just a concert of songs, but kind of promenade through the process of writing songs for musicals,” he explained. “How songs end up in the show, how songs are discarded, how songs are rewritten. As I always say, you don’t write a musical, you rewrite it. And that’s what the concert is about.”
Boublil lives roughly three miles from the Bowl and yet he has never been to the historic venue. This will be his first visit — to hear the people sing his own songs on the iconic stage. People like Patrick Wilson, who made his acting debut in the “Miss Saigon” tour, Jon Jon Briones, who played the Engineer on Broadway, Marie Zamora, who originated the role of Cosette in the Paris and Skylar Astin who has performed at the Bowl three times already, including in last summer’s “Everybody Rise! A Sondheim Celebration.”
“Every single time I go there, I am so, like, taken in by its power and energy,” he said of the Bowl. “There’s something really amazing about it feeling like it’s an acoustic venue, but it just it just keeps on going into the woods, literally.”
Astin has a history with “Les Misérables.”
He played Enjolras in the original school edition that was recorded as a reference for high schools across the country. As a teen, he also appeared on stage as Javert at the closing of the Broadway run in 2003 in an abridged performance put together by producer Cameron Mackintosh featuring young talent.
“I got to sing Stars in Terrence Mann’s costume,” he marveled.
In this concert, he will sing the songs of Marius and Jean Valjean, checking a few more major characters off the cast list.
“I’m hitting them all,” he joked. “I’m like a Thénardier away.”
What he loves about the music of Schönberg and Boublil, he says, is the depth of emotion they contain.
“Even if you don’t know the musicals themselves, you can hear ‘On My Own’ or ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ or ‘Why God Why,’ these epic hits of theirs outside the context of the musical, you just feel something,” Astin said. “And then when you wrap it into these epic tales, it just feels like some of the biggest, fattest, most emotional musicals you’ve ever seen in your life.”
At home, with an actual letter written by Victor Hugo framed in his office and a rare copy of the novel “Les Misérables” on his desk, Boublil continues to write.
He also continues to be inspired by the principals that drew him to “Les Miz” all those years ago.
“No one is bad, definitely forever. And the good people, maybe under the surface, are not as good as they look,” he explained. “We live in a world, I think, where you have to be a little more flexible than that in order to be able to cope.”
He added, “There is, I hope, a lesson about not making a definitive decision about the people that you meet before you check again.”
There is also a reminder to hold on to hope, because as the song says, “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”