<p>Yes, I guess the way to say it is that in the version Pi told to satisfy the investigators “the evil hyena (the cook) killed both the zebra-sailor and the orangutan-mother.” The reader has to choose which version to believe.</p>
<p>The tiger had to be a special effect–the movie couldn’t have been made otherwise. I completely suspended all disbelief–accepted Richard Parker as a real tiger and bought that the actor playing Pi was reacting to a real tiger. I would never have thought this book could be made into a movie. They did an amazing job.</p>
<p>I’m probably the only person on the planet who would rather have a root canal than be forced to sit through Les Miz again. Now that was torture.</p>
<p>H and I saw Les Mis on Broadway in its initial incarnation-and hated it. It was our first “sung through” musical, and it’s still not a genre I care for. I remember straining to catch every lyric so I could know what the heck was happening. Of course many attendees now know the score by heart and don’t have that problem. Many years later, my D was in a high school production and I came to appreciate the music, but I still think it’s an excruciatingly boring show to watch. I’ve always felt the stage has to revolve because except for the Master of the House scene, there’s absolutely nothing else going on of interest to the eye. So I think the movie may solve some of that problem because it opens up the visuals–but I’m still not seeing it because I resent the casting of non-singers or mediocre singers in roles that should have gone to performers with actual musical theater talent and experience.</p>
Well, it’s better than what Hollywood used to do–cast non-singers and dub in somebody else’s voice, like they did with Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Natalie Wood in West Side Story.</p>
<p>And Hugh Jackman, at least, won a Tony for The Boy from Oz.</p>
<p>I thought the Life of Pi book was so so until the end because I generally like realistic stories. But I went to the movie with a more mystical mindset and thoroughly enjoyed it.</p>
<p>It’s a story is about a boy (Pi), tiger, hyena, zebra,and orangutan, on a lifeboat and how the boy survives approx 270 days at sea, with the boy and tiger keeping each other alive. Alternatively, it may be about a boy with a cook, sailor, and mother, and how a boy deals with the horror of murder and cannalbalism and how his brain works in order for him to deal with these unspeakable acts (Pi, himself, is the tiger, and how he wrestles with his own conscience and power within).</p>
<p>Some people say that if you believe the former story, then you believe in God (willing to believe in things that seem impossible); while if you believe in the latter story, you don’t really believe in God (need “proof” in order to believe in something that seems impossible or magical).</p>
<p>Of interest, the actor playing Pi, Suraj Sharma, had not acted before. Pretty good job given no experience and in front of a green screen constantly!! He went with his bro to the auditions in India and Ang Lee saw him and felt that he had found his Pi (I assume based on his looks)!</p>
<p>I’ve seen the Les Miserables movie and the visuals weren’t opened up all that much. Hooper is so smitten with having the actors sing “live” on camera instead of lip-synching a studio recording that he fills the screen with close-ups of the singers’ faces 80-90% of the time.</p>
<p>I like the set-piece songs in the show, the singing where there is an actual melody, but the endless use of recitative singing instead of spoken words gets tiresome very quickly. I don’t know why they classify this as a musical instead of an opera. The almost exclusive use of recitative in between the songs makes it an opera in my book.</p>
<p>coureur, Les Mis is what’s called a “sung through” musical, where there’s no or almost no spoken dialogue. It’s a very common style in modern musicals–Miss Saigon, Once on This Island, Rent, and Spring Awakening are other examples. It’s not a genre I care for. I find that in order to really understand the nuances of these shows you have to be familiar with the scores in advance (I suppose that would be true of opera, too, though I’m not an opera buff), because it’s way too hard to catch every lyric as it’s sung. Having a D who was actually in TWO productions of Les Mis over the past 5 years, both of which I volunteered with extensively, I have become extremely familiar with the music and lyrics, and do like several of the better songs quite a bit. But I find the sung exposition (what you describe so well as “recitative singing”) in Les Mis and other sung-through musicals to be terribly tedious. To me, the technique pushes every show into the realm of melodrama, and by intermission, I just want to flee the theater. I’m a huge fan of the old-fashioned conventional musicals (the production of South Pacific at Lincoln Center a few years ago was the highlight of my theater-going life). My D, however, find the oldies boring and adores the sung-throughs. To each her own.</p>
<p>^^Okay, so then what is the difference between a “sung through” musical and an opera? I can’t see one. Same for “sung exposition” and recitative - not seeing the difference.</p>
<p>I guess you could say that opera is subset of sung-through musicals, one that requires highly trained vocalists who sing in a classical manner and has a long and storied history. (None of the cast of Les Mis could hope to sing opera.) And you could say “rock” or “pop” operas are another form of sung-through musicals. But in general when people use the term “sung through musicals”, they’re referring to modern Broadway compositions that forego dialogue.</p>
<p>Since opera is the older art form by several centuries, I’d say it would be more accurate to describe it the other way around - that the sung-through musical is subset of opera, one not requiring highly-trained vocalists who sing in a classical manner.</p>