Re: "Les Miz" -- a technical question

From: Gayle Murchison [[email protected]]

I would like to add one thing to the conversation:

for those trained in musical theater and opera, singing and acting are
not divorced. Singing *is* acting, as the dramatic singer (including
here, also recitalists, gospel singers, etc) act through music. There
are a variety of nuances--diction, volume and increasing/decreasing,
attack, changes in vocal timbre, etc, that are part of the singer's
acting/dramatic toolkit. One can speculate about how things were done.
The way to verify is to contact the direct, actors, and any one else
on the set, or to read any production documents. One can assume that
some scenes could have been done in one take, and thus, the "acting"
and "singing" (to accept this dichotomy) were synchronous.

Gayle Murchison

Associate Professor
Department of Music and Africana Studies Program
The College of William and Mary

[email protected]

address:

The Department of Music-Ewell 267
P.O.Box 7895
The College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, VA 23185
USA





On Jan 27, 2013, at 3:04 PM, Bell-Metereau, Rebecca L wrote:

> From: Frank, Michael [[email protected]]
>
> yes . . . this is the best [clearest] yet of many helpful
> answers . . . . thanks for that
> but it does confirm what i imagined had to be the case, specifically
> that there were some moments in the film [maybe many, maybe few] in
> which the image we saw on the screen and the vocals on the sound
> track were NOT recorded simultaneously, even if the vocals we were
> hearing were themselves recorded during another on-the-set take
> because i'm a big fan of live [unamplified] music i somehow had
> hoped/expected that in "les miz" we would at every moment be
> watching people acting and singing simultaneously, and i somehow
> [foolishly] felt ripped off when i realized that could not always be
> the case and yes, hathaway did  have that long close-up shot, which
> itself creates a very interesting dynamic   . . . actually the cuts
> i noticed most were in the beren-cohen/bonham carter numbers or in
> one of the songs by samantha barks as  Éponine
>
> m