Tom Hooper's film is the stage musical rather than the Hugo novel directly: the Boublil and Schonberg score, the English lyrics, and the songs in the order the stage show put them in. Its one real innovation is technical, and it is about performance rather than staging. The cast sang live on set to a piano in an earpiece instead of miming to a track recorded months earlier, which is the standard method for a film musical. That is why the vocals break where they break.