Review of Les Misérables (2012) by Nelson B — 09 Feb 2016

An extraordinarily talented cast (Allen, Redmayne, Seyfried, Hathaway, Jackman, Barks, and Crowe) aside, Les Mis suffers mostly from a lack of regular speech and uneven editing. Simple phrases that could have been far better conveyed without a forced melody and, indeed, even several simple scenes, would have helped ground this musical in some fragment of emotion and reality instead of pulling the musical toward melodrama.

A little more variation in the existing melodies wouldn't have hurt, either.