Montego Glover Joins the Sisterhood of Fantine in Broadway's Les Misérables

It's every actor's dream: one show closes and rehearsals immediately begin for another. It rarely happens, but when it does, you thank your lucky stars. For Montego Glover, the Drama Desk winner whose star-turn in Memphis is still fondly remembered by theater junkies, it actually came true. Just days after closing in the musical comedy It Shoulda Been You, Glover jumped into the role of Fantine in Les Misérables.

"The way it came about is pretty unbelievable," Glover explains. "I went in [for Les Misérables] on the Friday of my last week of It Shoulda Been You and met with everyone. About three hours later, I got the call saying, "You got the job." I flew to Sun Valley to do a symphonic concert for the entire weekend, came back late on Monday, and started rehearsals for Les Misérables on Tuesday morning. One thing walked into the next. It was very fast."

And now she's Fantine, the ill-fated prostitute who gets to sing one of the show's most iconic songs. "It's pretty exhilarating" [to sing "I Dreamed a Dream" every night], Glover says proudly. "It's a beautifully constructed song and such a well-crafted piece of storytelling. It's really a joy."

For Glover, this opportunity is simultaneously a dream come true and a shocker. "It was a bucket list item," she says. "What's funny is, like everyone else, thirty years ago, I was sitting in a theater being exposed to Les Mis for the first time and thought it was a masterful piece of art. For all this time, I've just admired it and applauded it. It never actually occurred to me that I might work on the show at some point in my career. It's surprising to be doing it."

But the double-joy is what she gets to do after Fantine meets her tragic end (about forty-five minutes into the three-hour show). "Fantine dies and then we move to what we call the Bullet Boy [sequence]," Glover continues. "I become one of the people on the barricade for two or three scenes. I sing "One Day More" and "Drink With Me," and then I disappear from the show again and go back to Fantine and return in the epilogue as her spirit.

Given the massive size of Les Misérables, the three-week rehearsal period was a challenge. "It calls on all of your skill set, in terms of technique and memorization," Glover says. "[It's about] really making sure you ask the questions you need to ask, both as an actor and as an entity. I wanted to be sure I was going to the right spot on the stage, but also why I was going to that spot. It requires that you do that work quickly rather than in a slow burn. [Since] the show is [already] up and running…I need to be ready. You need to keep a forward motion as an actor."

Forward motion is the name of the game in her career. Glover plays the role of Fantine until February 3, when she departs to star in a play at Lincoln Center Theater. "When you're an artist and you have another piece of beautiful art that you have the opportunity to work on, it's my responsibility to make them both work," she says. Mum's the word on the title, but "it's a fantastic, glorious, marvelous play." And for an extreme change of pace, Glover's vocal pyrotechnics won't be on display. "There's no singing at all," she exclaims. "And that's all I can say at the moment."

But until then, audiences can be awed by her range eight times a week at the Imperial Theatre, where Les Misérables is still thrilling audiences nightly. "At the stage door, I'm meeting people from all over the globe," Glover says. "They respond to it very kinetically and they tell us so. There are people who are seeing it for the first time. Imagine that. You think everyone on the planet has seen Les Misérables. Last night, I had three people tell me it was their first Broadway show. Isn't that something? It keeps giving, in that way." Just like it did for her.