Make no bones about it. "Les Miserables", the Anglo-French import that opened at the Broadway Theatre last night, is simply smashing.

This is magnificent, red-blooded, two-fisted theater. Start fighting to see it. You will not be disappointed. This is something like the Grand Canyon. Every expectation is fulfulled. It lives up to its hype.

Of course that is the good news. There is some bad news as well, if you really want to hear it.

This adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel scarcely does it justice - but, despite Fredric March and Charles Laughton, nor did the 1935 classic movie.

In fact, I wonder how fair Verdi's librettist Francesco Piave, for the "Rigoletto" more than a century ago, was to his Hugo source, the novel "Le Roi S'Amuse." Adaptors tend to be tough cookies.

But if you really want to savor disappointment and rake over a few cold coals, listen - really listen - to the score.

Most of the time you will be watching the scenery and wallowing in the brutish drama and tear-stained sentimentality, but if your ear gets around to Claude-Michel Schonberg's music you might feel that even as background wallpaper to all the stirring theatrics, it is somewhat monotonously patterned.

There are three or four more or less decent tunes - two lovelorn, one martial and one funny - which are repeated ad nauseam during the long evening. As composers, Schonberg and John Cameron, responsible here for the "orchestral score," could even learn from Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Luckily nowadays, you don't have to be a Richard Rodgers or Cole Porter, or even a Charles Strouse or Stephen Sondheim, to compose a hit musical.

Times have changed, and the function of music in this kind of musical - shows that would be better called "spectaculars" or "extravaganzas" - has geniunely changed with them. This is a different kind of beast, or, to be more pertinent, a new breed of cat.

Schonberg's real contribution to the entertainment is in dreaming up the idea with Alain Boubil, who in turn first formulated the French text in collaboration with Jean-Marc Natel.

With Herbert Kretzmer's succinct, well-pointed and economically dramatic English lyrics, the word-play, which has had additional English text added by James Fenton, makes the perfect foundation for the evening's true architects: the builders, the planners, the technicians, the wizards.

Presumably teamed up under master-wizard Trevor Nunn, these are Nunn and John Caird, the co-directors; John Napier, the great designer in charge of the show's total look; David Hersey, who fixed the lights and Andreane Neofitou, who envisioned and envisaged the pinpointedly effective costumes.

This is precisely the same team that gave us the FSC's production of "Nicholas Nickleby," and this Anglo version of "Les Miserables," originally a Paris musical, was indeed first staged by the RSC at its Barbican Theater.

The production values, concepts, and ideas are clearly from the same stable - and of course, luckily, Hugo and Dickens do have quite a lot in common.

Nevertheless, be warned - and I trust I am not being snobbish about this - "Nicholas Nickleby" was a major theatrical achievement, capable of changing a person's view of the theater.

"Les Miserables" is superbly served. Instantly disposable trash. It is the difference between a fast-food hamburger and a great haute cuisine steak. Superficially they share something. And the difference, for most people, will be in taste rather than nutrition.

Nunn and his Nunnsuch kids never put a foot wrong or a finger misplaced, "Les Miserables" is a technical miracle. I don't mean the computers and the machines (the night I saw it, they malfunctioned and we had to wait an hour for the fuse to be fixed, or whatever). I mean the theatrical ideas.

The British have been preparing for this new kind of musical ever since Sean Kenny designed Lionel Bart's "Oliver!" (a show which is the odd foster-father of this) and "Blitz!," and they now have the methodology perfected.

Hugo's theme has been stripped down beautifully to the concept of a confrontation and a chase. The confrontation is between Valjean, the man of morality and God's justice, and Javert, the man of law and Man's justice.

Valjean is a paroled prisoner from a chain gang, where he served years for stealing food to help a child. Unable to go straight, he steals silver candlesticks from a priest, who lies when Valjean is re-arrested, thus giving the convict God's blessing of a second chance.

The reprieved Valjean prospers, but against the colorful backdrop of poverty and revolution in early 19th - century France, Javert mercilessly pursues him.

Intertwined with this pursuit is the death of the little whore Fantine, whose passing would have made little Nell green with envy; the love story between her daughter Cosette, who becomes Valjean's ward, and the handsome young student Marius; and the unrequited love that the urchin girl Eponine also feels for lucky, carefree Marius.

Add to this French ragout a par of vicious but comic villains, the rascally inn keeper Thenardier and his crone-like wife.

And on the stage the whole saga, this wonderful human pageant, falls satisfyingly into place - with the help of the revolving stage and the sliding scenery - like a jigsaw puzzle.

Of course it is a unique spectacle and some of the set pieces like the body-strewn barricade and the streaming Paris sewers will prove as unforgettable as a Gustave Dore engraving.

But Nunn and Caird have also worked wonders with the simplicities of stagecraft, such as the ingenious dramatic suggestion of Javert's suicide.

And the cast, from top to toe, is terrific. I enjoyed "Les Miserables" much more on Broadway than I did in London, although the production seems virtually the same.

Fundamentally this is because the second time around, I was totally prepared in my expectations.

Colm Wilkinson, with his voice of moral outrage and hulking presence, is as superb as ever as Valjean, and the only other British import in the cast is Francis Ruffelle, who gives perhaps the best individual peformance of the show as little Eponine, who dies for love.

Terrance Mann is somberly impressive as the implacable Javert, David Bryant sweetly and irrsolutely charming as Marius, and while both Judy Kuhn as Cossette and the strong-voiced Randy Graff as Fantine are a little wan in characterization, the actual characters they play are, indeed a little wan.

"Les Miserable" is the stuff of theatrical legend. Go with the proper expectations, and you will have a lovely evening. And before we get stuffy about it, remember in the good old days you never went to Richard Rodgers expecting Mozart.