THE PUBLIC IS HAPPY WITH ‘LES MISERABLES’

The critics are mixed but it looks as if “Les Miserables” will be the latest transatlantic hit. This is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s version of French composer Claude-Michael Schonberg’s 1980 musical, based on Hugo’s novel. It virtually sold out at the RSC’s Barbican Theatre, and moves to the West End in December. After that, Broadway.

Can a novel as sprawling as “Les Miserables” be distilled into a stage musical--even a 3 1/2-hour-long one? Critic Jack Tinker of the London Daily Mail thought it was like trying to pour the English Channel through a china teapot. But the Guardian’s Michael Billington called the show “fine middlebrow entertainment,” if not great art.

Producer Cameron Mackintosh wasn’t worried by the iffy reviews. ‘We’ve touched a popular nerve,” he told the Associated Press. The Broadway version is planned for late 1986.

A group of former American Conservatory Theatre actors in San Francisco is starting a new theater--not to challenge William Ball’s company, they say, but to extend theatrical opportunities in their home town.

“Most cities this size have two major professional theaters,” actor Dakin Matthews told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Bernard Weiner. Matthews said he expected ACT’s Ball to be “most supportive” of the new company--to be called the Actors Theater of San Francisco--as long as it’s clear that “this is not a challenge for turf.”

Sidney Walker, who resigned from ACT this year, is another founding member. The company will perform at the Marines Memorial Theater (once ACT’s second stage), probably opening with Molnar’s “The Play’s the Thing” in April.

Some would say that San Francisco already has a second major professional theater--the Magic Theatre, Sam Shepard’s home stage. But there’s always room for one more.

Every aspiring playwright wants to place a script at “the O’Neill”--i.e., the Eugene O’Neill Foundation’s annual Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Conn. Deadline for entries this year is Dec. 1. TV scripts are also eligible. Information at 234 West 44th St., Suite 901, New York, N.Y. 10036.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. New York producer Lewis Allen to Reuters’ John Cotter, on the lack of interesting new work on Broadway: “There has been a brain drain to California.”