The Composers

Claude-Michel Schönberg (Music and Book) & Alain Boublil (Lyrics)

     Best known for their collaborations with each other, these two stand as one of the musical theatre world's most successful, and least successful, teams. They obviously wrote Miss Saigon, but they have another mega-hit you may have heard of. 

     Yeah, they wrote Les Miserables. Their first collaboration of note was a small rock-opera entitled La Révolution Française, which also focussed on a forbidden romance in the French Revolution. It was a pretty successful back in 1973, and prompted the duo to begin writing Les Mis. When Les Mis premiered, it was a rather small show that ran rather unsuccessfully in Paris for a short time. However, famous producer Cameron Macintosh (of Cats fame) discovered the show and took it to Broadway in 1980, transforming it into the mega-hit it is today. Their follow up show was Miss Saigon, which was also a huge success.

     The problem was, none of their other shows ever quite matched the success of those two. Notable shows include:

Martin Guerre:

     This is a mostly forgotten piece by the two that premiered in 1996, and concerns itself wit the real life figure Martin Guerre. Like Les Mis, the plot is pretty dense, but from what I can gather this guy basically flees his small French village to escape religious persecution and ends up being thrown in prison and...stuff. The plot is dense. It's basically a watered down Les Mis, and it was understandably not too successful.

The Pirate Queen:

     Somewhat more palatable, but still rather weak, was their 2006 collaboration The Pirate Queen, a musical based off of the stories of Gráinne O'Malley, an Irishwoman who was a legendary pirate in the days of Elizabeth the First. The show featured, most notably, Stephanie J. Block as the Pirate Queen, and was another dense sung through show about her going to confront the queen or something. It received terrible reviews and closed quickly.

Marguerite:

  

     This show was actually pretty nice, but it still had its fair share of problems that led to it too becoming another flop in 2008. The story takes place in Paris again, this time an occupied Paris in 1942. Once more, the plot is impossible to figure out, but I think it involves a nightclub singer?

Richard Maltby Jr.

     Richard Maltby Jr. was a lyricist on the show, but I include him here because his works are often separate from the other two. He's very successful in his own right, and he conceived and directed two music revues, Ain't Misbehavin' (based off of the music of Fats Wallace) and Fosse (based off the choreography of Bob Fosse), which both won the Tony Award for Best New Musical. He was also a co-lyricist/director on Song and Dance, writing lyrics for the first act set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Some of you Surf City Singers may know this as the show that Unexpected Song, a song from the trio, comes from. His most well known works, however, come from his collaborations with David Shire, a composer who wrote the score to many a film.

     If I started talking about the work those two did together I'd never shut up, but they wrote several unsuccessful musicals including Big (based off of the hit film), Love Match (based off of the romance between Queen Victoria and King Albert), How Do You Do I Love You (a parody of online dating), The Sap of Life (which is all but forgotten), and Baby (a musical about couples and children that has been embraced since its closing). They took pieces of their unsuccessful works (many of which either closed off Broadway or after a few days) and cobbled them together into two music revues called Starting Here, Starting Now and Closer Than Ever, both of which were hugely successful. The video above is Lea Salonga (and friends) singing a tribute to Richard Maltby, performing Patterns (a song cut from Baby but placed in Closer Than Ever), It's Never That Easy/I've Been Here Before (written for un-produced musicals but combined in Closer Than Ever) and Starting Here, Starting Now (written for The Sap of Life, but used as the title song of Starting Here, Starting Now).

How do you pronounce their names?

Boob-leel and Shom-berg. It's French. Lea Salonga says their names at about 2:10 in the video above.