Best movie of this year hands down!

You won't be disappointed!

Did you people see the same film I saw?

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

It is my favorite musical and one of my favorite DVD. But I made mistake. I had seen DVD before I saw London performance. The problem is, that this performance is cut comparing to stage score. Not to much, but significantly. I understand of course, that score was to long for TV broadcast. But in my opinion too many important songs were cut. F.eg. solo of Valjean from "Thenardier Waltz of Treachery" and ending of this song (with young Cosette), first meeting of Marius and Cosette (The Robbery), and definitely duet of Marius and Valjean in "The Wedding". Lack of these songs and lack of stage movement causes understanding of full show difficult. So do not watch this movie before watching theatrical performance. Stop complaining. It is really extraordinary performance. Singers are doing their best - Wilkinson, Quast, Henshall, Galloway, Salonga, Ball and Armstrong are simply breathtaking. Definitely best performances I have ever heard. Chorus consisting of 200 singers singing a cappella is incredible. 17 Valjeans ending show give you unique impression how different tenors might be good performers of this score. This DVD is perfect reminder of stage show. I hope 25th Anniversary performance planned on 3rd October 2010 in O2 Dome will contain stage movements and will be recorded for DVD broadcast too.

This is just perfec. A wonderful cast, and they even play before the microphones.My two favorites are Lea Salonga and Philip Quast. They almost steal the show, but in this show, everybody is great.Quast - oh my, I never knew before that Javert can be THAT hot and that - humanly. He's so cool. I fell in love with the Inspector, what I never did when reading the book or watching a movie. I cried on his death scene.Lea is just so sweet. And her voice is percfect. Eh, Marius is either blind or deaf... or both.

There is only one word I can think of for this unmelodious extravaganza, now bellowing from my TV as I write: OVERWROUGHT! It has bleated, seemingly endlessly, for nearly two hours now, and I am yet to hear a decent song. The seats in the theater must be very uncomfortable, as I can think of no other reason for the standing ovations that have greeted some of these very competent performers smirkingly belting out this dreadful material. The plot also seems overwrought, and overwhelmingly depressing, although I seem to recall an old movie of this name being quite interesting ... perhaps with Charles Laughton.Surely, the stage play must be much better in flow and dramatic exposition, but it no doubt has the same wretched music.Why, you may ask, am I torturing myself by continuing to watch and listen to this show? Well, it was loaned by a friend who asks me to let him know which number(s) I like best. I honestly don't know what I am going to tell him.

I'm assuming that this viewing was so tedious for me because it was a concert version.I am one of the few people on this planet who has never seen the musical "Les Miserables" in its entirety. I used to watch bits and pieces of this concert version as I walked along in the Mall in a midwestern city I grew up in, because it was constantly being piped in on an overhead TV from a store that sold PBS/Masterpiece Theatre type products.As I used to catch sections of it, I used to think "euuuuuwwwww... what a boring bombastic thing this is, at least from what I can see. The singers keep standing in front of microphones over-dramatically blasting away as they sing. And people in costume who aren't singing are sitting on chairs in the background, (discreetly) scratching their noses and swinging their feet." (Plus, the chorus members singing all wearing T-shirts with the Les Miz logo on them.) Weird.So......I finally rented it from Netflix. I got that same "euuwwww" feeling times 50, because it runs for 2 hours and 45 minutes.I honestly want to love this musical. So many people rave about it. But something is definitely wrong with the way it is presented here. THe audience members who praise it, I imagine, have probably seen it played out in a theatre with dialogue (I HOPE there's dialog to move the narrative along) and the actors always in character.I'm not an idiot and I'm a great fan of a LOT of musical theatre. I probably sound like a total idiot, but I just don't GET "Les Miz," at least from viewing this.