A Long Way From Paris to L.A.

When they heard the bad news, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg were hardly surprised. For several weeks, Cameron Mackintosh, who had produced the French musical team’s hugely successful “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon,” had been unable to find the right theater for their revamped production of the 1996 musical “Martin Guerre,” which opens at the Ahmanson Theatre this month and was scheduled to head off to Broadway thereafter.

“We were prepared,” says Boublil in a small upstairs study of his spacious pied-a-terre on the Champs de Mars, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Dressed in a pastel sweater that accentuates his pale green eyes, Boublil quickly establishes himself as the diplomatic spokesman of the pair. (He is the lyricist, after all.)

“We were not happy,” adds his longtime collaborator Schonberg, the composer, dressed in gray and black to match his brooding dark looks.

“Martin Guerre” isn’t the only production in recent years to report a struggle to find the right house on Broadway. But after a four-year odyssey of mixed reviews, constant revisions and a lackluster public following, it just seems like another unlucky strike against the musical adaptation of the classic French story of love, deception and mistaken identity.

“We shall be storing the physical production and hope to remount the show at some future date when the right New York theater becomes available,” Mackintosh said in a statement. “It is obviously a disappointment to everyone involved, as the show has enjoyed great success at the box office and has earned standing ovations at virtually every performance since the current tour opened at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis this past September.”

But on a recent night at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., there was only polite applause, and the largely gray-haired audience didn’t stand up until it was time to leave. Perhaps it was the long shadow cast by the Washington Post’s review, which panned the show as “theatrically inert.”

Boublil and Schonberg hope their production doesn’t die in Los Angeles. “The unlimited run is not necessarily what this show needs,” says Boublil, noting that even in Washington, the production in its final week grossed $913,000, and that has piqued the initial interest of other theaters around the country.

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If Boublil, 58, and Schonberg, 55, have grown accustomed to praise as the men behind two of the most successful musicals in history, “Martin Guerre” has been a more humbling endeavor.

The pair have spent seven years crafting this musical, based on the 16th century French legend about a soldier who returns to his wife and village after many years, and the best friend who impersonates him. The story has already been adapted into two films, “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1982) with Gerard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye and “Sommersby” (1993) with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster.

They came upon the idea for a musical separately in the early ‘90s. “It had never happened to us before,” Boublil says of their working relationship, which has now lasted some 32 years. “We thought there must be something since we both had this same obsession with that incredible story.”

But theater critics bemoaned the show’s lack of emotional depth and dearth of hummable tunes, and the show failed to find a following. Revisions were made, and the new show ended up running for 700 performances at London’s Prince Edward Theatre, winning an Olivier in 1997 for best musical. Still, it was not the stunning success they’d gotten used to, and even they couldn’t help but agree that the show needed additional work and focus.

“Once you see it with some distance, you realize you’ve lost the main thing you wanted to do,” Boublil explains, “which is a medium-sized show in a medium-sized theater with a medium-sized cast and orchestra; not another big show with a big company and set like ‘Les Miserables’ or ‘Miss Saigon.’

“This is a small domestic story between a very limited number of people. There was a disproportion between the shape and the contents.”

Prodded by the enthusiastic--some say obsessive--backing of producer Mackintosh and determined to keep working until they got it right, the two set off to prepare the show for its U.S. tour. The face lift nearly doubled the three or four years it usually takes to complete a production.

“We realized we didn’t tell that story the way we wanted to tell it,” Boublil says. “We didn’t go far enough in our own introspection in our study of the characters, in our analysis of such a complicated story. You have a triangle between a woman and two men, which is not very original, except that the difference is that the two men bear the same name and they’re supposed to be one person. It’s such an intricate, complicated story that you could work on it for 20 years.”

With collaborator Stephen Clark, Boublil rewrote the piece in English, rather than the usual process of writing in his native French and then translating it.

“I knew I could never write on my own in English,” says Boublil, who is fluent in English and has lived in London for the last decade. “I will always need a collaborator. But I don’t see myself not writing English lyrics for any show in the future.”

In the newest version of “Martin Guerre,” 40% of the music and 99.9% of the lyrics have been rewritten, they estimate. Three new songs--”Live With Somebody You Love,” “How Many Tears” and “Without You as a Friend”--became the backbone of the revised show. Initial reviews in Detroit and Minneapolis were promising, with the Star Tribune noting, “Though the musical engages the intellect only lightly, it speaks loudly, earnestly and passionately to the heart.” But some saw the chilly critical reception in Washington as a harbinger of more bad luck to come.

