Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1
The best part of two acts is a long time to wait to start caring about a show’s main characters. One of them is the eponymous Marguerite — powerfully played by Ruthie Henshall — a chanteuse and courtesan of a Nazi officer in occupied Paris. The other is Julian Ovenden’s infatuated Armand, the piano man in a jazz quartet with whom Marguerite falls in love.
Les Miserables creators Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg, and lyricist Herbert Kretzmer, have teamed up with composer Michel Legrand and director Jonathan Kent to update Alexandre Dumas’s 19th-century romance La Dame aux Camélias to wartime France. The result is admirably dark, often daring, but rarely uplifting. Few punches are pulled in portraying French collaboration and the zeal with which Vichy France persecuted its Jews.
