Les Mis

[cellio]

I never got around to seeing the Les Mis movie in the theatre, but I watched it on DVD last night. (Remember when we had to wait a year or more, rather than a few months, for a movie to come out on DVD? My, how times have changed.)

It appears that my standards for musicality, for a musical, are higher in a film than they are on a stage. On the stage you get one shot, and sometimes you have to sing in challenging postures (like while lying down or leaning over), and you have to account for the acoustics of the hall. None of these considerations apply on film. So while I enjoyed many aspects of the movie, particularly being able to see details of gesture and facial expression and setting that I would never be able to see on a stage, in the end I was disappointed because the singing was not, in general, as good as I had hoped it would be. I've seen three live productions, and all had stronger singers. So I'm disappointed; I guess I expected that to be even better in the movie. I'm not saying the singing was poor; most of it was quite serviceable, and Javert and Marius were consistently good. Oh well.

Every time I see this show my appreciation of Javert as a tragic character increases. Here we have someone who is so bound up in a worldview as to be harmful, yet he doesn't come across as a nut-case as sometimes happens.

One question: in every production I've seen (including the movie), the child at the barricade has a thick, exaggerated accent (which I would call Cockney were this not set in France). What's up with that?

Comments

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I don't know why it's traditional to make Gavroche Cockney, but everyone seems to do it.

[indigodove.livejournal.com]

I liked a lot of the same things you did -- it is a visually stunning movie. I was disappointed in several of the singers, and I was disappointed that they cut down Eponine's role a bit, possibly because she was played by a Broadway actress instead of a Hollywood star. That really annoyed me.

I really loved the visual of Javert walking his thin line on the Paris rooftops while he sang "Stars." I thought Anne Hathaway as Fantine was particularly overrated, but she got the Oscar for it, so maybe I'm wrong.

[cafemusique.livejournal.com]

I have never seen the stage production, though was familiar with some of the music from playing for voice students in festivals...but the movie disappointed me.

I keep coming back to a little behind-the-scenes feature which was shown before Les Mis when I saw the movie, and I think they fought so much for the emotion that they gave the music short shrift.

To be fair to the movie, I was glad I'd seen it and I enjoyed it, but I was disappointed by the music, and for me, that was my main attraction to seeing Les Mis.

But probably the only way I will ever see the stage version is if I am bizarrely given free tickets, since my expectations are now (after seeing the movie) low enough to be worth the ticket price I'd expect to pay.