Original ‘Les Mis’ cast protest against the end of royalty payments

Act­ors from the first stage pro­duc­tion of Les Mis­ér­ables are gear­ing up for a revolt against the com­pany behind the ori­ginal cast record­ing, after dis­cov­er­ing they will no longer get roy­alty pay­ments, says The Inde­pend­ent.

Mem­bers of the ori­ginal cast, includ­ing Michael Ball, who played Marius in the 1985 pro­duc­tion, have just learnt that they will no longer receive roy­al­ties from the soundtrack record­ing, which has sold hun­dreds of thou­sands of cop­ies in the UK alone. Cast mem­bers say they were unaware a con­tract clause stip­u­lated roy­al­ties would only be paid for 25 years.

Equity says it will take up its mem­bers’ cause and is seek­ing legal advice. The con­tract was based on a tem­plate agree­ment reached between industry body the BPI on behalf of record com­pan­ies and Equity.

First Night Records, which made the record­ing, insists that it has done noth­ing wrong and has simply abided by the terms of the record­ing con­tract agreed by Equity. Sim­ilar cast record­ing con­tracts that pay roy­al­ties to per­formers in suc­cess­ful shows such as The Phantom of the Opera will also end soon, and are expec­ted to spark copy-cat spats.

Here’s what the Les Mis ori­gin­als had to say:

Peter Polycarpou (Jean Prouv­aire) — “It’s just simply not mor­ally right to keep the roy­al­ties back after only a 25-year period.”

Frances Ruffelle (Epon­ine) — “[The roy­alty pay­ment] really is pen­nies, but to some of the cast who are ill or retired, it’s a winter fuel pay­ment or house repair.”

Rebecca Caine (Cosette) - “We are fight­ing so this doesn’t hap­pen again.”

An online peti­tion, Pay the OLC of Les Mis!, is call­ing for the ori­ginal per­formers to be con­tin­ued to be paid.

Mar­tin Brown, Equity’s assist­ant gen­eral sec­ret­ary, said,

We made an agree­ment with record pro­du­cers back in the 1960s that secured pay­ments for artists for 25 years. At that time, the legal copy­right was 20 years, so we secured a five-year exten­sion to the legal copy­right. First Night Records are try­ing to use that nearly 50-year-old con­tract to ter­min­ate pay­ments at 25 years, even though the legal copy­right is now much longer.”

John Craig, the man­aging dir­ector of First Night Records, said,

The beef that the play­ers have should be with Equity and not with us. Their union signed a silly con­tract, and there are quite oner­ous clauses in that con­tract from our point of view, and this gives us an oppor­tun­ity to rene­go­ti­ate a con­tract with more sens­ible clauses. I feel quite bit­ter that Equity sign a con­tract and then moan like crazy when we stand behind the terms of it.”

Most cast record­ings are unsuc­cess­ful com­mer­cially and cost a con­sid­er­able amount when recor­ded in the stu­dio. Pop albums, poin­ted out Craig, recoup the record­ing costs before roy­al­ties are paid, whereas under the Equity con­tract roy­al­ties are paid from the very first record sold.

Photo: from left, Rebecca Caine, Peter Polycarpou and Frances Ruffelle

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