Did You Hear the People Sing? Another Critique of Les Miserables the Movie

What choice do I have?  Everyone's a critic, right? So can you blame me for weighing in on the most anticipated movie event of the season?  Especially when the movie is a musical? The  musical I just directed last spring? Indulge me.

The movie version of Les Miserables is a cinematic masterpiece. Director Tom Hooper gives the viewer the panoramic scope of revolution and the close up brutality of its effects on Victor Hugo's iconic characters.  The movie drags you along through the dank, dreary, and desperate time through streets, sewers, and along the Seine with tight frames and sweeping cinematic shots. Les Miserables the movie does what a movie can and should do as a visual medium. Naturalism and realism are expected in film and Hooper delivers.

Which is why Les Miserables the cinematic masterpiece made me appreciate Les Miserables the theatrical masterpiece even more.

There have been other non-musical movie versions of Les Miserables, the most notable being the one with Liam Neeson as Valjean.  Hugo's story is epic and requires epic  story-telling one way or the other.  It's a great story.

What makes Les Mis the musical singular in the history of musical  theatre is its score! Boublil and Schoenberg wrote and composed a score as powerful and soaring as the story. It is in the best sense, an opera.   Schoenberg's music serves the story note by note, measure by measure from crescendo to crescendo - from recitative to soaring ballad - forte to pianissimo - the music is what makes the musical.

And the music is what was missing in the movie.  Oh sure it was there - kind of.  Boublil and Schoenberg both are credited as part of the screen writing team.  Somehow, in the mix, Boublil  forgot about his partner. In a musical that makes my insides explode with emotion with the thunderous and brilliantly woven  four- part barricade sequence, I was caught up in the realistic slaughter of idealistic students without the accompanying musical underscore.  It was there, buried beneath the rubble - barely audible most of the time.  There were selected moments when the music did what it is capable of doing - the heart breaking strings swelling  as we take in the deadly toll of the battle but the music was secondary to the visually graphic cinematography.

Don't get me wrong - I know that movies are a visual genre.  But oh how I missed Fantine's powerful belt in I Dreamed a Dream and the stillness of Valjean's Bring Him Home. Taking nothing away from Ann Hathaway's cheek bones, which we saw aplenty - or Hugh Jackman's mop of curly hair that barely grayed over the decades - both of whose performances I thought were credible with an abundance of tears in close ups that made the songs intimate at best and unmoving at worst...and so let's talk about Russell Crowe.
What were they thinking? Two of the best songs in the musical reduced to a semi-spoken, choked performance by a non-singer is perhaps the most grievous offense of all to the score.

In terms of storytelling, I thought the placement of I Dreamed a Dream was a startlingly good choice and the addition of the song Suddenly that Valjean sings about Cosette helped fill out a weak plot point in the musical.
Master of the House lost its charm although it had more than capable performances by Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as the Thenardiers.  Directorially, the much needed comic relief descended into the dark abyss with the rest of the story.

They might have shaved thirty minutes off the movie had they simply picked up the tempos which were at times dirge-like serving the close up naturalistic approach to the songs.
This worked best as Marius (Eddie Redmayne) sang Empty Chairs at Empty Tables - though "the grief that can't be spoken"was there in abundance as the tears poured down the young man's face. His voice still soared where it needed to. Hooper left most of the Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) and Marius songs alone and that was a good choice.
But what happened to Eponine (Samantha Barks)? Somehow, her character felt diminished - albeit rain drenched for A Little Fall of Rain - she disappeared at the end - a love story lost in the shadows.

So what does this all prove?  As a theatre director and advocate, it reminded me that plays and movies are completely different genres. The theatre by its very nature is larger than life and an epic story like Les Mis can be told simply, representationally, and effectively with the creative expanse that can happen only on the stage and in the imagination of the audience.

And a great score like Les Miserables should be sung.

Analysis of Normal

So here's the deal. I've listened to the score of Next to Normal twice while driving in my car.
The question I keep asking myself, the question I asked myself as I sat crammed into my seat at the Booth Theatre in New York buried in coats, scarves and gloves, and the question I asked at the Algonquin over a post-theatre drink, is "how do I feel about this story?"

My struggle is highly personal on both an artistic and experiential level.

Artistically I appreciate the way the story points of Next to Normal are revealed in pieces like a puzzle. I marvel and cringe at its through -sung style. A powerful, startling, piercing lyric here, a cheap rhyme there.

I will admit, the operatic style is not my favorite. I think it takes immensely nuanced compositional skills, married to just the right lyric, and just the perfect execution by the singer to convey the exactness of an emotional moment. The phrasing, the melody, the harmonic discord, the orchestration, come together through the singer whose vocal quality, timbre and expressiveness control the moment. And let's not forget the director's role in birthing the moment. One moment, influenced by dozens of artistic choices coming together to make it happen just so. A tall order. I think Les Miserables succeeded at this as did Weber's Evita. I find the short coming in through-sung musicals to rest largely in the artificiality of recitative as opposed to the actual songs.

