Peter Bradshaw, Xan Brooks and Catherine Shoard review Les Misérables .uk The result is a bracing, rough-and-ready immediacy from performers who can and do hold a tune. This version, directed by Tom Hooper, of The King's Speech fame, has all the singing recorded live on set, with actors listening to a pianist via earpieces, and the orchestral soundtrack added later. It's enjoyed staggering global success on stage since 1985. Just as some celebrities are so successful they come to be known only by their first names, this is known everywhere by its abbreviation: Lay-miz, impossible to say without a twinkle of camp. With the final rousing chorus of "Do you hear the people sing?", the revolutionary-patriotic fervour is so bizarrely stirring, you'll feel like marching out of the cinema, wrapped in the tricolour, and travelling to Russia to find Gérard Depardieu and tear him limb from limb.
Even as a non-believer in this kind of "sung-through" musical, I was battered into submission by this mesmeric and sometimes compelling film, featuring a performance of dignity and intelligence from Hugh Jackman, and an unexpectedly vulnerable singing turn from that great, big, grumpy old bear, Russell Crowe. L ike a diabolically potent combination of Lionel Bart and Leni Riefenstahl, the movie version of Les Misérables has arrived, based on the hit stage show adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel set among the deserving poor in 19th-century France, which climaxes with the anti-monarchist Paris uprising of 1832.
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