Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, book by Craig Lucas, directed by Christopher Wheeldon
David Mirvish, Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
March 29-April 29, 2018
“But Not For Me”
The film An American in Paris from 1951 directed by Vincente Minnelli and choreographed by its star Gene Kelly is one of the greatest of all movie musicals. It’s a musical not based on a stage show but created for the big screen and thus uses the techniques of filmmaking to enhance its use of song and especially dance. The new stage version of the film from 2014 would have a hard time competing with the film even if it used Alan Jay Lerner’s original book.
Unfortunately, to it detriment, it ditches Lerner’s book for an awkward new one by Craig Lucas that makes the story overcomplicated and less emotionally involving While the singing and acting are uneven, what shines throughout are the fantastically imaginative dance sequences choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon. The dancing is so good one wishes the show could have been reconceived simply as a wordless full-length ballet.
The best new idea Lucas has is to present Gershwin’s 17-minute-long tone poem as a ballet within the musical and to present Adam as its composer, Jerry as its designer and the older wealthy American woman Milo Davenport (Kirsten Scott) as its patron. This allows Adam and Jerry naturally to meet Lise, who is to star in the ballet, over a period of time and fall in love with her while also allowing Milo to meet Jerry several times and become smitten with him.
The worst new idea Lucas brings to the show is to present the blocking figure, Henri Baurel (Ben Michael), who is wishes to marry Lise, not as the successful cabaret entertainer that he is in the film, but as a would-be entertainer to is trying to keep this fact hidden from his parents (Teri Hansen and Scott Willis). To make things more complicated, Lucas deliberately hides the reason that Lise feels obligated to marry Henri even though she doesn’t love him. Lucas lets us believe, quite unfairly, that there is some nefarious reason behind this that has something to do with the war. He also has M. and Mme Baurel speak of a secret they hide as if they were collaborators during the war.
Lucas’s attempt to give the Baurels a mysterious past turns out to be a cheat and a clumsy attempt to give the story a red herring, absent from the film, that unnecessarily clutters up the stage musical’s plot. The show is a love story not a mystery.
Worse, Lucas’s re-imagining Henri as a would-be entertainer makes his desire to take Lise off to New York after their marriage completely improbable. If Henri hasn’t made it big in Paris, how can he think anyone in New York will want to see him? Were Henri a successful entertainer as in the film, then his appeal to Lise would be a threat to to charms of the starving artist Jerry. But Lucas’s mismanaging of the the Baurel character removes him as a serious opponent and thus makes the external tension Lucas tries to generate in the Jerry-Lise relationship seem false.
Luckily, the focus of the stage version of An American in Paris is dance and almost all the dance numbers are spectacular. This is because the director and choreographer is Christopher Wheeldon, best known as the choreographer for such wildly popular ballets as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2011) and The Winter’s Tale (2014), both of which have joined the active repertory of the National Ballet of Canada. Wheeldon’s choreography draws heavily on ballet, especially for Jerry and Lise, that makes their romance stand out from the choreography for the chorus that is more reliant on modern dance and jazz. The culminating ballet-within-a-show really is a ballet with pointe shoes, classical positions, jetés and lifts just as you might see at the National Ballet. One particularly delight of Wheeldon’s choreography is his use of props such as the moving department store counters that jerry leaps from in Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody or the chairs that everyone uses in myriad formations in “Fidgety Feet”.
As a result the roles of Jerry and Lise are played by performers whose primary focus is ballet. McGee Maddox, who plays Jerry, is, in fact, a Principal Dancer with the National Ballet of Canada while Allison Walsh, who plays Lise, was a soloist with the Joffrey Ballet. The challenge with these roles is finding ballet dancers who can not only dance but act and sing.
Maddox is quite amazing in this respect. Strength, precision and beauty of line characterize all his dance movements and he can easily blend ballet with other dance styles. He is also a fine actor and a fine singer although he tends to be a bit unsteady in his upper range. He can easily put across a famous tune like “I’ve Got Beginner’s Luck” where he sings without a chorus.
Walsh certainly captures the waif-like aspect of Leslie Caron in the original film. Her dancing is elegant and beautiful and she appears practically weightless the numerous times she is lifted and tossed in the air. Her acting is also fine and she has a pleasant voice. But it is unfair to assign her a classic like “The Man I Love” that she manages to get through but can hardly be said to deliver effectively.
The prime singer rather than dancer in the show is Kirsten Scott as Milo Davenport. Scott delivers a fine account of “Shall We Dance”, but she has succeeded in making Milo so abrasive that it seems odd such an upbeat song should be given to such an unpleasant character.
Matthew Scott gives Adam Hochberg a winning self-deprecating sense of humour as the narrator. One assumes Lucas has made the character lame to give him an excuse to sit out the various dance sequences. Yet, when a fantasy sequence comes along, there he is dancing away and making the character’s lameness all the more inexplicable. Scott is a fine singer and is in the midst of giving a moving rendition of “But Not For Me”, when Lucas makes the terrible decision to overlap the song with Milo’s singing a reprise of “Shall We Dance” and then joining in with Adam’s song, thus spoiling what could have been the character’s best moment.
The character of Henri Baurel may be Lucas’s main negative alteration to the plot, but this situation is exacerbated by Ben Michael, who is the weakest link in the cast. The Baurels are said to be French, Michael’s accent freely wanders all over Europe. Michael plays Henri as a nerdish mama’s boy so well that it is nearly impossible to believe the tales of heroism we hear of Henri later on. Lucas has Mme Baurel bring up the idea that Henri’s romantic interests “lie beyond the fairer sex”, but then does nothing with it. Least understandable is how we are to believe Henri could ever be a success in cabaret. The cabaret act we see is a disaster and only turns successful when it becomes a dream sequence at Radio City Music Hall. Even then Michael is only an indifferent singer and his tap-dancing is quite basic, likely because tap is not Wheeldon’s forte. Compared to the iconic production of Henri’s big number “Stairway to Paradise” in the film with its sequentially lit-up staircase, every aspect of the number in the stage version from its design to its execution is a disappointment.
The scenery is created by continuous projections done by 59 Productions which have their inventive moments such as the initial Concerto in F when the projections are fragmented by screens moving on stage or in the set designs for the American in Paris ballet seemingly inspired by the colour field paintings of American an artist like Paul Reed (1919-2015). As long as the projections function mainly to fade into and out of settings and remain unobtrusive they are fine. But when we start to have buildings falling into place from the sky or other animation, then the backgrounds become distracting.
Fans of McGee Maddox will certainly not want to miss the chance to see the ballet star not only show off his immaculate abilities in ballet and modern dance but to see him do well in a speaking and singing role. Others may wish to see An American in Paris as a kind of mixed programme of Wheeldon ballets and ignore the clunky dialogue that connects them. Fans of the film, however, will find that the stage version is overly and unnecessarily complicated and for all the energy of its dance routines somehow misses out of the sheer fun and simple charm that make the film so well loved.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Allison Walsh and McGee Maddox; Ben Michael, McGee Maddox and Matthew Scott; McGee Maddox with ensemble; Allison Walsh and McGee Maddox. ©2017 Matthew Murphy.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.
2018-04-06
An American in Paris