Another problem with this genre of musical is the inability to tightly sustain the dramatic through- line. In a straight play or musical play, every word, every line, every lyric needs to have a purpose to advance the story. A well written play shouldn't have a wasted word. One verse too many in a through- sung show stalls the momentum, especially if the lyric is forced or manipulative, which I feel at times is the case with Next to Normal.

This is where Stephen Sondheim, in my opinion, is unparalleled. The master. And the original Broadway cast of Into the Woods, whose recording I've listened to hundreds of times, achieves near perfection. Though not through-sung, the songs are the primary story-telling device and its psychological complexity every bit as layered as the subject tackled in Next to Normal.

Without a doubt, Next to Normal, if not an artistic triumph, is an artistically challenging, albeit uneven piece with flickers of genius. The prescription pill patter song is clever, capturing the mind boggling confusion of pyscho-pharmacology. A perfect match of form and content. And the song "Who's crazy" points up the whole issue of the identified patient and the dysfunction of a family system.

But, after listening to the score twice, I think the first few verses of the opening number of the show are flat out misleading. While in the theatre, I didn't know where we were headed, listening to the CD has caused me to bristle at the lyrics of the central character, Diana who sings, "My son's a little shit, my husband's boring and my daughter, though a genius, is a freak." Without revealing here the surprise elements of the story, these lyrics feel like something from a stupid TV sitcom. These lyrics set up a largely unfulfilled expectation about the family whose lives we are about to enter.

The show made me appreciate the musical, Rent, more than I had in the past. In its opening number, the composer and lyricist, Jonathan Larson, sets the story of Rent in motion with a seires of sung voice mail messages introducing characters that lead to the central character, Rodger's poignant and revealing song One Song, Glory. In it, we see Rodger's urgent need to leave a mark "before I die, glory." We are not misled. We know this character's trajectory.

From an experiential level, I think Next to Normal captures the inherent problem with diagnosis of mental illness, the continuum of mental health, the triggers, the coping mechanisms, the difficulty in treatment protocol and the danger of labeling disorders.

I've lived some of that. My husband, after the show, dazedly said, "I've lived parts of that story." I don't think he found it to be entertaining. The character of the husband - undaunted, blindly optimistic and hopeful hit the mark and caused some squirming in our seats. In my case, thanks to a gifted and insightful therapist, I was rescued from mis-diagnosis and mood stabilizers and restored to a balanced, feeling, and functioning human being after a deep depression brought on by tragic circumstances largely out of my control.

But where my life experience and the show really become reflections of each other is in the whole subject of grief and in the revelation of what can happen when grief goes unprocessed and pain is anesthetized.

(Spoiler alert)

I was a daughter born two years after the death of a three-year old brother whom I never knew but whose life and death loomed like a great unspoken ghost. Details hazy. Never revealed by my mother. Pieces of the story coming to me throughout my life. A phone call. Tonsillectomy. Anesthesia. Hemorrhaging. Mother throwing herself on the casket at the funeral. Sedatives. Jamie's sweater in the back seat of the Buick. A baby girl born. Joy restored to the family.

Unlike Gabe, the dead son in Next to Normal, my brother Jamie was never demon. He was only angel. The demon-grief was exorcised with my labor and birth. And my mother, though understandably possessive and over protective of me, did go on.

It is in this very intersection of death, loss and re-birth that Next to Normal misses the mark for me. While a very dramatic story point, the fact that the daughter was so invisible to her mother - in essence she is the lost child - born after the death of her 18 month old brother - simply runs counter to my personal experience and to what as a grief counselor I have observed. While there is no replacing the life of a dead child, I have witnessed the resilience of the human spirit in the face of the most tragic circumstances. It does not ring true to me that Diana would have experienced a psychotic break so deep that she would have been unable to even hold her new- born daughter after her birth.

But somebody did their homework on this very question because eventually, Diana asks, "what happens if the medicine wasn't really in control? What happens if the cut, the burn the break was never in my brain or in my blood but in my soul?"

After sixteen torturous years, this revelation, followed by Diana's decision to allow herself to feel her grief without the medication combined with her husband's fear and denial of the grief, is completely on target and authentic.

There are many songs and moments in Next to Normal that are heart wrenching. Painful truths and aching questions - "If you never grieve me you'll never leave me alone" and "Some hurts never heal and some ghosts are never gone. But we go on."
One brilliantly ambivalent and stunningly nuanced moment comes when Diane drops a bomb on her husband that begins in a barely audible and cracked voice, "So anyway...I'm leaving."
It is at once unthinkable, seemingly heartless and in her case, completely right. The choice serves the story.

Next to Normal is a courageous musical. It has stayed with me. It has forced me as a writer to examine how the creators, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey chose to tell this story. Ultimately, I believe it succeeds because, as Arthur Miller said, "The theatre makes us more human." What could make us more human, than to look squarely into the human psyche and to admit that "You don't have to be happy at all to be happy you're alive."

This ambivalent, less than idealistic statement certainly reframes the notion of what it means to live happily ever after.