LES MISERABLES SCHOOL EDITION is presented through special arrangement with Music Theatre International (MTI). All authorized performance materials are also supplied by MTI. www.mtishows.com
The Mascoutah High School Production of Les Miserables School Edition
Performed entirely by students.
A musical by ALAIN BOUBLIL and CLAUDE-MICHEL SCHÖNBERG
Based on the novel by VICTOR HUGO
Music by CLAUDE-MICHEL SCHÖNBERG
Lyrics by HERBERT KRETZMER
Original French text by ALAIN BOUBLIL and JEAN-MARC NATEL
Additional materials by JAMES FENTON
Adapted by TREVOR NUNN and JOHN CAIRD
Original Orchestrations by JOHN CAMERON
New Orchestrations by CHRISTOPHER JAHNKE, STEPHEN METCALFE and STEPHEN BROOKER
Originally Produced by CAMERON MACKINTOSH
School Edition specially adapted and licensed by MUSIC THEATRE INTERNATIONAL and CAMERON MACKINTOSH (OVERSEAS) LTD
Born in 1944 to Hungarian parents, Claude-Michel Schönberg began his career in France as a singer, writer and producer of pop songs.In collaboration with Alain Boublil, he is the book co-writer and the composer of La Révolution Française, Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, Martin Guerre and The Pirate Queen. In 2008, his musical Marguerite, in collaboration with Alain Boublil, Michel Legrand and Herbert Kretzmer, opened at the Haymarket Theatre in London.Schönberg has supervised overseas productions and co-produced several international cast albums of his shows. In 2001, he composed his first ballet score, Wuthering Heights, which was created by the Northern Ballet in 2002. His ballet Cleopatra, which opened in 2011, was his second collaboration with David Nixon and his seventh complete score. In 2012, Schönberg co-wrote the screenplay and reconceived the music for the Les Misérables musical movie.His shows have won many awards over the years, most recently the WhatsonStage audience awards for Best West End Show and Best Musical Revival for the London production of Miss Saigon. Golden Globe winner, Oscar nominee and Grammy Award winner for his outstanding contribution to the creative community, Schönberg and Alain Boublil were honoured at a New York Pops gala concert in Carnegie Hall celebrating their 40-year collaboration.Schönberg was appointed Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University and is now an Emeritus Fellow. He is an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music where he is a guest Professor. Schönberg married the English ballerina, Charlotte Talbot, in 2003. He is the father of one son and two daughters.Alain Boublil conceived the musicals, La Révolution Française (the first-ever staged French rock opera) and Les Misérables. He is the author of the librettos and original lyrics for those works as well as for Miss Saigon, Martin Guerre and The Pirate Queen, all in collaboration with lifelong creative partner, composer Claude-Michel Schönberg. He also co-produced with Claude-Michel the original cast albums of all his shows. He co-wrote the screenplay of the Golden Globe-winning and Oscar nominated film Les Misérables. He is the author/lyricist of Abbacadabra, a fairytale musical including ABBA classic songs, of the stage adaptation of the Demy / Legrand film, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, as well as author of the musical play, Manhattan Parisienne, and the play, The Diary of Adam and Eve, which Alain is rewriting as a musical, scored by Maxime Pretends.His many awards include two Tonys, two Grammys, two Victoire de la Musique and two Molière Awards for Les Misérables (1991 and 2025) as well as an Evening Standard Drama Award for Miss Saigon, an Olivier Award for Martin Guerre and a New York Chapter Honors Grammy for his outstanding contribution to the creative community. He received a Best Song Oscar nomination for Suddenly from the movie version of Les Misérables.The re-creation of Les Misérables in Paris at the end of 2024 in a new French production created the opportunity for Alain to re-write and fine-tune parts of the original French lyrics which he had not looked into for 30 years. Alain and Claude-Michel, in recognition of this new French production, completed a book of reminiscences of their amazing 50-year collaboration and friendship, published in October 2024 in France and entitled J’avais rêvé...Alain devised the Do You Hear The People Sing? concerts, a symphonic promenade through Boublil and Schönberg musical history and creative process, which regularly plays at major venues around the world including Carnegie Hall as honorees of the New York Pops 33rd Birthday Gala and, most recently, for an unforgettable starry night at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.He is long married to singer, actress and director Marie Zamora, the Paris Cosette of 1991, and is the father of four sons. Alain was nominated on 14 July 2024 to the Légion d’Honneur in France in