Hollywood is ruining musicals

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 20:25:00 +0000

Audrey Hepburn was famously inconsolable when she learned that her songs in "My Fair Lady," which she had practiced and recorded for months, were dubbed over by playback singer extraordinaire Marni Nixon. Hepburn needn’t have taken the dubbing personally, since the ubiquitous Nixon also served as voice double for Natalie Wood in "West Side Story" and Deborah Kerr in "An Affair to Remember."

But if the "Breakfast at Tiffany’s" star had been born several decades later, she wouldn’t have shed a tear, because those same studios that unceremoniously expunged her voice would have begged her to sing as Eliza Doolittle, regardless of her musical merit.

After the unexpected success of 2001’s "Moulin Rouge!" and 2002's "Chicago," a new breed of movie musical was born -- a genre I call the millennial musical -- in which all the songs are performed by musically untrained actors, with scant consideration of vocal caliber. This season's "Les Misérables" not only has its star-studded cast belting out all the tunes themselves, but raised the stakes further by having Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway and company sing them live on set, without the benefit of perfect acoustics or endless takes in a recording studio. (The resulting performances are, shall we say, a mixed bag.)

Salon.com > Inkoo Kang

Hollywood is ruining musicals