I’m sure audiences on both sides of the Atlantic would happily take me to the guillotines for these opinions. After all, Jackman cut his teeth in musicals and has been Oscar-nominated for his turn as Valjean. Grown men have reportedly wept at Crowe’s portrayal of the implacable policeman Javert’s final, “noble” gesture.
So what on earth is going on? Do I possess a “heart pumping porridge”, as the Telegraph’s film critic, Robbie Collin, said of those unmoved by this film?
Marni Nixon, the 82-year-old Hollywood musicals veteran, is known in the industry as the “ghostess with the mostess”, having been a “singing double” for everyone from Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Deborah Kerr in The King and I and – without her knowledge – Natalie Wood in West Side Story. Famously, Nixon was drafted in to sing the high notes in Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. In her opinion, the Les Misérables film was misconceived.
“If you’re making a musical, you should hire singers,” she tells me. “Singers who can act. In a musical, you want singing that’s technically good. It’s cruel to make people who can’t sing, sing.”
For Nixon, Jackman wasn’t a bad singer, just miscast: “Acting-wise he was wonderful, but could have done with a nobler voice.” Crowe, on the other hand, “was nothing. It wasn’t that he was choosing to sing like that, he just couldn’t do anything else.”
The female actors, says Nixon, “came off much better” – apart from Helena Bonham Carter, that is, whose comic number, Master of the House, a duet with her screen husband Sacha Baron Cohen, is meant to provide the film’s light relief: “You couldn’t understand one word she said. There wasn’t enough tone in her voice to carry any emotion.”
Nixon is warm and funny; there’s nothing mean-spirited about her. She is passionate about singing, and musicals in particular. What, then, went so wrong with this one? Nixon believes it was Hooper’s decision to make an operatic musical in the vernacular: “It doesn’t suit this score to have actors speak-singing it. Les Misérables is written to be sung operatically, with long lines to make it come off.” She chuckles, adding: “Maybe the director told the actors, 'You don’t have to hold the notes that long, because it’s silly. It sounds like you’re singing!’ ”
She gives short shrift to Crowe’s “raw and real” defence: “We’re talking about a musical. Is that real? People don’t go around singing 'La la la la’ to each other all day!”
Madalena Alberto, who played a highly acclaimed and memorable Fantine in the 25th anniversary touring production of Les Misérables, was moved by Jackman’s performance, but admits to having “doubts” during some of his bigger numbers. “Bring Him Home is a beautiful song. I wanted it smaller; it should be a prayer to God. I missed a little of Valjean’s vulnerability. But whether it was a directing choice or his ability, I can’t be sure.”
So, rather than being sung to camera, should some of the numbers in Les Misérables have been – whisper it – overdubbed afterwards by professional singers? Is this as inauthentic as many critics claim?
“Strangely enough, I don’t think it matters if actors are dubbed,” says Nixon, “as long as it’s done really well, and you don’t notice the difference in timing, and that the actor and the singer are totally in synch. The energy levels need to be exactly the same.”
This brings me to the question I have been dying to ask Nixon, who, in My Fair Lady, hits that legendary high F at the end of I Could Have Danced All Night. Can anyone become a singer?
“I think the desire and the talent has to be innate,” she says. “And then it’s according to your imagination as to how you develop that.” I shall keep trying – and so should Russell Crowe.
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