recognition of his service to the arts in the world.Herbert Kretzmer was born in South Africa, where he began a career in journalism writing the commentary for a weekly cinema newsreel. He came to live in London in 1954, and pursued twin careers as newspaperman and songwriter. He was feature writer on The Daily Sketch and a profile writer on The Sunday Despatch. He joined The Daily Express in 1960 and later became its drama critic, a post he held for 18 years, covering about 3,000 first nights. From 1979 to 1987, he wrote television criticism for The Daily Mail, winning, in this capacity, two national press awards. As a lyric writer he wrote weekly songs for That Was The Week That Was and the later Ned Sherrin television shows. He won an Ivor Novello Award for the Peter Sellers/Sophia Loren comedy song Goodness Gracious Me . Other award-winning songs include two written with, and for, Charles Aznavour: Yesterday When I Was Young and the chart-topping She . Herbert Kretzmer wrote the book and lyrics for the West End musical Our Man Crichton, which starred Kenneth More and Millicent Martin, and the lyrics for The Four Musketeers, which ran for over a year at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, starring Harry Secombe as D Artagnan. He also supplied the lyrics for the Anthony Newley musical film Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? He was the co-lyricist for Kristina which he wrote with Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson (ABBA), premiered at Carnegie Hall, New York, in September 2009. Herbert Kretzmer s latest work is Marguerite, written with Michel Legrand, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg.Jean-Marc Natel was born in 1942. He studies art at the Beaux Arts in Toulon before turning to poetry and has published two volumes of his poems. In 1968 he moved to Paris where he met Alain Boublil, who introduced him to songwriting with the daunting task of co-writing the lyrics for LES MISERABLES. Since then, he has written songs for a variety of artists and, recently, some of his poetry has been set to music by Franck Pourcel.James Fenton was educated at the Durham Choristersi School, Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. He has worked as a political and literary journalist on The New Statesman, was a freelance reporter in Indo-China, spent a year in Germany working for The Guardian, was theatre critic for The Sunday Times for five years, chief book reviewer for The Times 1984-86, South East Asian correspondent for The Independent 1986-88, and a columnist for them until 1995. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. James Fenton was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1994-99. He has just edited the Faber Book of Love Poetry and his new book, School of Genius: a History of the Royal Academy of Arts, has just been published. Forthcoming work includes: Tsunami Song Cycle for the BBC and Don Quixote for the RSC. Plays and libretti include: The Revenge of Tamar (RSC), Rigoletto (ENO) and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (New York City Opera). Publications include: A Garden From a Hundred Packets of Seeds, Samuel T Coleridge Selected Poems, On Statues, Penguin Modern Poets n the Strength of Poetry, Rigoletto (translation), Leonardois Nephew, Out of Danger (Poetry Book Society choice), All the Wrong Places, Children of Exile, You Were Marvellous, The Memory of War (Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), Dead Soldiers, A German Requiem (Southern Arts Literature Award for Poetry), Vacant Possession, Terminal Moraine and Our Western Furniture.JOHN CAIRD John is an author and director working in theatre, opera and musical theatre in London, New York, Tokyo and all around the world. Published works with MTI include Les Miserables (Schools Edition), (Children of Eden (with music by Stephen Schwartz) Jane Eyre (with music by Paul Gordon) and his own new version of Leonard Bernstein's Candide (originally performed at the National Theatre in London). Recent Productions include: Tosca (Houston Grand Opera), Daddy Long Legs Off-Broadway), Love's Labour's Lost (Stratford Festival), McQueen (Haymarket Theatre, West End) Twelfth Night (Nissay Theatre, Tokyo) Tosca and Parsifal (Lyric Opera, Chicago), La Bohéme (San Francisco Opera), Gertrud (Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm). Notable Engagements for the RSC include: Over twenty productions including Midsummer Night's Dream, (RST) Romeo and Juliet (TOP) The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Aldwych Theatre and Broadway) Les Misérables (Barbican, Palace Theatre, Broadway and worldwide). Notable Engagements for the National Theatre include: Hamlet, Humbleboy, Stanley, The Seagull and his own new version of Bernstein's Candide among many others. Elsewhere: Dance of Death, Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet (Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm) Brief Encounter (Houston Grand Opera). He has won numerous awards including Olivier Awards for Nicholas Nickleby and Candide, and Tony Awards for Les Misérables and Nicholas Nickleby. Caird's book about directing - THEATRE CRAFT - is published by Faber & Faber in London and New York. Go to <johncaird.com> for more information about his career.Cameron Mackintosh is the Owner and Co-Chairman of MTI. He has been producing shows since 1967 and remains the world’s most prolific producer of musicals in theatre history. As well as producing three of the world’s longest running musicals – Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera and Cats – his legendary productions include Miss Saigon, Oliver!, Mary Poppins (co-produced with Disney), Side By Side By Sondheim, Little Shop of Horrors, Song and Dance, Tomfoolery, Martin Guerre, The Witches of Eastwick and Five Guys Named Moe. His acclaimed productions of My Fair Lady, Oklahoma! and Carousel have all been international successes, as have his reinvented new productions of Les Misérables, Miss Saigon and The Phantom of the Opera. Cameron is also co-producer with Jeffrey Seller of Hamilton in London.In 2013, alongside Working Title Films and Universal, Cameron produced the hugely successful Oscar®, Golden Globe and BAFTA award-winning film adaptation of Les Misérables, which is one of the most successful movies ever of an original stage musical. The concert version of Les Misérables, which was first staged in 1989 at Domain Park in Sydney, has proved to be just as successful as the staged musical around the world. It has been filmed three times – at the Royal Albert Hall, the O2 Arena and the Gielgud Theatre – and is continually rescreened on TV and in cinemas throughout the world and, alongside his spectacular Royal Albert Hall production of The Phantom of the Opera, regularly breaks attendance records for live recording performances of musical theatre.Cameron owns and operates eight historic London theatres, which have all been spectacularly rebuilt and refurbished for the 21st century. They house many of London’s most successful hits. The Sondheim, formerly known as the Queen’s, now has a glorious auditorium and backstage and has been renamed in honour of Cameron’s great friend, theatrical legend Stephen Sondheim, who recently died. The last show he and Cameron were working on, Old Friends, premiered onstage and then TV as a sensational all-star gala last year and is now opening at the Gielgud this September for a limited season with a terrific cast including many of those from the gala, headed by Broadway legends Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga.In 1990, Cameron inaugurated the Chair of Contemporary Theatre at St Catherine’s College in Oxford University, with Stephen Sondheim as his visiting professor. Music Theatre International, the world’s largest owner of secondary rights of many of the greatest musicals ever written, is now one of Cameron’s companies.Cameron was knighted in the 1996 New Year’s Honours for his services to British theatre and in June 2023, was awarded the Freedom of the City of London. He is the first British producer ever to be elected to Broadway’s Theater Hall of Fame.
MHS Production directed by FREDDIE RICE
Director Assisted by ANNABELLE REDENIUS
Orchestra Pit Directed by LUKE DAVIS
Musical Pit: AMARE BIGHAM (Reed 2), RYAN CARR (Horn 2), CERETTA DAWSON (Reed 1), OLIVIA DITTMER (Eb Clarinet, Tenor Recorder), STEPHEN EROS (Keyboard 1), ACE HOMRIG (Percussion), KRIS PINEDA (Keyboard 2), RUTH RENKEN (Bb Clarinet, Bass Clarinet), ARIANA SANCHEZ (Horn 1), SEBASTIAN THOMPSON (Bass Trombone, Tuba), LUCINDA WARNER (Trumpet), MATTHEW YOUNGS (Trombone)
This production would not be possible without our Stage Crew and Production Team. This show is produced entirely by MHS students. Our Stagecraft students build and paint the sets, work as stage crew, lighting crew, rigging crew, and sound crew during the show, under the direction of SCOT ERICKSON and FREDERICK RICE with technical assistance from ANDREW SANKER.
Our stage crew for this production are: ALEX AMBURGEY, LOGAN ASSELIN, LUCA COX, LUCY ECKERT, KAYLEE ELBE, DEVYN FORNI, ADDISON GRABOWSKI, AUBREY GRABOWSKI, LILY HAMPTON, ALEX HODGE, REYNAN HUDSON, WYATT JANKO, SOFIA JANSEN, SKYE MAZE, JAVIER MENDEZ, ADELIE MURPHY, AMBER NIMICK, RYAN OWENS, SOFIA RAKOWSKI, COLIN ROTHMAN, ALAINA SMITH, ERIN TIMMERMANN, BREANNA VERIGA, CAYDEN WALTERS, LILLIANAH WATTS, ISABELLE YDE, and CONNOR YINGLING.
The Cast and Crew would like to thank our wonderful costume designer, MS. TRACY VICIEDO.
The Cast and Crew thank their families and friends for their support. The cast and crew would also like to thank the MHS administrative, secretarial, and custodial staff, without whom, none of this would be possible.
