The thing about musicals is,
Jan. 4th, 2013 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunrabthat part of what makes them good is the cleverness of the stagecraft. What can be done within the limitations of the size of the stage, with the fact that only so many costume changes can be done within a certain time, with the fact that every singer is live every night? The songs and the acting fit into that frame and part of what we admire is how the songs convey stuff we aren't seeing. Also, the immediacy of hearing the emotion in the songs from live people, who may feel slightly differently about it every night but who still have to convey the same intensity no matter what, is part of what leads us to identify with the characters.
When you switch it to a movie, unless the movie is just a straight filming of a stage production, you remove the immediacy - no matter how close up the actors' nostrils you get while they're singing, it's still not the same as hearing it live - and you remove all the cleverness. They get to do multiple takes, and you know you're seeing only what they selected as the best take of each song - and so it's even more disappointing when even that is not as good as an average stage singer on an average night. And when you remove the limitations of size of set and ability to change scenery, so that, for example, Gavroche gets to ride all over Paris, you have taken away a lot of the cleverness, and a lot of the intellectual reward we get from filling in the scenes ourselves.
And in the opening scene - we come back to that again, that the opening scene is full of everything that's wrong with the whole movie - well, we have all that big expanse of water, and the enormous ship, and the scores more of men than would fit on a stage - and it takes our attention away from the opening song and from the emotions of the men who are singing. We scarcely see or hear any one of them sing his line. Also, for me at least, since I had recently seen Life of Pi, seeing the ship turned somewhat sideways kept reminding me over and over of the ship in Life of Pi as it tilts and sinks, and then my mind would go for a second to an island full of meerkats, and I really don't think that helped me concentrate on the story of Les Mis.
OK, now someone tell me why I'm wrong, what I missed, what the movie did better than the show, at least for you.
When you switch it to a movie, unless the movie is just a straight filming of a stage production, you remove the immediacy - no matter how close up the actors' nostrils you get while they're singing, it's still not the same as hearing it live - and you remove all the cleverness. They get to do multiple takes, and you know you're seeing only what they selected as the best take of each song - and so it's even more disappointing when even that is not as good as an average stage singer on an average night. And when you remove the limitations of size of set and ability to change scenery, so that, for example, Gavroche gets to ride all over Paris, you have taken away a lot of the cleverness, and a lot of the intellectual reward we get from filling in the scenes ourselves.
And in the opening scene - we come back to that again, that the opening scene is full of everything that's wrong with the whole movie - well, we have all that big expanse of water, and the enormous ship, and the scores more of men than would fit on a stage - and it takes our attention away from the opening song and from the emotions of the men who are singing. We scarcely see or hear any one of them sing his line. Also, for me at least, since I had recently seen Life of Pi, seeing the ship turned somewhat sideways kept reminding me over and over of the ship in Life of Pi as it tilts and sinks, and then my mind would go for a second to an island full of meerkats, and I really don't think that helped me concentrate on the story of Les Mis.
OK, now someone tell me why I'm wrong, what I missed, what the movie did better than the show, at least for you.
