Les Miserables at Fred Kavli Theatre

Four decades ago, a grand idea was conceived when Jean-Marc Natel, Claude-Michel Schönberg, and Alain Boubil created the original musical screenplay for the stage adaptation, Les Misérables (originally in the French language). Stemming from Victor Hugo's original novel of the identical name, Les Mis was modified into a theater play as a fully sung-through show, which was an enormous achievement in that time period.

Following an initial showing in Paris, there was already overwhelming support to make an English adaptation, and once Cameron Macikintosh listened to the score, he instantly fell in love and decided to produce an English adaptation hand in hand with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Herbert Kretzmer, who invented the new songs. The English production of Les Mis only premiered with a two-month duration at the Barbican Centre, but due to its impressive success and larger audience with the English version, the show rapidly relocated to West End's Palace Theatre in just two months, London theatre's superior venue, and ran for close to two decades. The West End play then moved one more time to another theater, the Queen's Theatre (which after some time was remade and renamed to The Sondheim Theatre in roughly half a decade ago), and continues to run up until today. If you include all its productions since its first showing all those years ago, Les Mis is actually the longest-running musical in the entire world.

With 37 years in London alone and not even listing its productions in international countries, especially its well-received Broadway seasons, it is with certainty that Les Misérables continues to be unsurpassed in the viewpoint of the show's fanbase. The narrative and the fully sung-through score, which revolves around redemption, passion, and unrequited love, elevates the musical's quality because of the evident emotion behind the mask of each character and act staged. Featuring iconic songs like "I Dreamed a Dream," "On My Own," and "One Day More," Les Misérables has become so critically-acclaimed that the play has been adapted to movies repeatedly and gained loyal fanbases even on a different platform.

This coming October's production of Les Misérables carries it to California, where the Ovation Award-winning 5-Star Theatricals will present their full-scale production running from October 9-18, 2026, with performances on Saturday, October 10th, 2026 at 1:00 PM and 7:30 PM, at Fred Kavli Theatre At Bank Of America Performing Arts Center, Thousand Oaks. For a sung-through musical like Les Mis, theatergoers can agree that the 1,800-seat Fred Kavli Theatre At Bank Of America Performing Arts Center is the leading option thanks to its audio engineering and acoustic range, as well as a grand constructed stage to hold the show. For seat reservations or inquiries, tickets are available through the links that can be clicked above this page.