Les Mis is the disease, but the New Yorker has the cure

In a tweet, Roger Ebert noted that David Denby really, really doesn't like Les Miserables:

How awkward the staging was? How strange to have actors singing right into the camera, a normally benign recording instrument, which seems, in scene after scene, bent on performing a tonsillectomy? 
...Listen to any score by Richard Rodgers or Leonard Bernstein or Fritz Loewe if you want to hear genuine melodic invention.
     I was so upset by the banality of the music that I felt like hiring a hall and staging a nationalist rally. “My fellow-countrymen, we are the people of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin! Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Burton Lane! We taught the world what popular melody was! What rhythmic inventiveness was! Let us unite to overthrow the banality of these French hacks!” (And the British hacks, too, for that matter.) Alas, the hall is filled with people weeping over “Les Mis.” Is it sacrilege to point out that the Victor Hugo novel, stripped of its social detail and reduced to its melodramatic elements, no longer makes much sense?

But Denby has prescribed treatment for those smitten with the musical:

...Cure No, 2. “Les Mis,” as everyone knows, is sung all the way through, like an opera. It’s an opera, however, with music not worth listening to. But if you enjoy the convention of an entirely sung play, I suggest listening to another successful piece of musical theatre based on a work by Victor Hugo—Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” which has been running continuously more or less everywhere since 1851. Read more.