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Boublil and Schonberg are citizens of France, a country without a vaunted musical theater tradition. But, “We are not your typical Frenchmen,” Boublil insists, pointing out that he was born in Tunisia to Jewish parents and became a French citizen at age 25. Schonberg is the son of Jewish Hungarian immigrants who settled in Brittany.

Many American musical creators came from a similar background, Boublil says. “The only difference is that their parents went to New York,” he says.

“In terms of education and culture, we are not in a country where musicals are a part of the patrimony,” adds Schonberg. “I was always a fan of musicals, but the only way I saw them was in movies.”

“Our French culture gave us the subject matters in which we have worked,” Boublil says. “The great advantage of not being born in a place where all the major writers of the century were born is that it made us reinvent the art form and make it our own.”

In fact, they note, their feeling of being lifelong outsiders has shielded them from living and dying by the reviews.

“That may be the reason why we are less affected when we have the world at our feet at the opening of ‘Miss Saigon’ in New York, or a bad review,” Boublil says. “We are never destroyed by this kind of thing.”

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That they have chosen to cultivate personal lives out of the social sphere of their musical theater colleagues gives them a sense of balance and an intense reliance on each other. Schonberg admits that the long-distance working relationship can get lonely.

“When work is your passion, you could spend your time talking about it,” he says. “So of course when Alain is not in Paris I have nobody to talk to about my work.”

Although they read their reviews, they rely mostly on the audience to let them know if they’re getting things right.

“The show for the very first time in its life is getting a real audience and a young audience,” says Boublil. “We are touching the heart of an audience with our version of the story, although some reviews in Washington were as bad--sometimes worse--than the reviews we had the first time around in London.

“What we have achieved now,” he continues, “is that we have told that story the way we wanted to say it.”

If an extended North American tour is mounted, they say, they will continue to tinker with the piece to make sure it works in its next incarnation. Schonberg told a reporter recently that for him the score was “like a woman with no mystery.”

Asked about that particularly French-sounding statement, Schonberg says, “I enjoy the performances of the singers, but I’m not coming to enjoy anymore the music and the lyrics because that’s something we know by heart, from the inside. Once you know something from the inside, this work has no mystery for you.”

“Yes,” Boublil interrupts, “but as it applies to a woman, once you know her from the inside, you love her even more.”

“I’m not sure,” Schonberg continues, “if someone has no mystery for you, no question mark. . . .”

“I wouldn’t say ‘Martin Guerre’ has no mystery for me,” Boublil snaps. And the debate ends.

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As for what’s next, Boublil and Schonberg insist they don’t know. Even if they did, they wouldn’t tell. Not even their longtime producer Mackintosh finds out what they’re working on until they’re ready to show him a draft.

“We’ve never been commissioned by anybody to write anything, so we’re used to working on our own ideas without telling anyone,” Boublil says. “That’s how our friendship and collaboration with Cameron really works--we are partners. We come to him with what is really already a show. And afterward, with his advice and his collaboration, we rework and rebuild.”

Their biggest challenge, Schonberg says, is finding new ideas new subjects.

“We must have the view that we are reinventing ourselves. I’m going to compose music as long as I can [stay] fresh,” Schonberg says. “I don’t want to end up an old man frozen in a style.”

“The dream would be to have periods like Picasso had periods in his work,” Boublil says, “how he suddenly went abstract at an age when they thought he could never do something different. I’m not trying to compare us to Picasso, but I’m trying to compare the journey. At a time when the musical theater is full of reprises from the ‘40s and the ‘50s, I’m pretty sure there is something new, something else to find, which will be the next wave of musical theater. The art form will hopefully never end--and whether we will be able to help in that direction. . . .”

A sly look crosses Schonberg’s features.

“We do have a secret challenge,” he says with an air of mischief. “We want to write a very funny show.”

“I would say happy,” Boublil rephrases. “We would love to write a happy show.”

“Verdi had to wait to be 90 to write ‘Falstaff,’ ” Schonberg continues.

“We’re convinced that we will be writing a happy show,” Boublil says summarily. “If we find the right story.”

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“Martin Guerre,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. Opens Feb. 23 at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays 8 p.m., Saturdays 2 and 8 p.m., Sundays 2 p.m., through April 8. $25-$70. (213) 628-2772.