“Martin Guerre” begins previews tonight at London’s Old Vic: new song “Someday” in Warchus’s new version

The rarely staged musical “Martin Guerre” by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg — the duo behind “Les Misérables” and “Miss Saigon” — begins its first previews tonight, 1 October, at London’s Old Vic, in an entirely new version directed by Matthew Warchus. The run lasts only five weeks, until 31 October, while the official press opening is set for 20 October.

As Playbill reports, the company has also unveiled a brand-new song written especially for this revival, “Someday” — performed by Liv Andrusier, who plays Bertrande, accompanied by musical supervisor Chris Poon. Alongside Andrusier, the cast includes Alex James-Hatton and Shane O’Riordan in the role of Martin, Mathew Craig as Pierre, Caroline Sheen as Madame de Rols, as well as Aaron Lee Lambert, Adam Pearce, Colin Ryan and Barney Wilkinson.

Inspired by the real historical figure and the film “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1982), the work tells the complicated love story between a woman in early modern France and Martin Guerre: an arranged, loveless marriage, until Guerre leaves to fight the Huguenots. After news spreads that he has been killed in battle, his identity is taken by a friend from the front, who truly falls in love with his widow — who, for her part, knows the truth.

After their mega-hits, Boublil and Schönberg opened “Martin Guerre” in the West End in 1996, where it won the Olivier Award for Best Musical in 1997 — but, as Playbill writes, the work never achieved the success of “Les Misérables” or “Miss Saigon”: it has undergone drastic revisions in the rare productions that followed, a Broadway transfer has yet to happen and the 1999 American tour was short-lived. Warchus’s new version comes with folk arrangements of the usually quasi-operatic score, new lyrics by Boublil, Annabel Mutale Reed and Paul Hodge, and is staged “in the round”, with the audience seated around the stage.

The production is part of Matthew Warchus’s final season as artistic director of the Old Vic company — the Olivier and Tony award-winning director of “A Christmas Carol” and “Pride”.