Review – Les Miserables

Bad as some of them were, the “singing” actors derided by many critics weren’t exactly the worst part of this production. Indeed, I was genuinely surprised at how terrible the music itself turned out to be. I was braced for pompous grandiosity along Andrew Lloyd Webber lines, but this outing wasn’t even that good. Aside from two or three lavish production numbers, the whole thing was a mess of meandering, barely-rhyming verse and so many recitatives that it might just as well have been a non-musical version of Hugo’s novel. When the villainous Javert is the only interesting, sympathetic character, the adaptation has issues. Tom Hooper’s direction was also especially dreadful. Every time the camera slanted off to an awkward, pointless dutch tilt or zoomed in so tight on a singer that the home viewers could perform a laryngoscopy, he left me wondering if he’d ever actually seen a musical before attempting to create one. See if desperate