Musicals

I like to listen to music.  Growing up, our Mother instilled in us a love for music.  She could sing quite well, having once cut a record for a relative.  I listened to all the great musical of the 40's and 50's, Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  I came to have a great appreciation for wonderfully written songs from those shows and to this day can still sing portions of them from memory.

At the same time, I cultivated a healthy disdain for the genre itself.  The platform is designed to launch singing and dancing but defies reality.  Where in life do people spontaneously break into song perfectly, harmonizing with other voices -- some of which are unknown to them prior to the song's beginning -- and with the lyrics perfectly sung?  Add to that the perfectly choreographed dances, intricate numbers involving lifts and ballet moves that mere mortals must practice for weeks to perfect, and you see the senseless optimism of the era in which the movies were wrought.

There were few credible and successful musicals after ther 50's -- The Sound of Music is the only one that comes to mind -- until the recent sourge that started, I think, with Moulin Rouge sometime within the last ten to fifteen years.  I can't claim to know how well they're written or performed, since I haven't paid any attention to them.  But since Moulin Rouge, there's been an increasing trend toward putting out musicals.

The latest entry is Les Miserables.  No, I won't give the diacriticals to make it more correctly French because the Brit producer didn't see fit to make it more correct, so I see no need to do it either.  I'll explain that below.  This film is an adaptation of the theater play that was, of course, a loose adaptation of Victor Hugo's opus.

I won't regale you with the same stuff about the suspension of disbelief regarding singing and dancing.  All that's in there, although there's thankfully little dancing.  Sure, there are some choreographed scenes, but they're more like choreographed chaos, trying to make the banal seem intricately woven.  The singing is the real problem.

First of all, I'm used to the likes of Gordon McRae, Shirley Jones, Julie Andrews, even Dick Van Dyke, being cast in roles that required singing.  If I'm going to spend the time listening to this, I may as well not be subjected to the sound of someone singing while a surgeon operates on his brain using a rusty rake.  They don't have to be operatic superstars or even recording artists, just be able to hold a tune...pleasantly.

Anne Hathaway, whom I despise, ruined her part for me by waxing obnoxious explaining in an interview how she had to learn to sing while she cried.  Save it already.  I Dream A Dream is a beautifullly melancholy song.  I get the emotion of it, just sing it so it's a song and not a death rattle.  This, of course, points out the obvious, inherent flaw in musicals:  Emotion is clearly called for in this scene, but to inject it ruins the song, thereby nullifying the whole point of the musical in the first place.

Hugh Jackman, whom I admire, did a great job and both acted and sang his part fine.

The others, for the most part, performed capably, notably the actress who did the jilted daughter of the hoteliers and, most suprisingly, Amanda Seyfried.  Karen reminded me she'd been in Mamma Mia -- another musical I'd been fortunate enough to avoid -- and that explained her competence.  The only thing I'd heard about that movie is that Pierce Brosnan brayed like a water buffalo.

But the true horror of the movie, insofar as singing was concerned, was the unfortunate choice of Russell Crowe to play the pivotal role of Javert.  For some inexplicable reason, the producers of the movie chose someone whose singing style, should it exist at all, is best confined to a shower in a prison.  Whatever accolades Crowe earned in his career, I don't think that singing ranked in the top fifty.

The other and equally bothersome aspect of the movie was the by now almost kneejerk insistence on putting Brits in roles to liven up the local color.  The last time I checked, Les Miserables was all about France.  There was no relation to Britain at all, unlike A Tale of Two Cities.  There was some puny runt who fought on the barricades during the last quarter of the movie who had a decidedly Cockney accent.  It was like Oliver Twist had magically been transported to Paris.  For the life of me, I don't understand why artists in the English-speaking world feel that putting a Brit in a movie ups the cultural content no matter how jarring the accent.  Ancient Greece?  Cast a Brit.  The Roman Empire?  Get another Brit?  Post-Bonaparte France?  Get me a Brit.

For that reason, I make no effort to put diacriticals in the title since, after all, we don't use 'em in English.

I survived the musical.  What mattered is that Karen loved it.  As our new New Year's Day tradition, Karen and I saw another movie after this one.  Just to get us as far away from British Paris as we could, we saw Django Unlimited. 

Of course, Django had both a German bounty hunter and a German-speaking slave which, naturally, there were plenty of examples of in the antebellum South.

Ah yes, the suspension of disbelief.  If only I could master that skill.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles