To many, no Broadway musical is more epic, more moving than Les Miserables. The aptly titled Les Miserables is exactly that: a story of misery, but like all great stories of woe it’s more a reflection of how we distract ourselves to cope with that suffering. The creators (director Tom Hooper, The King’s Speech and writer William Nicholson, Elizabeth: The Golden Age) of the latest attempt at putting this story on celluloid have raised the curtain on the first official trailer. In it, we are treated to glimpses of grand staging, a beast of a cast, and the shaky but evocative vocals of Anne Hathaway singing “I Dreamed a Dream.” But to further remark on the cast, you need only list the names and you start to see the AYFKM scale of this production: Anne Hathaway, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Amanda Seyfried, Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Eddie Redmayne… you get the idea.
But, there is a worry that has stirred in the troubled minds of Miserables fans since the announcement of the project. That worry can best be summed up in two phrases, “Phantom of the Opera” and “Rent” which were epic on-stage productions turned into epic on-screen failures. But, the hope is that this production will turn out more Chicago or better yet Evita than the other two I shall not mention again. Les Miserables works as a musical and fails as a dialogue film because of the way you can condense story within an aria. Victor Hugo’s book is enormous in its story and it takes a solid two hours of music just to summarize this story for audience consumption. The question will remain, will they take the route of Evita and just let the perfectly crafted lyrics work their magic, or will they be stupid enough to continue the failed practice of replacing perfect music with lame and ineffective dialogue as they did in the other two musicals that I dare not speaketh their name again? I guess we’ll see if we stand and cheer or if audiences will end up even more miserable when the credits roll.
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