Greatly compounding the problem is that director Hooper, in his first outing since conquering Hollywood two years ago with his breakthrough feature, The King’s Speech, stages virtually every scene and song in the same manner, with the camera swooping in on the singer and thereafter covering him or her and any other participants with hovering tight shots there hasn’t been a major musical so fond of the close-up since Joshua Logan attempted to photograph Richard Harris‘ tonsils in Camelot. There were 49 identifiable musical numbers in the original show, and one more has been added here.

Although not terrible, the music soon begins to slur together to the point where you’d be willing to pay the ticket price all over again just to hear a nice, pithy dialogue exchange between Hugh Jackmanand Russell Crowerather than another noble song that sounds a lot like one you just heard a few minutes earlier. The first thing to know about this Les Miserables is that this creation of Claude-Michel Schonberg, Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, is, with momentary exceptions, entirely sung, more like an opera than a traditional stage musical.

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