I like movie musicals; but I tend to prefer the ones that have a mixture of songs and traditional drama throughout, some examples being 'Oliver' (1968), 'Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory' (1971) and 'On the Town' (1949). I tend to be less keen on the films like 'West Side Story' (1961), which have very little dialogue and are almost entirely communicated via the songs. Having said this, I didn't find 'Les Misérables' (2012) to be all that bad.
I recently watched the 1964 Palme d'Or winner 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg', a musical which is played out entirely through song. Stylistically, I loved almost everything about this movie: the bold colours, the patterns and fashion, beautiful ladies dressed beautifully. It had the 1960s written all over it. But as a musical it didn't have quite the impact on me that I would have liked.
As the image above suggests; the movie is French and it is communicated in its native tongue. This I have no problem with, it's a wonderful sounding language and I am more than used to reading subtitles. But this becomes a bit of a problem when speaking of musicals. Not only for the fact that the translation naturally won't rhyme with the original words in the song, but also due to the different nature in which sentences are structured in two seperate languages.
The result of this is that those reading the subtitled translation, whilst understanding the meaning and getting the content of the story, are at a complete loss to the rhythm of the songs. I often found myself just listening to the song in French in order to get a sense of the rhyming sounds, but in doing so it sometimes took my attention away from the subtitles.
Ultimately this didn't effect my overall comprehension of the film and I enjoyed the narrative, but it served as a warning with regards to watching musicals in a language foreign to my own.
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