Martin Guerre review – return of Les Mis duo’s melodrama reveals a surprise new hero — SkimNews
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- Martin Guerre by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg has been radically restructured with new lyrics by Boublil, Annabel Mutale Reed and Paul Hodge and folkier orchestrations, cut to 90 minutes without an interval.
- The musical, set in 16th-century France and based on a real-life impostor story, runs on the floor of the theatre alongside its returning production of A Christmas Carol.
- Matthew Warchus directs the in-the-round staging, with Rob Howell's set design transforming seamlessly from courtroom to battlefield during quicksilver flashbacks to France's religious wars against the Protestant Huguenots.
- Liv Andrusier as Bertrande — the abandoned wife — becomes the production's new emotional hero, delivering a standout rendition of the new song "Someday."
- The review criticizes the score as "operatic, emotional, too tonally similar," creating pacing issues despite the sleeker 90-minute shape.
- Director Warchus's staging brings intimacy between Martin and Bertrande but also a "frothing sense of mob rule" as villagers brand her a witch.
Why it matters: For Boublil and Schönberg — the team behind Les Misérables — a 90-minute, in-the-round reworking of Martin Guerre signals a deliberate pivot from epic-scaled musical theatre toward intimate, chamber-scale storytelling. The surprise emergence of Andrusier's Bertrande as the true protagonist reframes a 16-year-old show around a woman's steadfast loyalty rather than the male impostor deception plot.
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