scottyrocks
I'll Lock Up
- Messages
- 9,178
- Location
- Isle of Langerhan, NY
. . . insistence on casting non-singing stars hobbles it.
I once saw raw footage of Hepburn performing "Loverly" during the shooting, and her own voice, while no miracle like Andrews', sold the emotion far better than Nixon's technically-good-but-generic overdub does.
As someone who grew up memorizing the original cast albums of most of the great forties-to-sixties musicals, I think it's unfortunate that so many of their film adaptations are only halfway successful at getting the essence of the show (Carousel, The Music Man) or outright disasters (Man of La Mancha). Even the best, like The King and I, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, and Oliver!, are all overcooked in ways that don't do justice to the stage originals.
That's one of the things that so impressed me about the recent film version of Les Miserables (2012). Not only were non-singer actors in the title roles, but they, themselves, sang, and sang live-on-film without over-dubbing and/or dubbing in their voices in post-production. It lent an urgency to the performances seldom seen in a musical.